It’s Week 1 of the 2013 NFL season, and the New England Patriots have made their way west to Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park, N.Y., to take on the Bills. The snow and cold have yet to fall on the Greater Buffalo metro area, but the September temperatures are a far cry from anything rookie receiver Marquise Goodwin is used to back in his hometown of Garland, Texas or what he played in during four years as a Longhorn. To return to a place of comfort before making his NFL debut, Buffalo’s third-round draft pick, No. 78 overall, will, as he has done for years, wear his track uniform under his football equipment.

"He would not go to football practice — he will not, I repeat — go to football practice if he don’t have his track tights underneath his football pads," says D.J. Monroe, his teammate on both the football and track squads at the University of Texas. "He has to have some kind of track something on when he’s playing in a game, and when he’s running track, he’s got to have some sort of football thing on."

The trick must work for Goodwin. Since setting out on what has developed into a 13-year career as a two-sport athlete that began when he was just nine years old, his athletic achievements have already propelled him to some of sport's brightest stages. After Rivals labeled him a three-star football recruit out of Rowlett High, the majority of Big 12 schools recruited him heavily before he accepted an offer to Austin. Of course, he's since spun that into a chance at football's highest level with the Bills, but not before becoming a four-time college All-American and two-time national champion, as well as a two-time U.S. champion, all in his blue-ribbon event on the track, the long jump. The accomplishments in his second sport even led him all the way to the Olympic Games in London last year, fulfilling one of his childhood dreams. He went on to finish a respectable 10th in the event last August.

At the NFL Combine, everyone, including himself, expected the 5'9, 180-pound speedster to dazzle in what is the most talked about drill of the event, the 40-yard dash. Asked before the test how fast he thought he could run it, Goodwin responded simply, "Really fast," adding that he hoped to produce one of the quickest times on record. He didn't disappoint.

Goodwin hit the finish line in a blazing 4.27 seconds, taking the bragging rights by a slim margin over, among others, a player to which he has often been compared, West Virginia wideout Tavon Austin (4.34). The time tied him for the third fastest on record, just three-hundredths of a second behind the recognized leader, Tennessee Titans running back Chris Johnson, who holds the title from 2008.

"I don't get why people question whether I'm a football player trying to run track or a track guy trying to play football."(USA Today Images)

Since then, Austin went No. 8 overall in the draft, the first receiver chosen, while Goodwin had to wait to hear his name called until the following day, as the ninth selected at the position. Of course, Austin accumulated back-to-back 100-catch, 1,000-yard seasons his final two years as a Mountaineer. Goodwin tallied 120 receptions and just over 1,300 yards in his four seasons at Texas. He had a breakout performance in his final game as a Longhorn, though, collecting 132 all-purpose yards and scoring two touchdowns, including the game clincher, in a 31-27 win over Oregon State in the Alamo Bowl. By all accounts, Goodwin also showed well in the North-South Senior Bowl on his way to the second-most receptions of any player in the game.

Still, somewhat ironically, it is actually because of Goodwin's level of success in his other sport that he had trouble convincing pro teams he fit the mold of a legitimate receiving weapon. Despite forgoing his final college season of track to focus on preparing for the NFL Draft this past April, it was an issue he received many questions about and tried desperately to dispel. Judging by where he was selected, several teams may have had doubts about the 22-year-old's abilities away from the track. Is he a wideout with world-class speed, which lends itself to the long jump, they wondered, or merely a track star who catches pigskins part time?

"I don't get why people question whether I'm a football player trying to run track or a track guy trying to play football," he told Sports Illustrated in April leading up to the draft. "It's really embarrassing to me to even have to answer the question.

"Track guys just have linear speed. I have proved I have more than linear speed," Goodwin previously stated in February from the combine. "I have good hands, I run routes, I get out of my breaks. I'm tough, I have taken on hits, I've blocked. I have even got MVP for blocking in one game and I didn't even touch a ball that game. I don't think a track guy could go out there and get MVP for blocking."

The concern over Goodwin's football credentials is a practical one, however. It's far from the first time an Olympian has attempted to make the transition to football and teams have been burned before, investing in similar athletes with the same question unresolved. There are even two others trying to achieve the same goal just this season. And while there are certainly exceptions to the rule, Olympians' track records are inconsistent. Of the 35 men before Goodwin to appear on the highest level of international competition and follow that up by playing in at least one regular-season professional football game, nearly a third were in out and of the league within two years. Sure, the list includes 11 Pro Bowlers, nine All-Pros and four Hall of Famers, but the odds of Olympic success leading to similar returns from the line of scrimmage are dubious.

One would think the segue would come naturally, but history shows that has just not been the case. Whether it's been these premier athletes' inability to grasp the game and its many nuances, properly applying those same skills that got them to the Olympics to the NFL, or even simply learning how to catch, something has been amiss.

Regardless, the Bills were apparently satisfied with Goodwin's football acumen, tabbing him based on the potential shown in some his final games, and inserting him as their deep threat for years to come. Or so that's the thought.

"I had watched a lot of tape and there was another receiver (Austin) that was taken first in the draft that has outstanding ability, and I felt Goodwin possesses a lot of those same traits with the same speed and toughness," said first-year Bills coach Doug Marrone following the draft. "When you get a player with that type of speed then it’s up to us as coaches to develop him and be able to get him the football."

"One of the things in the report about Marquise that jumps out at you, a guy his size, is he's a tenacious blocker," added Bills GM Buddy Nix. "He's a football player first even though he's had all that success in track. I think when you see him play you'll realize he's a football player."

Certainly talented, Goodwin, while contending with his contemporaries on the football field, will also be competing against history, to live up to the best of those Olympians who came before him, as well as eclipsing his own erstwhile results on the track.

***

Professional football's attraction to the Olympian dates back to perhaps the finest athlete of all time, and the sport has been trying to transform track stars to the gridiron ever since. Unrivaled multi-sport talent Jim Thorpe, who took gold in both the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Games — in addition to participating in the long and high jumps, placing fourth place in both — set quite an untouchable bar. Thorpe played professional baseball prior to his prolific performance at the Olympics, then returned to the game for several years before moving on to football, and finally playing pro basketball after that. In 1950, The Associated Press named him the Greatest Athlete of the first half of the 20th century, and in a poll conducted by ABC Sports in 2000, he was awarded the title of Greatest Athlete of the Century.

After making his professional football debut in 1915 and guiding his teams to three league championships at fullback, Thorpe helped found the American Professional Football Conference (soon dubbed the American Professional Football Association) in 1920 and was the loosely affiliated league's first president. The APFA was renamed the National Football League two years later. Although Thorpe never played for an NFL title, he was awarded First-Team All-League honors in 1923 as a member of the Oorang Indians — one of six teams for which he played during his NFL career. After he died in 1953 at the age of 64, Thorpe was later named to the 1920s All-Decade Team and inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1963.

Since Thorpe’s incredible precedent, the marriage between football and track and field Olympians has been one of mostly disappointment and fumbled ambitions. There have definitely been those who have far-and-away bested the ceilings placed upon them. For one, Ollie Matson, the bronze medalist in the 400 meters and part of the 4x400-meter U.S. relay team that took the silver at the 1952 Games in Helsinki, played halfback at the University of San Francisco before going on to pen one of the best two-sport efforts of all time when he joined the NFL. The No. 3 pick in the 1952 Draft, Matson was a six-time Pro Bowler, five-time All-Pro first-teamer, and finished his 14-year pro career in 1966 second to only Jim Brown in rushing yards. Capping it all off, he gained membership to the Hall of Fame, Class of 1972, enjoying the prestige that came with it for many years until his death in 2011.

After Matson came Bob Hayes, a wide receiver at Florida A&M. "Bullet Bob," as he was known for his tremendous speed, won gold in both the 100 meter and 4x100-meter relay at the Tokyo Games in 1964. The Dallas Cowboys selected him in the seventh round of the draft that year, the No. 88 selection overall, and he more than delivered on that investment. He averaged 20 yards per catch over his entire career and twice led the league in touchdown receptions. Five Super Bowl appearances later, including a victory in 1971, three Pro Bowls, two All-Pro first-teams over an 11-year career, concluding with a posthumous Hall of Fame invite in 2009, and Hayes is one of the greatest Cowboys ever and appropriately included in the their Ring of Honor.

Bob Hayes, Jr. at his father's Hall of Fame induction. (Getty Images)

"I always called him 'Rapid Robert,'" says former NFL coach and player Marty Schottenheimer, with a chuckle, recalling playing with Hayes in a college All-Star game in 1965. "He could flat-ass run, there was no doubt about that. I mean, Bob could run like the wind obviously with all of the records that he set, but if they had to throw one pass to win the game, I'm not sure he was the primary target."

Schottenheimer, a linebacker for the AFL's Buffalo Bills and Boston Patriots in the 1960s and a 30-year NFL coach including stops for the head job in Cleveland, Kansas City, Washington and San Diego, says he greatly admires the skills and achievements of Olympians — from their unique physical abilities to dealing with the highest levels of pressure when the entire world is watching. But he believes none of the above, particularly pure speed, automatically translates over to triumph once between the hash marks.

"The old adage says speed kills," he explains. "If you've got it, you kill them, and if they've got it, they kill you. But in reality, speed in and of itself is not the be-all end-all of becoming successful as a player in the NFL, regardless of the position."

"Football is unique," adds Schottenheimer. "I don't think you can overestimate the value of being involved in a team sport. If you're a part of an Olympic team it's certainly a team environment, but the actual competition itself is individuals."

This may help explain why many of the rest of the former Olympians who gave the NFL a try are a mixed bag of primarily underperformers, long shots and never-shouldas. The list includes the father of famed writer Gore Vidal (Gene; seventh in decathlon, 1920), the actor who played Tarzan in a 1938 film (Glenn Morris; gold in decathlon, 1936), the first Australian to play in the league (Colin Ridgeway; seventh in high jump, 1956), and one of the symbolic leaders of the Black Panther movement of the 1960s and '70s (Tommie Smith, gold in 200 meter, 1968). All flopped in their efforts to catch on in football, unable to recapture the glory of the international spotlight.

"When Bill Walsh called me the following morning," recalls Nehemiah, "I hung up on him because I thought it was a prank. He called me back and I said, 'If this is really you, here's my agent's name and number and call him.' A couple hours later my agent called me and said, 'Did you just hang up on Bill Walsh?' And I go, 'That was him? Wow.' Within, I don't know, 48, 72 hours, I was in … San Francisco running routes in secret with the Niners."

After picking the 49ers over a handful of other teams that also showed interest, Nehemiah tallied approximately 750 receiving yards on 43 catches and added four touchdowns during four seasons in the NFL, his final one spent on the injured reserve. He was also on the 1984 squad that won the Super Bowl. Many say he never lived up to expectations, but Nehemiah, now president of his own sports agency, takes it in stride.

"those kind of skills are great regardless of what sport that you do."Curley Culp at his Hall of Fame induction. (Getty Images)

"I never went into it thinking that I would sort of be the best," he says. "I checked my ego at the door. I think I proved that it could be done and you can make the transition. To my point, there have been many first-rounders who hadn't lasted four years or in four years hadn't done much. There's so many people who never even had the chance, and many guys who played in college who never even got drafted, so from that standpoint I'm very pleased."

Nehemiah believes it's the overall intangibles coaches are after that particularly draws them to Olympians, with the mental side as a large factor.

"I think a lot of it is just because we can do a lot of things well that they feel that adaptation would probably come about quicker," he says. "We don't lack for confidence because our motivation is very high in an individual sport — day in, day out, having to go through that grind of preparedness by yourself."

Curley Culp, who had a 14-year career at defensive tackle capped off with a Super Bowl in 1969 and induction into the Hall of Fame earlier this month, was the No. 2-ranked American freestyle heavyweight wrestler and named to the Olympic team in 1968, but opted not to attend the Games in Mexico City. Though he notes there are no guarantees, Culp emphasizes the importance of the physical skills Olympians possess, which lend themselves to the more abstract attributes that also make solid football players.

"Wrestling is a very physical, demanding sport, and you have to have a good, strong will, you have to have good work ethic, in order to be successful there," he says. "And I think those kind of skills are great regardless of what sport that you do. Just to say someone is great in one sport doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be great in another sport, but I think some of the skills that were necessary to be successful in competing Olympically, or as a college athlete, transfer to football."

Meanwhile, Marty Schottenheimer says he never once scouted a player strictly because he was an Olympian.

"I certainly recognize the potential benefit that can be derived in taking a player with that type of skill set because he knows how to compete," he says. "But if that was a characteristic, in my opinion, that would ensure that the guy would give you some reasonable assurance he's going to provide you an edge in the competition in the NFL, more people would be going after them and more people would have been successful doing it. We're talking about totally different competition and environment.

"Go back to the number of Olympians that have been signed to contracts," Schottenheimer continues, "not many of them have made it. And those that were taken later on (in the draft), I mean, it was a flyer. I've always said, your top three picks need to make your team, and you'd better do pretty well in the fourth and fifth round."

As a third-round pick to the Bills, Marquise Goodwin will have high hopes immediately thrust upon him by his new team. Whether he will meet them by besting the results of some of his predecessors, in turn becoming the exception not the rule, is at this point anyone's guess.

***

Reminiscing about Goodwin's freshman year, when he and pal D.J. Monroe first met as members of the football team in 2009, his former teammate smiles about having had to explain to his new friend — a soon-to-be collegiate track star, future Olympian and now an NFL wide receiver — how to run.

"It was just crazy," says Monroe, "because he came out there running full speed. I said, 'Bro, this football, this not track. You can gauge your speed. When you break, you use your speed.' I told him, 'You've got to run with your pads low, not high. Low. Because if they catch you up here, you're going to fumble the ball and your helmet might be over there.'"

For survival's sake alone, Goodwin made the adjustments and his career evolved quickly, recalls Texas head coach Mack Brown.

"Before the 2011 season," he writes by email, "Marquise had decided to redshirt and focus on track and field with an Olympic year coming up. But while he was coming back from an overseas trip and thinking about how much he missed his teammates and the game, he asked us if he could change his mind and come back for that season. You could just see how much he wanted to play. He's had great success in both sports, but at the end of the day, what I heard from him was that he really missed football.

"he brings versatility, which all NFL teams are looking for. He'll just keep getting better."(USA Today Images)

"He has tremendous skills — leaping ability, speed, and hand-eye coordination," Brown adds. "He's tough and can be a kick returner as well, so he brings versatility, which all NFL teams are looking for. He'll just keep getting better and better. Marquise, in my opinion, has his best football ahead of him."

In his first preseason game, against Indianapolis this past Sunday, Goodwin immediately showcased his speed, going for two lengthy kickoff returns — the second of which was a 107-yard dash into the end zone.

Once more looking ahead to Week 1 in Orchard Park, with the five interlocking rings permanently etched into his left forearm acting as a common symbol of having competed at the Games, and following a traditional haircut the day before — another of his pre-game customs — Goodwin will be in a place of calm as he officially takes the artificial turf for the first time. With a home crowd of more than 73,000 boisterous fans decked out in royal, red and white excited for the initial chance to cheer their beloved Bills this year, the nerves may be running higher than usual for Goodwin, but he will remain composed because he is used to the limelight.

"I really don't feel like anything will be difficult to handle," he told SB Nation in May. "I feel like I've been carrying myself as a professional even before I became a professional. The biggest challenge really is just staying healthy and available."

For as much pressure as Goodwin may be under, he won't be the only Olympian attempting to navigate a career in the NFL this season. Jeff Demps, a sprinter on the U.S. 4x100-meter relay team that took silver in London, is on the roster for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers following four years as a running back at the University of Florida. He signed a free-agent contract with the New England Patriots last season, but only suited up for two preseason games before being shut down and returning to the track. The Bucs then acquired him in a trade during the offseason. Should he make the team if he chooses to continue his football career following the professional track season, and plays in Week 1, Demps and Goodwin would simultaneously join the exclusive club as co-36th members.

On the other side of the country, Lawrence Okoye, a 21-year-old British discus thrower who placed 12th in London, signed with the 49ers this past May after impressing at an NFL regional scouting combine in the spring. He is viewed as a serious dark horse candidate. Before camp, Okoye had never played a snap of football, but is a towering 6'6, 300-pound specimen who previously played rugby, and his father, Lawrence Sr., was a defensive end at Nebraska in the '80s. The Niners plan to develop him as a defensive lineman.

San Francisco's unconventional move — one for which they now have a record — once again highlights the league's prolonged history of Olympic interest and courtship. It is this infatuation with the world's best athletes that maintains an underlying curiosity within the NFL over whether someone like Usain Bolt — undeniably the fastest human on earth, but more importantly, someone who was never introduced to the game — could be an X factor in football, if only he could be taught the game. It's the same reason disgraced world-class sprinters, American Justin Gatlin and Briton Dwain Chambers — both with failed tests for performance-enhancing drugs during their track careers — had opportunities to prove their football prowess. Neither would sign contracts. It's also why the Dallas Cowboys drafted former world's fastest man, Carl Lewis, in the 12th round of the 1984 Draft, though he had never played. Notably, the Chicago Bulls did the same, making Lewis the 208th overall selection to the NBA that same year despite him having no history with the sport. Just out of sheer intrigue.

While repeated chances are granted to Olympians, their relative inadequacy underscores why teams had reservations over Goodwin's prospects.

"If I had 1,000 yards or even three extra touchdowns nobody would even question if I was a football player," Goodwin rebutted to Sports Illustrated in April. "If I got as many balls as Tavon Austin no one would even question if Marquise Goodwin is a top pick in the draft."

Curley Culp, the fourth and only living Olympian Hall of Famer, believes Goodwin will be just fine and the skills with carry over. They did for him.

"I mean, if you have the skills you have the skills, right? Absolutely," he says. "If you're a great athlete, you're a great athlete. If you acquire certain skills, and those skills are dominant, then you should do well in both sports, I would think."

Regardless, for Goodwin, making it to the NFL fulfills a lifelong dream, just shortly after accomplishing another — representing the United States at the Olympics. And as he flips open the cover on one career, he may have turned the page for good on the other.

"I am a football player," he told Sports Illustrated. "I don't need track. If everything works out as I planned I won't ever need to run track again."

Of course, it won't keep him from sticking to convention and donning his track attire beneath his pads. The Buffalo Bills, the team's many fans and future Olympians looking to make the eventual transition to the gridiron are just hoping that for the long-jumping Longhorn, even if the running tights precede the protective gear when he suits up, that football stays on top, for good.

With Goodwin, the seasons to come will be telling, but as his enduring pre-game routine showcases, old habits die hard, especially when they come from positions of comfort and prior success.

"That guy, he's got ultimate dreams," says Monroe. "He's lived one dream, and I think he's going for his next one. And he'll play as long as he can, as long his body lets him.

"But I feel like he's going to take one more shot at the Olympics."

On a perfect night for September baseball at Washington Nationals Park last year, as his band played "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" toward the end of his I'm-still-as-manic-as-George-Brett-used-to-be show, Bruce Springsteen gazed upward at a screen showing a video tribute to his late saxophonist Clarence Clemons. In a visual echo, Clemons towered above him on all the stages in the footage, too.

The day of the show, I had re-read Bruce's eulogy of Clemons from June 21, 2011, in which he referred to a photograph on the altar as "a picture of Scooter and The Big Man, people who we were sometimes." Springsteen went on to excoriate the fellow as much as he praised him, with the same sheer honesty with which he eulogized his similarly flawed but equally beloved organist Danny Federici in 2008. Bruce loved the boys in his band, but sure was conscious, and consequently forgiving, of their sins and shortcomings.

And as I watched Bruce watching the Big Man in a baseball stadium, his facial expression, part contented and part wistful, made me think he was thinking of the same line from the eulogy -- look at those people, those two wild SOBs, we were together sometimes.

The ballpark setting and the elegiac moment, and the white guy/black guy buddy film, made me think of George Brett and Willie Mays Aikens, another emblematic 1980s friendship my brain had chewed up a lot of cells trying to figure out over the past three years. Willie, the Kansas City Royals slugger turned drug addict had now, after 14 years in prison, become the face for reforming discriminatory drug laws and mandatory minimum sentencing. During the two years I had just spent researching and writing a book on him, I regularly watched the footage of his legendary 1980 World Series performance. He hit two home runs in two different games that Series; ended with a batting average of .400; and stared down Steve Carlton, possessor of a stare of the uttermost disdain.

Willie, like Clarence, was a big, bad man, and as joyful and playful and confused and destructive as Springsteen made Clemons sound. They both had stage presence of absurd proportions. In my favorite scene, from Game 1, Willie is lumbering to the plate after a home run and, among the Royals gathered to greet him, you can see Brett hit him on the helmet. Willie pauses for a moment as if to say, I'll be damned, Gorgeous George just smacked me on the helmet for hitting a home run in the World Series, then turns his head to look back at Brett again as the next round of head slaps and back pats ensues.

Indeed, I watched the footage with Willie a bunch of times in his living room in Kansas City, and every time that congratulatory scene arrived, he would shift on his couch, draw closer to the tube, and marvel with the same sort of gaze with which Springsteen stared up at his departed band mate: Damn, I used to play in the same band as George.

For me, the Kansas City Royals of the 1980s were the baseball version of The E Street Band. I was 9 years old when Willie Mays Aikens turned Veterans Stadium into his personal bandbox, and he and George Brett and their crazy cast -- part funk band, part Allman Brothers - embodied an America that enchanted me. Country boys and California surfers, Motown menace and Mississippi cool, the Royals played with a unique spirit, a rebel defiance, which fed my imagination. They were a raucous band.

But I soon would be baptized into the world of American fraud, for that myth I had invented for myself, or that television had created for me, fell apart off camera. In 1983, I experienced my first lesson in that great American phenomenon called disillusionment, a common theme in Reagan America, as Bruce so well sings. Aikens, my favorite player from the team, had been busted along with three other Royals for purchasing cocaine, and was going to jail. The Royals would soon cut him, as would the Blue Jays a few months later, and he would disappear into the anonymity of the Mexican Leagues by 1986.

I didn't know then, not yet, that he was also disappearing into a sordid haze of drugs and despair. George Brett, my second favorite Royal, would keep on bringing down the house for years to come, a baseball, California version of Springsteen, and they, in very different ways, would come to stand for me, culturally, for one end of two very different, but emblematic pathways that people took in the '80s: Absurd success or bombastic self-destruction.

Many years later, still obstinately stinging at the betrayal, I decided I wanted to write a book about Willie, primarily to understand the man who had deceived me so, but also to get a grasp on these paradoxes of the era in which the consumer - of junk food, of images, of drugs, of entertainment, and of lies - became an American archetype.

Instead, the book experience turned into something straight out of a Springsteen song - bittersweet, hard fought, tragic, but ultimately ending with a sort of regretful wisdom that I will forever cherish. And, above all, it ended with a friendship, not legendary, like Bruce and Clarence or Willie and George, but in no small part owing to the examples of these famous men.

The April day we were driving to George Brett's house Willie said to me, "This is where I would have lived, man." He was referring specifically to the Mission Hills neighborhood of Kansas City, a stately, boulevardish amalgam of mansions that feels like Buckhead in Atlanta or Westchester, New York, or Chevy Chase near D.C. But we both knew what he meant: Had I stayed clean, man, had I not blown it first on coke and then on crack and simultaneously, on women, I would have been George's neighbor. I would been a rich man.

Brett's house itself, from the outside and on the inside, feels like a Spanish palace. The tile, the porticos, the colors remind you that, though he lives in the Midwest, this is a Southern California boy through and through.

Willie has two bad knees and two bad hips, a gray beard and a bald head, but as he rang the doorbell, he got bouncy.

Brett answered and in his loud, showman's voice said, "Get on in here, Mick!"

He always called Willie ‘Mick,' I could never get straight why, and they back-slapped each other all the way into George's wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling wood library.

And as we sat and talked about what had happened to their lives over the past 25 years, their mutual affection filled the room like the pleasing spring breeze. Brett thrived on Willie's good humor and adoration; Willie, peeking out from under his gray hoodie, acted like he was in the presence of a rock star.

But there was an elephant sitting squat on top of the antique coffee table. George was as loyal a friend to Willie right now as could be, setting up a speech for Willie at his son's school, constantly lobbying the Royals to hire Willie in some capacity, calling Willie regularly to urge him to stay on the straight and narrow, harassing and haranguing him into living a clean life. But, for 25 years, they had not spoken.

Willie had a theory, one he had repeated to himself in his head so often in prison that it had become a sort of nighttime prayer: George was pissed, real pissed, 25-year-long pissed. Willie knew his self-condemnation rote: I let George down by becoming a cokehead even before I became a crackhead, I let the team down, and George to this very day is pissed about that. I was a fun teammate, a popular teammate, but, ultimately, a bad teammate. I never became the cleanup hitter for George I was supposed to be, I just messed things up. And therefore I am a bad friend. On sleepless nights in his cells in Leavenworth and Atlanta and Estill, he invariably repeated this penance like a rosary.

George, he knew, wouldn't go to bat for him until he had now seen the full proof that Willie was going to build a life. George, he knew, was showing him what they called tough love. Get your act together, my friend, and this friend will back you up all the way. Keep on snorting, forget about it.

And so, that odd couple of the '80s was reunited, chastened and aged into a steady, self-aware sort of friendship that would become the spine of the book on Willie's life.

To understand their relationship better, in literary terms, I turned one day during a writing slump to the old masters of ideas, the Greeks. Aristotle, as with most big topics, was, at least on paper, the proprietor of the idea of classical friendship. He broke it into three categories: utility, pleasure and goodness.

Utility - friendships abounded in ancient Greece as much as they do in contemporary America: You are my friend because you help me, and I'll help you back. George certainly fulfilled that role for Willie since his release from prison.

Pleasure - well these were two guys who sure as hell enjoyed one another's company as much in 2010 as in 1980.

Goodness - the highest and most difficult form of friendship, meant thinking the best and doing the best for the friend regardless of utility or pleasure. George was doing that now; in fact, even with his intentional cold shoulder, he had been doing it for the past 25 years. Willie was getting it. And a friendship in full, seemingly stalled, was now thriving.

In 2011, Willie, in large part due to George, and other Aristotelian backstops like Hal McRae, Pat Gillick, Frank White and agent Ron Shapiro, got hired as a minor-league hitting instructor by the Kansas City Royals. Twenty-five years ago he tried to be George's cleanup hitter. He failed. Today, he would die for George. Kill for him. Willie is forgiven, and the boys in the band are pure energy when they are together at spring training or Kauffman Stadium, mugging it up, just like Bruce and Clarence did so many times onstage.

On Sept. 19, 2010, at about four in the afternoon on a day that was ballpark gorgeous, I could barely speak as I tried to tell Willie over the phone that my mother had just died. I had just left her hospital room, my dad had held her right hand and I her left as she slowly eased her way into the wherever souls go. She had been in septic shock, couldn't open her eyes or move her fingers, but a few minutes prior she had nevertheless managed to send a tear wiggling down her face as I said goodbye to her.

All I could hear was a roar. For days it kept up, like a jet engine was inside my head. She was, in a very unhealthy Irish way, but also a lovely Irish way, my world. My brother had died in a car accident when I was young, and, from adolescence onward, I had spent my life trying to protect my mother from this bone-deep pain. I fought for her happiness like a Spartan soldier. Now that war was over. She had died of bone cancer.

Willie was the first person I had called. You see, I had already broken all the rules of a biographer - Willie had become my friend, irresistibly and undeniably. I could not refrain from admiring him. The poet William Butler Yeats coined a phrase, "things fall apart," that became the title of Chinua Achebe's classic novel. They sure are pretty sounding words. True, no doubt, but also a bit of a truism from overuse. American literature's recycling dumps have stockpiles of books on the topic of things - lives, relationships, bands, friendships - falling apart.

The other big stockpile of books, so large it could fuel a city as the incinerators burn them, are redemption stories. Tons of them, by addicts and crooks and the ill and brokenhearted. And I had fallen, after microscopic examination of Willie's life, of his cheap deeds and monumental lies, for his effort to put things back together. The challenge was not to tell another cheap redemption story, but to write a redemption song, for Willie's life was singing now - married, a father to be yet again, repairing his relationships with his daughters, caring for his failing mother.

No one had wanted to buy the book when we shopped it around. Most publishers said there really wasn't an audience for what they called "black addiction books." Another just said there wasn't a market for "black books." Still, others said the world was saturated with "addiction books."

Then one day the mighty Steve Wulf, now an ESPN writer from whose words I had gotten years of nourishment when he wrote at SI, called to say ESPN Books wanted to buy it.

We dug in, Willie and I, with all the gusto that he used to dig his back foot into the box. The only rule was heartbreaking honesty - he had to tell the truth about every bad thing he had done - from watching as his baby daughter gashed her leg to the bone on a jagged mirror that he used for snorting coke to taking one last hit of crack as a cop pulled him over on the highway; from almost killing a man in prison to nearly ruining his two daughters' lives.

And we became friends, the utilitarian type. He was giving me the stories I needed; I was giving him his platform.

Then we became friends some more, taking pleasure in being together, in going out to eat fried chicken at the end of the day in Kansas City or strolling along the streets in Manhattan. We enjoyed one another's laughter, conversation and support.

But that day my mom died, Willie started to pay it forward for George. He kicked it up a notch from biographical subject to good friend to friend bearing goodness.

I couldn't write. Writing takes a certain kind of concentration, a maddening kind, which soul-buckling grief precludes. I had a hard enough time getting up in the morning.

But I would leave my phone on, and at about 7:30 each morning the "Hey, Greg" call would come.

One morning: "Hey, Greg, you know how easy it would have been for me to quit when some Muslim dude nearly killed me in prison?"

Another: "Hey, Greg, you know how much I wanted to kill myself every time my daughter visited me in prison and refused to kiss me?"

Another: "Hey, Greg, look at yourself. You think your mother would be proud of you right now, giving up like this?"

I got back in the box, some days more wobbly than others, and dug into the disgusting portrayal of his cocaine years. Willie kept calling, one day harassing and another consoling, each time spot on given my condition. And he urged me to dig into the worst days of his life.

Then, one cold January day, another call came. ESPN was closing its book division and terminating all outstanding contracts. I felt like the floor had fallen out again. My mother had promised she would live to see the book come out. She didn't, and now there wasn't going to be a book at all.

I rehearsed how to tell Willie, certain that Mr. Cool himself would crumble this time, too.

First words out of his stutter-prone mouth: "Ain't got no doubt someone else, will buy it, Greg. Let's keep going. We gonna finish this together."

We did.

But a month later, he, weeping this time, called me. His 42-year-old wife, Sara, who had recently given birth despite having Lupus, had had a terrible stroke.

I had been struggling with how to end the book, and, it makes me sick to say, that the writer in me, and the utilitarian friend, saw it right then and there: a hospital room, Willie and his daughter standing above Sara's bed, and Willie doing the right thing. Just as he described it.

But the good friend in me, the friend wanting to reciprocate Willie's goodness, was flailing. What do you say to American Job, a guy who had been in the belly of the whale just about his whole life, when things fall apart as soon as he was starting to put them back together?

I tried calling him like he did me, but wasn't connecting. I began to think the whole thing was cursed. But then one morning Tom Bast, an old-school sports book guy from Triumph Books in Chicago, started calling me and talking in hushed tones and code words as if he were some sort of secret agent, saying he thought he could convince his boss to put up a little coin to buy the book. He sent along a contract that we thought we could negotiate a bit. Then one day he called and said sign it as is, right now, trust me if you don't this ain't gonna happen.

I called Willie, told him the news and the situation, and he stayed silent.

Then, in that spectacular South Carolina stutter of his, he said: "God is good."

I soon found out that all during his battle to survive his wife's tragedy - who kept calling him, bucking him up and pushing him forward, but George Brett. And the subject of my book - Willie so full of goodness - and I finally got the story of his cursed, blessed, selfish, glorious, cowardly, heroic, and friendship-saturated life onto bookshelves.

In the text, we tried mighty hard to nail the sentiments of his life while sidestepping sentimentality. But the night Bruce played in D.C., as the amplifiers reduced the volume so my wife and I could take in the Big Man in full without distraction from our ears, I picked up the phone and dialed my other hero from the '80s.

"They're playing our song," I told Willie. He doesn't know "The Rising" from "Rosalita," but laughed his I-know-my-laugh-makes-the-world-feel-good laugh, and told me he had sold 300 books at an autograph session that day. You see, Willie had become a successful traveling salesman ever since MLB had killed George's upstart idea of giving Willie his personal booth for signings during All-Star festivities in Kansas City in July.

The official book tour was long over; our press was good, but not wide; sales were solid, but not spectacular. But, golly, did the work win me an Aristotelian friend, and I finally allowed sentimentality, so insistent, to trump sentiment.

"Hey, Willie," I said as the final image of the Big Man froze above, Bruce, the band, and the stadium. "It's fun to play in your band."

We call each other once in a while now, and I troll for updates on the state of the Royals rejuvenation. For the first time in decades Kansas City is playing ball close to the way Kansas City used to play ball. And, the taste of Kansas City barbecue in my mouth whenever I look for their box score before going to bed at night, I pull for a team in a city so Midwestern and flat and lovely that it seems somehow exotic to my East Coast eyes, because, through the uncanny routes that friendship takes, it is a team that helped save my life.

When the trade was consummated, Ricky Bell smiled.

He smiled. And smiled. And smiled. And smiled. And smiled. He smiled toward friends. He smiled toward relatives. He smiled toward old teammates and new teammates and strangers who wished him well. He smiled toward business partners; toward his barber; toward waiters and repairmen and bellhops.

Ricky Bell -- brand new member of the 1982 San Diego Chargers -- could not stop smiling.

Over the past few years, Bell had resided within a sort of tropical football hell. The front office of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers -- the team that selected him first overall in the 1977 NFL Draft, then decimated his body by having him run behind one subpar offensive line after another -- had repeatedly questioned his heart and dedication. The organization had quietly told reporters covering the team that its star tailback was a shell of his former self, and that he was an overrated, money-motivated player with a possible drug problem. Owned by Hugh Culverhouse, a notoriously cheap man who was distrusted by many of the team's African-American players, the Buccaneers were an organization that perfected the art of alienating and offending its stars. "Culverhouse was not someone who was particularly liked," says David Lewis, Tampa's star linebacker. "Sometimes the bottom line seemed to be money, not success."

Bell had wanted to go down as one of the organization’s first great professional athletes.

Oh, Bell had wanted things to work out in Tampa Bay; had wanted to go down as one of the organization's (and city's) first great professional athletes. When, in 1979, he ran for 1,263 yards and seven touchdowns, helping the fourth-year franchise shock the league by reaching the NFC title game, Bell could do no wrong. He was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated; selected as the team's MVP; asked to appear at this event and that banquet. He became a spokesperson for the United Way, and the stories of his good deeds and charitable endeavors overtook the city. There were likeable football players, there were loveable football players -- and there was Ricky Bell, whose gap-toothed smile came to symbolize a fan base's love-fest with a team. "As great a person as you'll ever meet," said Richard Wood, Bell's teammate with the Bucs and at the University of Southern California. "I can talk about Rick all day. He was a special guy."

In professional sports, however, special guys are only special so long as they put up numbers. And, following his breakout season, Bell's production plummeted. Battling a bruised knee that forced him to miss two games, Bell ran for just 599 yards in 1980, and fans blamed him for Tampa's dreadful 5-10-1 finish. The ensuing year was an even bigger disaster, as Bell carried only 30 times for 80 yards. There were excuses -- a chip fracture in his shoulder caused Bell to miss eight games, the offensive line was as porous as ever, and the coaching staff wanted to give more carries to James Wilder, a highly touted rookie tailback out of Missouri.

Yet behind the words and thoughts and actions, an unspoken truth seemed to linger. "Ricky," says Lewis, "just wasn't Ricky."

It was obvious. But, in a way, not so obvious. Ricky Bell still looked like Ricky Bell -- the high hips, the miniature Afro, the letters B-E-L-L stitched atop the number 42 on his creamsicle-and-white jersey. He walked with a regal gait, signed one autograph after another, spoke of better Sundays to come. And yet, Bell was ... iffy, and his teammates and coaches knew it. Back in 1979, when quarterback Doug Williams handed off to his halfback, Bell burst toward the line with the force of a cue stick slamming into the ball. All power. All energy. Now, he seemed sluggish. Bell still ran hard, but minus the speed and power. More often than not, he reached the first defensive player and fell backward. John McKay, the Buccaneers' head coach, had coached Bell at USC, and often compared him to a young O.J. Simpson. He selected him over Pittsburgh's Tony Dorsett with the first pick in the 1977 Draft, and knew what type of weapon he could be.

This wasn't that Ricky Bell.

"Me and Ricky lived in the same apartment complex on Dale Mabry (Highway)," says Lewis, a former teammate USC. "That last year in Tampa, I spent a lot of time helping him into his apartment. I didn't think anything of it. I just thought it was soreness and wear and tear. He played a tough position, and got hit a lot. It never occurred to me that something might be wrong with him."

It never occurred to Bell, either. Though rarely one to publicly blame his blockers or cite a nagging injury to the press, Bell became increasingly convinced that his problems were beyond his immediate control. How could he run when there were no available holes? How could he explode when parts of his body were either black and blue or numb (or both)? He craved physical contact. Loved physical contact. But he was one man, carrying the hopes (and mounting anger) of a city longing for a Super Bowl. The task was an impossible one.

That's why, when Bell received the call on March 9, 1982, he could hardly contain his giddiness. The Buccaneers were sending him to the San Diego Chargers for a fourth-round draft pick. A Los Angeles native, Bell had desired to finish his career back near the sun and the beaches and the casual groove that was Southern California. So what if the Chargers' starting halfback was Chuck Muncie, an elite talent coming off a 1,144-yard, 19-touchdown season? So what if San Diego's famed Air Coryell offense was primarily about the passing game? So what if the Chargers' backfield was overcrowded?

This was the chance of a lifetime.

"It was," says Natalia Jacke, Bell's widow, "a fresh start."

* * *

The requisite clichéd narrative is slotted to begin here.

You know whereof we speak -- the triumphant return to the place where it all began. Think Tom Seaver taking the Shea Stadium mound as a Met again on Opening Day, 1983. Think Fran Tarkenton, the Vikings' legendary quarterback, in the purple duds once more following five seasons as a Giant. Think Reggie Jackson back in Oakland, think Denis Savard wrapping things up as a Blackhawk.

Think about them all.

This is what was supposed to unfold; what Bell knew, in his heart, was about to commence, his triumphant return to SoCal. Shortly after the trade was announced, Jack Gurney, a reporter with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, reached Bell at his home in Los Angeles. "I come to the Chargers fired up to play football again," he told the scribe. "I wish the season would begin tomorrow. I am prepared to do whatever asked of me here. It's hard to believe any team could be more offensive than the Chargers, but whatever I can add to their attack I will try."

The offseason had been a busy one for San Diego, the defending AFC West champions who fell one game short of meeting the 49ers in Super Bowl XVI. Around the league, the consensus was that the Chargers needed only to upgrade their 26th-ranked defense in order to take the next step. Conveniently, the Buccaneers (the NFL's thriftiest outfit) were in a seller's mindset. Before long, the Chargers had traded for two of Tampa's best players -- linebacker David Lewis and defensive tackle Dewey Selmon -- and hired Tom Bass, the team's outgoing defensive coordinator, to fill the same position in San Diego. Hence, when the Bell trade came to fruition, the media treated it as a quirky, yet relatively minor, transaction. There were no banner headlines and few interviews. Bell, by his family's recollection, did but a single local TV appearance, and it lasted for all of two minutes. "It wasn't a big thing," says Rick Smith, the Chargers' media relations director at the time. "Ricky was a nice guy and he had a good career. But it wasn't like he was coming in to challenge Chuck Muncie. He was a backup. Generally, backups don't get much attention."

Upon closer inspection, however, the back story here was a remarkable one. Born on April 8, 1955, Ricky Lynn Bell was the fifth of Ruthie Lee Tatum's seven sons (from three different men). He was initially raised in a converted garage inside Houston's Fifth Ward, a crime-ridden section northeast of the city's downtown. Ricky shared quarters with two of his brothers, Lee and Chester, and his mother, his aunt and a cousin slept in an adjacent room. "There wasn't much opportunity for blacks in Houston in the 1960s," says Lee Moore, one of Ricky's two younger siblings. "The jobs were out west."

One night, Ruthie, who worked long hours as a housekeeper in a white section of Houston, dreamed that God or Jesus or Moses or someone important told her to relocate to California. Upon waking up, she flipped open her bedside Bible and landed upon Philippians 3:14 -- "But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." It was, she believed, meant to be.

"My mom had $60 in her pocket," says Moore. "There were two bus services back then -- Greyhound and Continental. Continental was the cheaper one, so she boarded the three of us [the oldest four brothers -- including noted soul singer Archie Bell -- were already out of the house] and we moved to Los Angeles when Ricky was nine. All because of a dream ..."

What awaited the family, however, was a nightmare. Ruthie and the children found a dirty, discarded, cardboard box-sized apartment at 1131 East 71st St. -- the center of gang-infested South Central Los Angeles. "Our place was a shotgun shack," Moore says. "Me and Chester shared a bed, all of us shared one bathroom. It wasn't a good scene. Crime everywhere, violence everywhere. Pretty hopeless."

Strapped for money, Ruthie (who found work in an auto parts shop) was unable to pay for her children to play in the local sports leagues. Instead, Ricky and his friends would retreat to one of two places: An asphalt court overtaken by broken bottles and crumpled fast food bags, or a dusty field down the street, located behind a Salvation Army thrift shop. Always big for his age, Ricky dominated sandlot games, slugging baseballs into the far off sky and, in football, running over older opponents as if they were pillows. "As a trick, he used to pick other kids up and hold them over his head," says Moore. "I still get reminded of that."

At Edison Junior High, young Ricky began his gradual development into an Adonis. Muscles sprouted from muscles that sprouted from more muscles; his legs took the form of tree trunks; his forearms were granite ("Ricky was given the strength of Samson," his mother once told People magazine. "And that's amazing because he was an anemic baby.") A gym teacher, Richard Adams, organized after-school football games for the children who couldn't afford youth leagues, and Ricky was, in his brother's word, "untouchable."

By the time he reached Fremont High School in the fall of 1970, Bell emerged as a terror, earning All-Los Angeles City Section honors as one of California's elite prep fullbacks and linebackers (before rushing for 995 yards as a senior, Bell excelled as a blocking back for Chet Lemon, future Detroit Tigers centerfielder). Equally important, he ignored the siren call of gang lifestyle. As those around him turned to the streets, Bell focused upon school and sports. "I never had the urge," he told the Sporting News' Dwight Chapin in 1976, "to go around beating anyone up." Indeed, when his mother worked the late shift at the plant, Ricky was responsible for making Lee and Chester dinner, then putting them to bed. "Chicken, rice and Kool-Aid," Ricky once said. "I grew up fast taking care of my brothers."

As one college recruiter after another showed up at Pathfinder practices, Bell's dreams grew bigger and bigger. One warm summer night, he sat out front of his home, alongside Lee, and talked of a future without gunshots, without drug dealers. "I'm gonna make the NFL," he said, "and the first thing I'll do is buy Mama a house. We have to get out of here. We have to..."

"He had dreams for his son. But in order for them to happen, his dreams had to come true, too."

(Credit: YouTube)

Problem. During his junior year, Ricky impregnated his girlfriend, a pretty gymnast named Carolyn Estres. When Ruthie heard the news, she broke down. How many times had she told her boys that the one thing -- the very one thing -- they must not do is have babies while in high school? How often had she warned Ricky that his path could be easily destroyed by a single misstep? "A lot of people were very disappointed in Ricky," says Moore. "We all liked Carolyn. She was a nice girl. But when that happened, there was this belief that Ricky had possibly ruined his future, and that football wouldn't happen anymore."

Ricky heard the words, soaked in the heartbreak and, says Moore, "acted responsibly." He was inside the hospital when his son, Ricky Bell, Jr., was born on Feb. 13, 1974, and spent as much time with the infant as possible. "Ricky had plans for him," says Moore. "He had dreams for his son. But in order for them to happen, his dreams had to come true, too."

After paying visits to Colorado, Oregon, Cal, Stanford, Arizona State, UCLA and USC, Bell -- at his mother's behest -- chose the Trojans. "It's the only school," she told him, "that you can ride a bike to from home." McKay, the legendary coach, recruited Bell as a future fullback. Early in the 1973 season, however, a Trojan outside linebacker named Dale Mitchell was injured, and Bell was inserted into the starting lineup in his place. "He was a freshman when I was a senior, and I got on him really hard in a game against Arkansas," says Wood, a fellow linebacker. "But he got it together really quickly. Great athletes are great athletes, and Rick was friggin' great."

Bell alternated with Dave Farmer in 1974 at fullback as a sophomore, blocking for Anthony Davis, helping the running back finish second in balloting for the Heisman Trophy. Then, five days before spring practices closed in 1975, McKay yelled out, "Ricky! Line up there at tailback and let's see what you can do from there!"

Vince Evans, a Trojan quarterback, handed Bell the ball. Whooooooosh!

"From that day on," Sports Illustrated's John Underwood wrote, "history was born."

His debut as a featured ball carrier came on Sept. 12, 1975, when the Duke Blue Devils traveled to the Los Angeles Coliseum for the season opener for both teams. It was a warm, breezy California evening, and 56,272 spectators filled the building to watch the Trojans presumably destroy an overmatched opponent. "I was real scared," Bell said. "I felt like throwing up."

What ensued was something few Duke players have ever forgotten. Bell carried the ball 34 times for 256 yards, breaking C.R. Roberts' 19-year-old single-game team record. That USC won, 35-7, was lost in the new halfback's brilliance. "Bell is as great as any tailback John McKay ever had at USC," Mike McGee, Duke's coach, said afterward. "How could any others be better?"

Over the next two seasons, Bell -- who rushed for 1,957 yards as a junior and 1,433 as (an injury-plagued) senior -- morphed from standout to star to Trojan legend. In a game at Washington State during his final season, he carried 51 times for 347 yards and two touchdowns, prompting John Robinson, USC's new coach, to note, "As far as I'm concerned, he's the best football player of all time." Bell, who placed second to Dorsett in Heisman Trophy balloting, was unlike any other Southern Cal tailback -- nearly as explosive as Simpson, only with a Mack Truck's physicality. Nearly as fast as Davis, only with sharper instincts. Teammates nicknamed him "Bulldog," and with good reason. Bell's running style was uncomplicated and devastating. He tucked the ball under his arm, lowered his helmet, raised his knees and powered straight ahead. There were no tricks or gimmicks; no slick attempts at misdirection. Defenders knew Bell was coming toward them, and that he wouldn't make much of an effort to duck or sidestep. It was Ricky Bell's shoulders slamming into your chest. "He was as good as anyone who ever played for us," says Dave Levy, the Trojans' offensive line coach. "USC had so many great running backs, but he's right near the top."

What most separated Bell from many Trojans was his off-the-field approach to life. Here was the anti-stereotypical jock; a kid who took his academics seriously (A speech major, Bell was placed on academic probation as a freshman, worked diligently with tutors and returned to USC to wrap up his degree requirements in 1979), and who committed himself to his mother. He lived at home his first three years of college, so that the rental supplement check supplied by USC could go to household needs, and worked a series of summer jobs to help make ends meet. Bell served as a janitor and a playground instructor, and midway through college appeared as an extra in such shows as "The Six-Million Dollar Man" and "The Rockford Files."

"You can't say I wasn't poor, poor," he once said. "I always had clothes on my back and food to eat, but that was about it. I remember when I got my first car. See, I always worked, selling newspapers or something. But this time, I got a job selling for a sporting goods firm in the summer. I guess I was 18. I know I saved $250 and bought this '64 Chevy and it set me going. I'd done something, man."

During the mid-1970s, USC's linebackers were coached by Foster Andersen, whose young son, Christian, used to bound along the sidelines. Bell became the boy's unofficial babysitter -- "he took me everywhere with him," says Christian, who later became a producer for Fox Sports. "He came to my elementary school and spoke to a full auditorium. I still have a photograph Ricky signed for me hanging downstairs." Bell's inscription to the then-seven-year-old: YOU'RE MY BEST FRIEND.

Midway through Bell's senior year, he and some pals visited a Los Angeles club, Disco 9000. No longer attached to the mother of Ricky, Jr., Bell spotted a pretty young woman named Natalia Laidler, and asked her to dance. "I was only 17, but my friend and I knew the owner of the club so we got in," Natalia says. "Well, when Ricky found out I was 17, he said, ‘Oh no, are you serious?'"

"I am," she replied.

"Well," said Bell, "I'm 22. We can't date. But give me the date of your 18th birthday, and I'll call you."

The following Feb. 12, the phone rang in the Laidler household. Ricky and Natalia married three years later.

"Ricky was extremely honorable, very respectful," says Natalia. "When we dated he came to pick me up the first time, and my mom was mopping the floor. He took the mop from her and said, ‘I'll do that for you.' It wasn't an act -- Ricky was just that way.

"He was just really, really good."

* * *

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers quickly found this out.

Ricky Bell was really, really good. He worked hard, he rarely complained, he fulfilled every request with a smile on his face. Need someone to visit a hospital? Call Ricky! Have a bunch of kids requesting autographs? Ricky! His first big purchase after signing a five-year, $1.225 million contract was  a $184,000 home for his family in the tony Baldwin Hills section of Los Angeles. When presented the keys, tears streamed down his mother's cheeks. "Talk about culture shock," says Moore. "We went from one bathroom to five! Five! Who needs five bathrooms?"

When McKay selected Bell over Dorsett (who went second overall, to the Cowboys), he explained to the media that a smaller halfback (Dorsett was 5-foot-11, 192 pounds) wouldn't survive behind the Bucs' inexperienced offensive line. Yet the reasoning made little sense. Dorsett was shifty -- he could make his own holes. Bell was a north-south runner, with the elusiveness of a desk lamp. For such a running back, there was no worse place to begin a career than Tampa. The Bucs had completed their inaugural season with a 0-14 record, and ranked 24th in the league in rushing yards. "You knew one thing," says Dewey Selmon. "It wasn't going to be easy for Ricky."

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It was worse than anyone could have ever imagined.

The Buccaneers lost their first 12 games. The starting quarterbacks -- Gary Huff and Randy Hedberg -- combined to throw for three touchdowns and 23 interceptions, and the leading receiver, Morris Owens, had but 34 catches. Bell made his professional debut on Sept. 18, 1977 at Philadelphia, running for a scant 53 yards on 15 carries in a 13-3 defeat. The Eagles stuffed the line to stop Bell -- a tactic used week after week by Tampa Bay's opponents. At the same time, while Dorsett was rushing for 1,007 yards en route to a Super Bowl title with the Cowboys, Bell was being manhandled by defensive linemen and booed by the hometown fans.

His frustrations boiled over during a Week 11 loss to Atlanta, when he was forced to leave the game with a knee injury after running for 11 yards. As Bell sat on the bench, simmering, a handful of hecklers taunted him from behind. Bell turned and, uncharacteristically, screamed, "Come on down here! If it's that bad, just come on down!" When the exchange intensified, Bell charged the nearby retaining wall in order to climb into the stands. George Ragsdale, a kick returner, pulled Bell away. Afterward, sitting by his locker, Bell felt humiliated. "I know I shouldn't have done it," he told the assembled media. "I've never been a fighter. But it was just the frustration ... everything."

When Tampa completed its disastrous 2-12 campaign, Bell's stat line (148 rushes, 436 yards, an average of 2.9 yards per carry with only one touchdown) appeared to tell the saga of a first-round bust.

"What nobody seemed to understand was that he was running against 11 guys," says Wood. "Ricky was courageous that year, man. Never whined, never made an excuse. But he didn't have a shot. Not a shot in hell."

Bell's second campaign was only slightly better (he ran for 679 yards and six touchdowns for the 5-11 Buccaneers), but in 1979 something in Tampa Bay clicked. After four seasons of adding high draft picks (and competent offensive linemen), the Buccaneers of Bell, Williams and Lee Roy Selmon captured the NFC Central with a 10-6 record, shocked the Eagles in the divisional playoffs, then lost to the Rams 9-0 in the NFC Championship Game. Bell's 1,263 rushing yards ranked sixth in the NFL, and the sports' chroniclers began speaking of him not as a bust, but as a rival to Houston's Earl Campbell and Chicago's Walter Payton as the league's most physically dominant ball carriers.

"That year," says Dewey Selmon, "Ricky was the best he'd ever been."

* * *

Now, just three seasons later, he was a Charger. The good times that were supposed to ensue in Tampa Bay never ensued. Injuries mounted. The line fell apart. By 1981, McKay, Bell's biggest defender, lost faith. He wanted the Ricky Bell of USC; the Ricky Bell who resembled a freight train chugging along a downhill track.

Instead, Bell seemed to be tiptoeing and pussyfooting. So much natural talent, so little resemblance to the bull he once was. "He just wasn't the same running back at the end of his time in Tampa," says Wood. "He had absorbed a lot of pain, and it took a toll." Jerry Eckwood, a third-year player with 1/100th of Bell's natural talent, took over as the starter. Bell silently stewed, and suggested to McKay that, perhaps, he should be moved elsewhere. The coach did not take to this kindly. He had brought Bell to Tampa Bay, and this was the thanks he got? This was the appreciation?

"Hell," McKay said to the press, "we couldn't even get a postage stamp for Ricky."

The words crushed Bell.

He'd show McKay. He'd show Culverhouse. He'd show Tampa's fans -- the ones who booed and accused him of maligning.

Ricky Bell would show them all.

"I remember when our GM [John Sanders] called and said we had a chance to get Ricky Bell," says Dave Levy, the former USC coach who now oversaw the Chargers' offensive line. "I said, 'Holy cow! If he's still the same guy he was, we want him. We definitely want him.'"

Bell rented a condominium in the Scripps Ranch area of San Diego, and moved in with Natalia and their 3-year-old daughter, Noelle. For the first time in years, he was genuinely excited about football. If Bell wasn't lifting weights, he was running the beach. Or doing sit-ups. Or studying the Chargers' offense. "He looked like he was OK," said Smith, the media relations director. "I can still picture him doing physical labor on the roof of his condo."

Come May, Bell reported to the campus of the University of California at San Diego for minicamp. He was handed a No. 42 jersey and greeted by Earnel Durden, the team's backfield coach. Entering his ninth season on the job, Durden was excited to have a player boasting such a résumé among a motley crew of rookie hopefuls and castoffs. "I remember those first days -- he was bubbly and he seemed healthy," says Durden. "I honestly thought, ‘This is just what we need. He'll fit in perfectly.'"

Bell felt the same way. He told Durden and head coach Don Coryell he'd do whatever the team needed -- block, run, return kicks, return punts. Few NFL teams boasted San Diego's running back depth (along with Muncie, the backfield candidates included John Cappelletti, the former Heisman Trophy winner from Penn State, James Brooks, a second-year standout who ran for 525 yards as a rookie, and Hank Bauer, a respected sixth-year veteran), and Bell figured he needed to fight for a roster spot.

Beginning that first day of camp, Bell eagerly lined up behind the quarterback, looking comfortable and sleek in his shiny lightning bolt helmet. With each snap of the ball, he charged forward, opening his arms to receive a handoff. It was just like the glory days of Tampa all over again, with one slight difference.

Ricky Bell was awful.

"I watched him during minicamp, and there was no zip on his fastball," says Bauer. "I played at a Division III school in California (California Lutheran), so I knew how great Ricky had been at USC. I mean, he was one of the best ever. But he just didn't have that explosiveness. I'd played with some special running backs -- Chuck, Lydell Mitchell, Johnny Rodgers -- and they all exploded when they got the ball. Ricky had no explosion. None."

"He just looked like he didn't like getting hit anymore," says Levy. "That happens with old backs who have been beat up. But he wasn't old."

Durden noticed the same thing, but the team chalked it up to rust. Plus, Bell was, without much debate, the classiest pro they'd ever seen. He attended every meeting with a smile on his face; complimented awe-struck nobodies when they made good plays. One of the other running backs in camp was Russell Ellis, a former UNLV standout who'd spent the previous season playing for the Twin City Cougars of something called the California Football League. Ellis' odds of making the Chargers were, approximately, zero. "Well, one day he picks me and another player up and takes us to the beach," says Ellis. "He didn't have to do that. There was nothing to gain. He was just a really kind man looking out for another Los Angeles guy. I'll never forget that. Ever."

Two months later Bell returned to UC-San Diego for training camp, and so did the sluggishness. Though somewhat able to conceal his struggles alongside the likes of Ellis in minicamp, now -- compared to Muncie and Brooks -- Bell seemed to be running through a bowl of applesauce. When pressed, he described a dull achiness that was creeping through his legs. "As soon as we started, it was clear he wasn't right," says Lewis, the new Chargers linebacker. "Ricky wasn't one to complain, but this was different. I think the complaining started during the preseason games. He was hurting, but he didn't know why."

"It was hard to watch, because he was playing his heart out and it wasn't there," says Bauer. "It was never a question of effort. We all just scratched our heads and wondered, ‘Where's the Ricky Bell we all know?'"

Despite his struggles, Bell made San Diego's opening day roster. He dressed for the Week 1 visit to Denver, but played little in a 23-3 win. The following Sunday, during a 19-12 loss at Kansas City, Bell returned one kickoff for 10 yards. "I remember seeing him the morning after that return, and he was in a lot of pain," says Ricky, Jr., who was visiting his father from his home in Seattle. "He had this look like, ‘This ain't happening anymore.'" The discomfort and inactivity were depressing, as was the 57-day players' strike that ensued. Yet what really concerned Bell was the weight loss.

It began innocuously enough. A few pounds dropped here, a few pounds dropped there. Professional athletes monitor their bodies like few other Homo sapiens, and they also specialize in making excuses for any discernible changes. The weather had been hot. The work days had been long. Bell wasn't eating enough. He was sweating an awful lot. He needed to change his diet. He needed more sleep. "He was declining," says Natalia. "Only we didn't know why."

"The weight loss was pretty eye-opening," says Lewis. "It didn't make sense."

The season resumed on Nov. 22, and Bell -- shrinking before his teammates' eyes -- stood along the sideline for games against the Raiders and Broncos. He finally returned to action on Dec. 5, late in a 30-13 decimation of the lowly Browns at Cleveland. With the outcome long decided, Coryell sent Bell in to play halfback. He took a handoff from quarterback Dan Fouts and ran for four yards. Three weeks later, in a landslide win over the dreadful Colts, Ed Luther, San Diego's backup quarterback, gave the football to Bell, who made it two yards before being tackled to the ground.

The play, insignificant by all possible measures, exists somewhere on a reel inside the bowels of the NFL Films offices.

Nobody has ever asked for it.

Nobody has seen it in years.

It shows the final moment of Ricky Bell's NFL career.

* * *

And, with that, he vanished.

Bell's locker stall, uniform No. 42 dangling from a hanger, sat empty. His shoes remained, literally, unfilled. When asked, years later, what he recalled of his time coaching Bell in San Diego, Ernie Zampese, the Chargers' offensive coordinator, paused awkwardly. "The USC guy?" he said. "I don't remember him at all."

By Dec. 31, 1982, the day San Diego mercifully placed him on the reserve list, Bell was nearly unrecognizable. His weight had plummeted from 225 to 198 pounds. The severe pain and swelling in his joints was unbearable. Blisters were beginning to sprout up on his palms and feet. Some with the Chargers had assumed Bell was suffering from Rheumatoid arthritis. He wasn't.

He went through a bevy of tests, and then the team referred him to Dr. Michael Weisman, an arthritis specialist at the University of San Diego. "Right off the bat I knew there was a serious problem," Weisman told the Los Angeles Times in 1984. "He had swollen hands and feet, and open sores on his fingers and toes." In January 1983, Bell was diagnosed with dermatomyositis, an inflammation of the skin and muscles that affects all of its patients differently. Many go on to live long, productive lives. A small handful develop cardiomyopathy, which affects five in every million people. Ricky Bell was one of the five. "It's a disease where the muscles and arteries are attacked and may be started or triggered by a virus," Dr. Allen Metzger, Bell's physician, told the Times. "The muscles get inflamed, causing profound weakness. The blood vessels within the skin become severely inflamed to the point where you're unable to use your muscles. The weight loss comes from the body trying to fight off the disease."

Chances of survival: Less than 30 percent.

Bell refused to hear it. So, for that matter, did his family. He would beat this, just as he beat the odds of escaping South Central; just as he beat the Bears and the Lions and the Packers. Moore liked to think back to the time his brother -- still in college -- returned home from a summer job at a factory that produced rims for cars and trucks. Ricky was told to buy a pair of steel-toed boots, but went to work one day in tennis sneakers. "A rim came off the belt, landed on his toe and busted it," Moore says. "That night, he came in and took off his shoe, and his sock was filled with blood." Ricky removed an old Swiss Army knife from a nearby drawer, wedged the blade under his toenail and popped it off. "Blood was shooting out, and the next day he was back at work as if nothing had ever happened," Moore says. "That's the kind of toughness Ricky had. He could handle anything."

Like many athletes, Bell viewed the disease as an opponent, no different than Mark Gastineau or Lyle Alzado, but one for which there was no cure, just a series of drugs to treat various symptoms and the dim hope of a miraculous remission. He began skipping doctor appointments, not wanting to hear any more bad news. He tried acupuncture and various forms of alternative medicines. Throughout 1983, myriad newspapers ran blurbs updating Bell's recovery. RICKY BELL IMPROVED read a small New York Times headline from June 24, 1983. Shortly thereafter, Bell told the Sporting News, "My health has improved since January by about 50 percent." He even attended minicamp with the Chargers, though only as a spectator, ultimately expecting to be better than ever.

"I was in denial, he was in denial," says Natalia. "I knew he was sick, but I always throught he'd go in remission and get better."

As the months passed and the weight failed to return, Bell begrudgingly acknowledged that he would never again play football. On Aug. 12, 1983, he issued a statement announcing his retirement. He didn't say goodbye to his old Charger teammates, or return to the facility to pick up his belongings. After just six seasons, his career was over, and he needed -- emotionally, mentally -- to sever ties. He, Natalia and Noelle returned to Los Angeles, to live in the house he bought his mother six years earlier. "I honestly thought he'd recover and be back for 1983," says Dewey Selmon. "That's just the way I figured it'd go ..."

For a man whose body was systematically betraying him, Bell refused to act the part. The disease was beginning to spread to his lungs and heart, developing into cardiomyopathy, and the strain took an increasingly severe physical toll. Bell became increasingly tired, and needed to sleep long hours and nap regularly (with an oxygen tank by his bedside). He would often wake up screaming from the muscle pains shooting through his legs, and the inability to pick up Noelle broke his heart. But, outside of his immediate family, he never let on. He invested in a pair of Popeye's Chicken franchises and purchased a bulk storage facility. He studied to attain his real estate license, and used the time away from football to forge a bond with, Ricky, Jr., who moved to Los Angeles to live with his father and attend fifth grade at nearby View Park Elementary. When people inquired about his health, he was always armed with a standard reply ("I'm doing much better!"), even when the inevitability of death seemed to loom.

"He didn't waste time being angry," says Ricky, Jr. "He knew how blessed his life was, and he showed that in his actions. We used to watch all these Bruce Lee movies together -- he loved them. There was this one film we watched a lot, and in it the guy's nose was bleeding. I'd wake up the next morning to my dad dripping water on me, trying to get me to think it was his nose.

"My dad had a unique spirit. He liked the rain at night ... the feeling of the warm air and the rain falling on him when it was dark. For some reason, that sticks with me. Him, happy in the rain."

* * *

On the morning of Nov. 28, 1984, Lee Moore was lying in bed when his telephone rang. It was his mother. "Ricky just called and told me to get to the house," she said. "Can you go over there?"

Moore jumped in his car, drove the handful of miles to 4259 Enoro Dr. and sprinted through the front door. "The paramedics were already there," Moore says. "They had attached a monitor to him. He was slumped over, and when he saw me, he told me his back was killing him. He asked me to come over and rub it." Bell was placed on a gurney and taken to Daniel Freeman Hospital in nearby Inglewood. Moore had Ricky, Jr. brought home from school, and then drove with the boy to the hospital. "I parked, walked up to the information desk in the emergency room and told the receptionist that I was Ricky Bell's brother," he says. "My mom was trying to get hold of Natalia, who was back at school (Bell's wife was working on a master's degree in history at Cal State, Los Angeles). We had a seat in the waiting area ..."

Without warning, a voice came over the loudspeaker. "Is there any family for Ricky Bell here?" Lee and Ricky, Jr. were escorted toward a small office. From the corner of his eye, Lee spotted two panicked nurses sprinting past. "We were pushed into this office, the door was closed and we were told to wait," Moore says. "We were sitting there for a while. I had no idea what was going on. I just wanted to see my brother."

A doctor entered. The time on the clock read 11:06 a.m.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"I'm Lee, Ricky Bell's brother," he said. "And this is Ricky's son."

A pained, awkward silence.

"I'm sorry," the doctor said.

"Sorry for what?" said Lee.

Another pause.

"Your brother. He just expired."

Ricky Bell was 29.

The year is 2013. Moore is telling the story. He is sobbing, as if the death happened moments ago. His voice cracks, then cracks again. "Little Ricky begins to cry," he says. "I knew I had to get to a phone, to call my mother ..."

He dialed the number, and Ruthie Lee Tatum picked up.

"He's gone," Lee said.

Ruthie wailed. And wailed. And wailed. "My baby ..."

Natalia was pulled from her class by a security guard and informed that Ricky was in the hospital. During her 40-minute drive from campus, she refused to turn on the car radio for fear of hearing the news she dreaded. When she entered the emergency room, she saw Lee. "Tell me he's OK," she cried. "Please, tell me he's OK ..."

Lee shook his head.

Moments later, the wife and the brother were escorted into a room where the body of Ricky Bell, eyes closed, rested atop a table, dead of a heart attack, the end result of his disease. He was down to 180 pounds, but looked larger in death than he had in life. The doctor asked if they wanted to hear his last words.

"Yes," said Natalia. "Of course."

"Your husband told me he didn't want to die," he said. "That he had kids to take care of and so much to live for. He kept saying he was sorry, and that we had to keep him alive.

"All Ricky wanted to do," the doctor said, "was be alive."

(Credit: YouTube)

* * *

Nearly three decades have passed. Ricky, Jr. lives in Seattle, where he is a managing real estate broker for Allegro Realty and raises his son -- a fabulous 11-year-old athlete named Ricky Bell III. Noelle, 33, works in the music business in New York City. She looks exactly like her father, from the smile to the eyes to the hair. "I recently started going through some old fan mail he received, but never opened," she said. "I love it, but it's really sad. I barely remember my father. I wish I did, but ..."

Natalia spent much of her career as the manager of legal affairs for Warner Bros Pictures Music -- a job she recently left. She has been married to H. Clay Jacke, a judge on the Los Angeles County Superior Court, for more than 20 years. They have two children together. She still thinks of her late husband, but too often those ponderings are accompanied by pain. "He's missed," she says. "He really is."

Ricky's younger brother, Lee, is a custodial worker in a San Diego school district. He is occasionally haunted by what his role model could have become; what he would have been. "I look at Magic Johnson, and his business success after basketball, and I think of Ricky," he says. "He could have had the same level of excellence. I truly believe that. He was so much more than just a football player."

As the thought fades away, Moore is asked how often his brother creeps into his mind. Time, after all, has a way of turning fresh images into faded newsprint. Can he still hear Ricky's voice? Can he still see his face?

Moore pauses to collect himself.

"When I was little, my mom always had Ricky tie my shoes at the start of every day," he says. "It was always, ‘Tie your brother's shoes ... tie your brother's shoes.' Well, Ricky got tired of it, so he decided to teach me to tie my own shoes. It was a painstaking experience, I'm sure, but he showed me repeatedly, until I got it down for myself.

"I'm an adult now. Old. And every morning, before leaving the house, I bend down to put on my shoes. And every time, I think of my brother. I can't help but think of my brother.

"That," says Moore, "makes me very happy."

Maybe your experience is similar.¹ Parts of this chapter adapted from a piece that appeared at SB Nation on September 19, 2011.

It's probably an hour after I intended to show up, but I'm here. I park in a different lot than where the tailgate is located, but while that gets a bit frustrating at times, it does allow me to take in the scene as I hike to our chosen spot. On my walk, I can spy on tailgate food, take in bits and pieces of conversations and get an early feel for what attendance is going to be like ("At three hours to kickoff, this lot should be much more full than this...").

Within 30 seconds of my arrival, Seth hands me a beer, as he has for just about every tailgate I've ever attended. He always gets here on time. At Homecoming it's all about the Bloody Mary with the infused vodka. After Halloween, I'll bring in growlers of the local pumpkin ale. Right now, it's just beer, even at 8:00 a.m. (if your team is unlucky enough to draw an 11:00 a.m. start time). The bottle is open, there are hours before kickoff, and it's time to settle in. I'm not thinking about numbers.

It's the same people, the same chairs, and the same tent with the same team colors each year. The grilling equipment gets upgraded from time to time, and lord knows there are more children here than there used to be, but there is comfort in familiarity. I do not overtly fear change in my day-to-day life, but I like my tailgates the way they are. When the weather cooperates, there is nothing more relaxing. And it's still pretty good when the weather is temperamental.

**********

In Lincoln, Nebraska, 85,000 people make an incomprehensible amount of noise watching on an enormous jumbotron as 100 young men walk through a hallway.

In Columbia, South Carolina, old Southern men yell and wave towels to the pulsating beat of a nearly 15-year old song by Finnish trance DJ Darude.

In Blacksburg, Virginia, engineering majors make an equal amount of noise following the opening notes to a classic rock song from Los Angeles-based Metallica.

In Madison, Wisconsin, after 45 minutes of play, the home crowd jumps along in disturbing unison to a decades-old song from faux-Irish rap group House of Pain. It is so fun you can occasionally catch members of the visiting team joining in on the sideline.

In Auburn, Alabama, a town of 53,000, up to 87,000 people show up to watch an eagle fly around a stadium. A retired eagle still hangs out on campus. (The team's nickname is the Tigers, by the way.) In Tallahassee, Florida, a student is given a scholarship to dress up as a Seminole chief, ride into Doak Campbell Stadium on a horse named Renegade, and plant a spear into the ground.

In Starkville, Mississippi, home fans clang cowbells incessantly, and they are the only fans in the country allowed to do so. This is a big deal. In Stillwater, Oklahoma, the Cowboy Marching Band plays "The Waving Song" after the home team scores. The fans don't clap along, of course; they wave.

In Clemson, South Carolina, the home team pats a rock and runs down a hill to thunderous applause. In College Station, Texas, proud Aggies cheer along with male yell leaders dressed like milkmen, repeating chants that you don't understand and nodding quietly to the collie graveyard on the north end of the stadium.²The collies are buried facing the south scoreboard so they’ll always know how the home team is doing.

In Shreveport, Louisiana, local Louisiana State fans show up at the Independence Bowl, a game in which their team isn't playing, just so they can get some tailgating practice. In Boise, Idaho, Utah State beats Toledo in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl. The trophy they receive is basically a crystal bowl of potatoes. Winning this ridiculous trophy is one of the program's finest moments.

In stadiums throughout the country, men wearing different-colored shirts, with perhaps incredibly similar backgrounds, yell at and/or tussle with each other because of the actions of a bunch of 19-year olds wearing similar colors. And in stadiums throughout the country, men wearing the same-colored shirts yell at and/or tussle with each other because of the plays being called by a well-paid man in a box across the stadium from them.

Welcome to college football, where this all makes sense. From the tunnel walk at Nebraska, to "Sandstorm" at South Carolina, to "Enter Sandman" at Virginia Tech, to "Jump Around" at Wisconsin. From War Eagle at Auburn to Chief Osceola at Florida State. From CLANGA CLANGA CLANGA at Mississippi State to silent waving at Oklahoma State. From drunk LSU fans grilling meat for practice to jubilant Utah State fans cheering as their head coach holds a potato bowl over his head.

In the real world, you aren't allowed to dress up like a Native American and throw a spear into the ground.  In college football, you can pay for an education doing this.

College football is the world's biggest insiders' club, a sport with too many inane, insanely enjoyable traditions to count. It is off the beaten path. It is messy and absurd. It is nonsensical. It is wonderful. It is always changing, and it never changes.

**********

A guy named Michael down the line of cars has a deep fryer. He lives six hours away, but he comes in for every home game. He makes most road games, too, but the home games are special. "I have friends six times a year," he says. We talk about the game. I do not reference success rates, or leverage, or points per play. Maybe he asks me what "the numbers" say about this one, but he's really just asking who I think is going to win.

The air smells like grass and fried meat. The walk to the stadium from our lot is a nice one: mostly downhill (which means mostly uphill after the game, I guess), past the basketball arena (a nice Porta-Potty alternative), through the high-roller donor lot, past the buses blaring the same Jock Jams CD for nearly 20 years running, and down the drive toward the stadium where, if we time it just right (and we usually do), the marching band is serenading the crowd and making its way into the stadium like we are.

Kids and families stop to watch and listen as we weave through them. Some old alum is attending his 300th home game. Some 3-year-old, hypnotized by the band or the mascot, is attending his first. So, so many people attend college football games in this country; all of them have their own habits, goals and levels of alcohol and food intake. I probably do not have much in common personally, or politically, with most of the people around me, but right now we are wearing the same colors. In about 30 minutes, we'll be singing the same song. Hopefully at some point we'll be high-fiving.

**********

If you count yourself among the millions of college football obsessives, chances are good that there was a moment when the bug bit you. In Alabama, or Oklahoma, or Nebraska, perhaps that moment was simply your birth. But maybe you were a Northwestern student during the Wildcats' Rose Bowl run in 1995. Maybe you attended Virginia when the Cavaliers made a miraculous (and brief) run to No. 1 in 1990. Maybe you were attending Missouri 17 years later when the same thing happened. Maybe you just got sucked into the game - the fight songs, the unexpected passion, the combination of chess and brutality, the vulnerability associated with life as an amateur - at any random school. Or maybe you were simply a six-year-old watching Doug Flutie complete a Hail Mary live on television one Saturday night in 1984.

College football is almost literally off the beaten path. There isn't much of a presence for this sport in New York City, for example, and while there are games in or around Chicago and Los Angeles, those aren't what you would naturally call college football towns. Instead, the capitals of college football require a bit of a drive, even from smaller-market cities. Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is an hour from Birmingham. Lincoln, Nebraska, is an hour from Omaha. Norman, Oklahoma, is about half an hour from Oklahoma City. Eugene, Oregon, is almost two hours from Portland. Ann Arbor, Michigan, is about 45 minutes from Detroit. Baton Rouge is about an hour and a half from New Orleans. And, of course, South Bend, Indiana, is about an hour and a half from Chicago. You have to find college football; it's probably not going to find you. But oh, when you find it, it's all over for you.

"Sports define people in a given culture," notes Chris B. Brown of the wonderful website Smart Football. "If you grew up in the New England area, perhaps you grew up in a community with a pro football focus. But if you grew up in Alabama, it was all college. For me, I grew up playing the sport, and college is probably the best blend of the things that make the game meaningful - doing it for team reasons, doing it in support of each other, working for a singular goal, not just for money or recognition, plus the noble, ‘get knocked down and get back up' part - and the strategic side of it. With 100-plus teams, you get a lot more diversity, more effective problems.

"There is at least a little insanity involved in college football obsession, in the way it makes you think and feel," Brown continues. "Often, when you're rooting for a Purdue [his school] or a Missouri [mine], it's because it connects you with some community or cultural experience - four years of college, tailgating with friends, something you can continue to do each year. If you're a part of the Notre Dame or Alabama fan base, maybe you feel connected to something that's larger than you. Connecting to that gives you a better sense of who, and where, you are."

"I always laugh when people go to their first real college football game, maybe an SEC game" says Sports Illustrated's Andy Staples, "and they see how different it is from the NFL. If you go to an Alabama-LSU game in Baton Rouge, there's really just nothing in the world that compares."³More from Staples: "It’s my favorite sport. I was born in Columbia, South Carolina. We moved around to Florida, another football-crazy state, and it just wasn’t an option. Saturday was the holy day in our house. I went to my first game in 1983, and I was hooked." He would eventually walk on for Steve Spurrier and Florida in 1996 before deciding that writing about college football was far less painful.

CBS Sports' Bruce Feldman agrees. "It's always cool just to get down on the field late in a game, when things are ramping up. It always feels new. I love seeing when Oregon lets the students in; you're looking down from the press box, and it's pretty picturesque, and you have these students sprinting down the steps trying to get to their seats. Sometimes it's raining, and you think ‘This is a bad idea.' And when Virginia Tech comes onto to the field, and you hear the sound of ‘Enter Sandman' starting up? I get goose bumps every time."⁴ More from Feldman: "There are just so many moving parts in college football, and there’s a different level of strategy that I think is fascinating. I covered college basketball for a while, and the level of detail in scouting and preparation and breakdown is 100 times more intense in college football than it is in college basketball."

For Steven Godfrey, a writer for SB Nation, it took a little while to get bitten. "I grew up in an FBI family, and we moved a lot. We went to a Marshall game here, a VMI game there, but it didn't really click. I finished high school in Jackson, Mississippi, and we went to the Egg Bowl.⁵The annual Ole Miss-Mississippi State game is called the Egg Bowl because … well, because it’s college football, basically. The winner of the game earns possession of the Golden Egg, over which these two schools have been fighting since 1927. It was there that I began to see the disproportionate amount of passion to reason, the amount of time people spend obsessing over this. It was an immersion process.

"You have people with different coal politics in the West Virginia-Marshall rivalry. You've got Civil War ties to Kansas-Missouri. The stakes are just different in college football."

Godfrey later came back to Oxford to finish his degree at Ole Miss and decided to give beat writing a chance. His first job: covering Ole Miss for the 2003 season. One of the most dominant programs in the country in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ole Miss had not been ranked higher than 15th in the AP Poll since 1970 and hadn't won a conference title since 1963. But behind quarterback Eli Manning, the Rebels made a charge toward glory in 2003 ... eventually. They first fell to Memphis and Texas Tech and began the season 2-2. But they beat No. 24 Florida and No. 21 Arkansas, surged to No. 15 in the polls, and found themselves undefeated in conference play when No. 3 LSU came to town on November 22. A win would give them the SEC West title and a chance at the SEC championship.

"Ole Miss-LSU was the perfect college football experience," says Godfrey. "I remember thinking, ‘This is the most passion I've ever seen from a group of people about anything in my life.' If I ever get football fatigue, I always remember that. Their passion is my passion, I guess.

"Ole Miss was lining up to kick a field goal at the end of the game, and a CBS production guy comes running by me. They were taking their cameras off of the goal posts. I said, ‘What are you doing? Why are you doing that?' He said, ‘Look around. This place is about to fucking explode.'"⁶Kicker Jonathan Nichols, who made 25 of 29 field goals for the season as a whole, missed a 47-yarder late in the second quarter, then missed a 36-yarder wide right with four minutes remaining in a 17-14 loss. Ole Miss still hasn’t won a conference title since 1963.

"My dad is from Louisiana, and my mom is from Georgia. College football provided context for every aspect of my life." C.J. Schexnayder is discussing how he never really had a chance in avoiding the college football bug. Schexnayder, an Alabama fan who has written for sites like Roll Bama Roll and [my own] Football Study Hall, loves the backstories almost as much as the game itself. "The historical and sociological aspect of college football is just fascinating," he says.

"So many plays have an ‘Immaculate Reception'-like impact on so many fan bases and cultures," Schexnayder notes. He's right. The NFL has a storied history, with plenty of crazy, fate-changing plays like Franco Harris' deflected-catch-and-run from the 1972 AFC playoffs. But in sheer quantity, it cannot hold a candle to college football. Every program has an Immaculate Reception, a play or a game that changed its fortunes (for better or worse), a near-miss that still hurts 40 years later, a great play that is still celebrated 20 years later. Ask a Florida State or Miami fan about Wide Right I, Wide Right II, Wide Right III, or Wide Left. Ask a Georgia fan about Run, Lindsay, Run. Ask an Arkansas fan about Right 53 Veer Pass. Ask a Missouri fan about the Fifth Down or the Flea Kicker. Ask an Alabama or Auburn fan about Punt Bama Punt. Ask a Nebraska fan about Tommie Frazier's run or Johnnie Rodgers' punt return. Ask an Ole Miss fan about Billy Cannon. Ask a Texas fan about Michael Crabtree. Et cetera. You'll never actually learn about every incredible moment, every incredible game, every classic gut punch. There are just too many of them.

"As I've gotten older, and I've read more books and talked to more people," says Brian Fremeau of Football Outsiders, "the history of college football that I have come to understand more fully has produced such a rich culture, richer than what I would call the ‘sterile' culture of professional sports. There are these great little stories from every season, and they have been happening for more than 100 years. People want to tell you about this amazing little nugget of a story from 60 years ago. People in a pro sport maybe talk about records or the team that held the Lombardi Trophy so many years ago. But they don't really share the stories that build up to a ‘This is why we rally around this team' conclusion. The little stories are what make this such a passionate sport."

At the same time, there are bigger, broader stories, which is another draw to college football for football academics like Schexnayder. "Football allows us to talk about complex cultural issues in a safer, less threatening way. You can see what's happening socially in the country through college football."

Football was a backdrop for the desegregation battles of the 1960s, from the fight over James Meredith's enrollment at Ole Miss in 1962 to the integration of Alabama's football team (and Arkansas', and Texas') a few years later. College football is, like politics, local. And a look through time at your team's history will tell you so much about your school's, your town's, and your state's history as well.

2013 season preview

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I began writing about college football for Football Outsiders in September 2008. My job was to talk about the numbers I had begun to play with over the previous year or two, but I wanted to make sure I knew what I was talking about when it came to college football as a whole - its traditions, its history, its rivalries, its collective joy and bitterness. This didn't seem like a difficult task; I had obsessed over the sport since I was about three years old.

I grew up in Oklahoma, where college football is basically the pro sport of choice. Some relatives of mine were the type of obsessive OU fans that made me both revere them and despise them. I remembered the controversial tie between OU and Texas in 1984, and people talked about the Sooner Schooner's premature celebratory arrival onto the Orange Bowl field (and subsequent penalty) for years. I knew just about every player on Oklahoma's 1985 national title team. Jamelle Holieway was my first official favorite player.

I had the Heisman winners memorized going back a decade or two, and I could recite for you national title winners like they were Super Bowl champions. I knew who the All-Americans were, I knew where all the top NFL players attended school, and my love for college football only grew when I began attending major (sometimes) college games at Missouri in the late 1990s. And a decade later, I was getting paid a little bit to write about this sport and its numbers? This was going to be great.

I began to snatch up every college football book I could think of on eBay and Amazon.com. I read everything Dan Jenkins ever wrote for Sports Illustrated. I took in the known classics and the out-of-print, only-locals-will-probably-care autobiographies of successful coaches (John Vaught's Rebel Coach is my favorite). I recorded and watched just about every old college football game ESPN Classic would show and complained when they didn't show nearly enough variety.

After nearly three decades as a college football obsessive, I came to realize something during this immersion process: I didn't know shit about college football.

I knew about Oklahoma, Nebraska and the Big 8. I knew about Bud Wilkinson and Barry Sanders and Sal Aunese and the tunnel walk in Lincoln. I knew everything there was to know about my alma mater's football program, from Don Faurot creating the Split-T (and teaching it to future Oklahoma coach Bud Wilkinson during World War II), to Dan Devine nearly winning a national title in 1960 (damn Kansas beating Ol' Mizzou with an ineligible player), to the big upset wins (and ridiculous upset losses) of the 1970s, to the cratering of the 1980s and the early 1990s, to the Fifth Down, to the Flea Kicker (which I had the honor of seeing in person).

I didn't, however, know about how dominant those late 1950s and early 1960s Ole Miss teams were. I didn't know enough about the Ten Year War between Michigan's Bo Schembechler and Ohio State's Woody Hayes. I didn't know how dominant Pittsburgh and Minnesota used to be. And Fordham. And St. Mary's. I didn't realize how important the Third Saturday in October (the annual battle between Tennessee and Alabama) was. I didn't know Oregon State had a Heisman Trophy winner. I didn't know about Harvard "beating" Yale, 29-29. I didn't realize just how good Herschel Walker and Bo Jackson were, at least not until they reached the pros.

"Every college football team has a 500-page biography," says the USA Today's Paul Myerberg. "Oklahoma's is 1,000 pages. Notre Dame's is 2,000. Every game has a back story." When Michigan and Ohio State face off in Ann Arbor in 2013, they will not only be fighting for present-tense supremacy, but they'll also be re-fighting all of the battles that came before, in Michigan's home stadium and elsewhere. The same goes for conference battles throughout the country. The more you learn about college football, the more you find out you have to learn.

"College football fandom is a niche," says college football historian and sociologist (and former Notre Dame star) Michael Oriard. "You are a fan of your school, or your conference, more than you are a fan of college football." College football's history is incredibly rich but regionalized; because of travel and a limited sample size, your team barely played teams out of its region (aside from bowls) until the last 40-50 years. Shared facts do not extend far beyond Heisman winners and national champions, and even the mythical national champion from a given season is often up for debate. Five teams claim a share of the 1926 title (Alabama, Lafayette, Michigan, Navy, Stanford). Another five claim the 1927 title. In the 12 seasons from 1931-42, at least three teams claim a title from 10 of them. If you added up claimed titles, you would guess that college football has been played since about 1650 A.D.

Now, it should be noted that this is changing a bit. Unlike 30 years ago, you can find more than a couple of nationally televised college football games airing on a given Saturday. And as it has for everything else, the Internet has made the world a lot smaller. Blogs and Twitter have helped even further in this regard. But this is a new development. The shared history of college football has just begun.

Of course, college football's history has only so much to do with actual results. For many, the reason for obsessing over college football actually has little to do with the game on the field and everything to do with the events surrounding the game on the field. The word "pageantry" ("an elaborate display or ceremony") was meant for college football. You probably clap (or wave) to the same fight song that your parents (or alums your parents' age) clapped to a generation before. And while your program's stadium may have been stretched and expanded a few times through the years, the field probably hasn't moved. The grass (fake or real) that hosts a given game on a given Saturday was probably hosting the cleats of athletes decades earlier. Schools don't move their teams like pro franchises. Where you play is quite possibly where you have always played.

In this vein, college football is, to Football Outsiders' Matt Hinton, "a body regenerating itself." New players come and go every year. Coaches stay anywhere between a couple of weeks and a couple of decades. But for the most part, the school colors remain the same.⁷Oregon and its flexible (for lack of a better word) color scheme are the exception, not the rule. The tailgates don't change that often. Season ticket holders plop down in nearly the same seat from one year to another. You meet up with people on fall Saturdays that you don't get to see the other nine months of the year, and you will meet up with them again next year. The game day experience keeps you coming back even when the names associated with the team change.

This is a communal experience, a constant in life. You plan one-third of your calendar year around it. Everything else in your life may change; fall Saturdays aren't going anywhere. And hell, when the fall ends, bowls, recruiting, and spring football are right around the corner.

**********

There is a lovely old couple in the row behind us. They were as excited as Seth's parents the first time they got to see his new baby one fall. A couple of years later, they got to meet Child No. 2. They probably don't care about opponent adjustments or what "PPP" stands for, but they love my school as much as I do. The first home game of the season is like a family reunion, really. It's the same people sitting in the same places around us. Sometimes you can move up a few rows if others have canceled their season tickets, but when your school is doing well, that doesn't happen too often. Winning comes with a price.⁸Winning also comes with bandwagon jumpers, horrible traffic, more ridiculous expectations and embarrassing behavior by some of the people around us. Also: It’s much, much better than losing.That's okay, though: We've talked ourselves into the "From the 61st row, you can really see the plays develop!" line of thinking.⁹For what it’s worth, you really can see the plays develop from up there.

When you attend games for years (I'm getting ready for my 17th season as a ticket holder, which pales in comparison to others), seemingly subtle changes are noteworthy. A couple of years ago, a new director took over the marching band. They played different songs at different times of the game, and we reacted as if we were listening to Questlove DJ'ing in a club. "Ah, he chose this song now? Interesting transition."¹⁰Later on: "Is this Lady Gaga? Wow, the last guy definitely wouldn’t have chosen this. Very progressive."

We also got a new P.A. announcer a couple of years ago, the first change in that seat since I came here. We complained about him all fall, even though he probably wasn't actually that bad.

**********

Even if we are born into college football, we can probably still look back on specific moments, specific games, that truly reeled us in. Here are 10 formative games that helped to turn me into the fan I have become.

1. November 23, 1984: Boston College 47, Miami 45.

A six-year-old in 1984 had almost no choice but to love Doug Flutie. He was kind of wild, he was a magician, he had the belly shirt, and to top it all off, it seemed he was about the same size as me. If you were playing football in the front yard, or in your room, or with friends, you didn't have to look very far to find your muse in 1984. And this game, with the Flutie-to-Phelan Hail Mary, and the classic call from Brent Musberger, and the ebbs and flows of the game itself ... it had it all. Even before the final play, this was a classic. Boston College jumped to a 14-0 lead, Miami charged back, the game was tied 31-31 heading into the fourth quarter, Miami's Bernie Kosar passed for 447 yards, Flutie passed for 472, and Miami took a 45-41 lead with 28 seconds left. It was an outstanding game before that final pass. It was a classic after it.

I was led to believe Hail Marys like this worked all the time.

2. January 1, 1986: Oklahoma 25, Penn State 10.

I loved that 1985 Oklahoma team. Then seven, I was addicted to the brash, sometimes ridiculous personalities, and the talent level was simply ridiculous - linebackers Brian Bosworth, Dante Jones and Paul Migliazzo; nose tackle Tony Casillas; defensive back Rickey Dixon; and of course all of the wishbone talent you could possibly want: quarterback Jamelle Holieway, fullback Lydell Carr, halfbacks Spencer Tillman and Patrick Collins. The buzz entering the season was about how Barry Switzer had adapted his offense to account for the star talent of quarterback Troy Aikman. But when Aikman broke his ankle against Miami in the fourth game of the year, adaptation went out the window. Switzer inserted Holieway, a true freshman, into the lineup, and Oklahoma wrecked shop.

I used to have a VHS copy of this game. My grandparents had two VCRs and did a lot of recording, which was pretty crazy (and felt a little illicit) in 1986. I watched this tape so much I remember the commercials. Does anybody remember a show called Blacke's Magic? It starred Barney Miller's Hal Linden and M*A*S*H's Harry Morgan. It was about a retired magician (Linden) who uses his tricks to solve crimes. It lasted just 12 episodes. I'm sure it was terrible. But NBC pushed it multiple times during the telecast. I remember that. I also remember the perfect play-action bomb from Holieway to magic tight end Keith Jackson, and I remember Carr eventually finding room to run up the middle. I was never an unabashed Oklahoma fan like a lot of my friends and family, but I did love this particular team.

3. January 2, 1987: Penn State 14, Miami 10.

The BCS era has left us unfulfilled in a lot of ways due to its inability to fit three deserving teams onto the same championship field. But it has spoiled us in one regard: It guarantees an end-of-year battle between the No. 1 and No. 2 teams. In 1986, these matchups were rare. That undefeated Miami and Penn State were facing off was an absurdly big deal then. Add to it the sort of "good (Penn State) versus evil (Miami)" tone most of the coverage of the game took (coverage that makes you a little queasy upon reflection, after the sexual abuse conviction of then-Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky), and this was one of the most highly anticipated college football games in memory.

Not only did the "good versus evil" theme take hold, but the narrative was fulfilled during the game as well. Those cocky, no-good Hurricanes were shown up and beaten by the good, wholesome young men from Penn State; Sandusky's defense picked off Miami quarterback Vinnie Testaverde five times, and Penn State won, 14-10, despite being outgained 445-162. This was the first college football game I could remember truly receiving Super Bowl-level hype; and to say the least, the game (and its narrative) lived up to the hype. I think it was the only time my father, never a Joe Paterno fan, ever rooted for Penn State.

4. October 16, 1993: Missouri 42, Oklahoma State 9.

And now we take a left turn. The first three games on the list are relatively well known. This one, however, makes the list for two reasons. First, it was just the second major-college football game I had ever attended (the first: Missouri 41, Oklahoma State 7 in 1991). Second, it featured what still might be the greatest catch I have ever seen. This game taught me the "You never know when something memorable might happen" lesson more than any game has since.

I don't remember a single play from this game except this one: Sometime in the second half, with Missouri already winning comfortably (they were up 28-9 at halftime after scoring all of 20 points in their five previous first halves), freshman receiver Rashetnu Jenkins went deep. The way I remember it now, he was well covered by a poor OSU defender but made a diving, one-handed catch around said defender. I have never attempted to find film of this play or make any sort of corroborative effort that might ruin my memory of it. All I know is, I left this game assuming Jenkins was going to be an All-American by the time he graduated. I probably do not need to tell you that did not happen.

5. January 2, 1996: Nebraska 62, Florida 24.

By this point, I was a junior in high school. Raised a Missouri fan in a sea of Oklahoma fans, I grew up with a healthy dislike of all things Nebraska. But in this game, that just didn't matter. Whatever Big 8 pride I had came out in droves during the Fiesta Bowl, which saw stoic Tom Osborne defeat cocky Steve Spurrier and saw Tommie Frazier rip off one of the most famous plays in college football history; he ran into a wall of Florida defenders, then ran right through the wall for a 75-yard touchdown. He broke somewhere between five and 26 tackles on the play, and his score gave the Huskers a jarring 49-18 lead.

That 1995 Nebraska team was just one of the most dominant I've ever seen. In summer 2010 at Football Outsiders, I compiled a list of the Top 100 teams of the last century based on calculations similar to those that give me the S&P+ ratings we will discuss in a future chapter. Because of a relatively weak strength of schedule and their propensity for allowing garbage-time points here and there, the 1995 Cornhuskers ranked just 47th. That alone made me question whether I should publish the countdown at all. I'm glad I did - it was a fascinating, enriching comparison of what one era calls great to what another era does - but the rankings were the perfect example of numbers being used to start a dialogue, not end it.¹¹The Top 20 of this list, by the way? 20. 1943 Notre Dame (9-1). 19. 1986 Oklahoma (11-1). 18. 2004 USC (13-0). 17. 1962 LSU (9-1-1). 16. 1952 Georgia Tech (12-0). 15. 1979 Alabama (12-0). 14. 1987 Miami (12-0). 13. 2000 Oklahoma (13-0). 12. 1971 Nebraska (13-0). 11. 1946 Notre Dame (8-0-1). 10. 1946 Army (9-0-1). 9. 1972 Oklahoma (11-1). 8. 1962 Alabama (10-1). 7. 1957 Auburn (10-0). 6. 2001 Miami (12-0). 5. 1945 Army (9-0). 4. 1944 Army (9-0). 3. 1966 Notre Dame (9-0-1). 2. 1961 Alabama (11-0). 1. 1959 Ole Miss (10-1). That a one-loss team could qualify as the greatest team ever is the most perfect representation of both college football’s oddity and a season’s small sample size. What was the late Beano Cook’s response to some of the odder results here (1959 Ole Miss, 1957 Auburn, 2000 Oklahoma) when I spoke to him about it? "Well, it’s your list." I miss Beano.

6. November 8, 1997: Nebraska 45, Missouri 38.

Welcome to life as a Missouri fan, kid.

Mizzou fans of a certain age will perpetually struggle to let their collective guard down, mostly because of what happened when they did so in the 1990s. First, you had the Fifth Down in 1990, when the officials lost track of downs in the final minute of Missouri's upset attempt against eventual national champion Colorado.¹²By the way, Colorado quarterback Charles Johnson was down before he reached across the goal line on fifth down. You can never tell me otherwise. Then, you had Mizzou's 1995 upset bid of eventual basketball national champion UCLA done in by a 4.8-second, length-of-the-court drive by Tyus Edney in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. But I experienced those from afar. The Colorado-Missouri game wasn't on television in Oklahoma, and while Tyus Edney crushed me, I was still not yet fully invested in Mizzou fandom. I was only about 95 percent or so.

This game, on the other hand? I was fully immersed. This was my fourth home game as a Mizzou student. I was in the 14th row of the student section. When Corby Jones found Eddie Brooks on a perfect play-action pass, one that you could see had worked while the pass was still in the air, for the go-ahead touchdown midway through the fourth quarter, it was my first true experience of college football joy and bedlam, hugging strangers and not being able to hear myself screaming because of all the chaos around me.

By the end of the game, with Missouri up 38-31 on the No. 1 team in the country, the 14th row was standing on about the seventh row of the bleachers. The crush was ready. It almost misfired when squatty linebacker Al Sterling nearly made a diving interception earlier in Nebraska's final drive¹³I still swear he caught it before it hit the ground, and if the game is on ESPN Classic, I make sure to look away for this play so I don’t have to be proven wrong., but it was so very ready.

I still clearly remember every millisecond of the final play of regulation. Quarterback Scott Frost threw over the middle to receiver Shevin Wiggins at the goal line; two Missouri defenders were there to bat the pass away, and it fluttered away from Wiggins. The student section surged toward the field, collectively thinking Mizzou had just won the game. Some Nebraska player behind the play dove to the ground for some reason, and the official's arms signaled touchdown. At this point I was basically in the front row, charging toward the field involuntarily (getting charged toward the field, I guess), one of the only people around me to see the official's arms in the air. A dorm mate, attacking from the northeast corner of the stadium, was the first person to reach the goal posts. Memorial Stadium went from unabashed joy to confusion and chaos and absurdity and a little bit of anger in seconds.

I assume you probably know what happened, but in case you don't: When Wiggins was knocked to the ground, with the ball falling away from him, he swung his legs up and kicked the ball back into the air. Freshman receiver Matt Davison - who would walk on to Nebraska's basketball team a couple of years later and get booed vigorously for 40 straight minutes by Missouri fans at the Big 12 tournament - dove for the ball and caught it. Wiggins later admitted he kicked the ball intentionally, which is illegal, but there was no way for officials to understand that at the time.

Once in overtime, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, of course. Nebraska scored, Missouri didn't, et cetera. We knew what was going to happen, and then it happened. We had to sit patiently until the inevitable took place, then we had to trudge back to the dorms to figure out what the hell we had just seen.

I still remember that night, too. Reality sank in. By 11:00 p.m., a group of friends and I had come together in a dorm room, and we almost literally just stared at the tiles on the floor for a couple of hours, then went our separate ways. College football is great, but college football is often just cruel. The Flea Kicker: my own Immaculate Reception.

7. November 20, 1999: Kansas State 66, Missouri 0.

There are a lot of ways for college football to break you. There is the steady build-up of hope that is finished off by a bolt of devastation, not unlike the Flea Kicker. But then there is the steady, week-to-week crumbling we sometimes get to witness in slow motion.

Missouri finished with a losing record for 13 straight years, from 1984 to 1996. In 1997-98, however, under Larry Smith, the Tigers had surged back. They went 7-5 in 1997 despite the Flea Kicker, and they went 8-4 in 1998, leading every game at halftime before eventually losing to Ohio State, Nebraska, Texas A&M and Kansas State (and trying their damnedest to do the same in the Insight.com Bowl versus Marc Bulger and West Virginia).

Each of the four losses was terribly disappointing in its own way, but no matter: Missouri is good now! So they're losing quarterback Corby Jones, running back Devin West and a host of difference-makers on both sides of the ball; recruiting has picked up! Mizzou has started to win now, and they're never going to stink again! That's all in the past!

In 1999, at a naïve 21, I actually believed this. Despite the fact that I really didn't actually have any money, I bought tickets (via student charge, of course) to every Missouri game, including the five road games. I watched as the revenge attempt against Nebraska went awry immediately, with two snaps bombed over the punter's head in the first five minutes of the game on the way to a 40-10 loss.¹⁴The poor long snapper’s name: Ben Davidson. That I can remember a long-snapper’s name 14 years later tells you he did something creatively awful.

I made the 11-hour drive to Boulder to watch Missouri fall behind against Colorado, catch up, fall behind again, catch up again, and lose in overtime, 46-39.

I watched as quarterback Kirk Farmer broke his leg after getting pushed out of bounds during Homecoming against Iowa State; I was on the hill on the north side of the stadium with my parents, so unlike most of the student section on the east side, I apparently missed witnessing him screaming, throwing up, and passing out. And I watched Missouri somewhat justifiably fall apart afterward and lose, 24-21.

I drove to Lawrence the next week and watched the Tigers get thumped, 21-0, by a really bad Kansas team.

I drove to Norman two weeks later and watched Missouri lose, 37-0, to Oklahoma. I watched a desperate Larry Smith tear the redshirt off of Justin Gage late in the fourth quarter. This was the ninth game of the season. Gage would become one of Missouri's all-time great receivers, but in 1999 he was a raw, dual-threat quarterback. He was of no help. This all came after I almost got arrested the night before the game.¹⁵I drove down to the Oklahoma game with seven friends in two cars and stayed at my parents’ house in Oklahoma City. Late that night, after being denied service at a Whataburger, we went to a 24-hour Wal-Mart in Yukon, just on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, to get … something. I have no idea what we were getting there, and it couldn’t be less important to the story. Passing the toys section, three of us stopped to grab bouncy balls from the giant display and bounced them on the ground for about three seconds when a man in a leather jacket and sweat pants told us, "You either need to buy those, or put them away and leave." We put them away and moved on to the next aisle, and he followed us. "I said leave!" We were getting kicked out of the store before we really had a chance to do anything worth getting kicked out about, and we thought the man doing the kicking was some repressed 3 a.m. Wal Mart security guard. Turns out, he was a cop. The friend in the passenger seat of my truck made sarcastic noises about flipping him off on the way out of the parking lot. I noted that this was a bad idea, being small-town Oklahoma and all. Without my knowledge, he did it anyway. The cop moseyed over to his car, called for backup, and pulled us over on the on-ramp to the interstate. After we spent about 20 minutes with our hands in the air, on our knees, behind the truck, the friend with the finger received a ticket for disorderly conduct. I got a ticket for a busted tail light; I didn’t know I had a busted tail light – I thought it was going to turn into a scene from a terrible movie ("What busted tail light?" *crash* "That busted tail light.") – but it turned out there was indeed a tiny hole in the upper left hand corner of the left light. Thirteen years later – and this is no lie, I promise – I met a woman at an MBA happy hour at Mizzou. Turned out, she was a graduate of Yukon High School. Upon finding that out, I immediately told her this story. Two years and two months later, we were married. The next week, I watched Missouri quarterbacks complete 14 of 39 passes in a 51-14 home loss to Texas A&M.

And in the coup de grace, I watched Kansas State score 28 points in the first 10 minutes in Manhattan, cruise to a 42-0 halftime lead (it could have been 70-0 if they wanted), and try their damnedest not to score anymore after going up 52-0 midway through the third quarter.

And I watched Missouri say "No really, I insist," handing them a pick six, then allowing a blocked punt for a touchdown when KSU wasn't even really going for the block.

I walked back to my truck after the game and found a parking ticket on my windshield.

The entire 1999 season was a slow-motion car crash, and I was there for every second of it. Okay, that's a lie; I was not there for the final minutes of the Kansas State game. We all have our limits.

More than anything else, this season taught me the moral value of loyalty. Endure the losses, stay on the bandwagon, and you will feel twice the reward when something good happens.¹⁶That’s a load of crap, by the way. What the 1999 season really taught me is that I have masochistic tendencies I didn’t previously know about or understand. Many sports fans do. I could have just stayed at home and held my hand to a lighter for a few hours each Saturday, but instead I chose to abuse my parents’ Conoco gas card, doing the metaphorical version of the same thing.

8. October 11, 2003: Missouri 41, Nebraska 24.

Revenge is sweet. In 1999, we just knew Missouri was going to get revenge for the Flea Kicker, but instead we watched Ben Davidson become immortalized. We also watched Matt Davison score another damn touchdown. In 2001, we just knew Missouri was going to get revenge, but instead we watched Eric Crouch avoid a sack in his own end zone, then race about 104 yards for a touchdown. But in 2003, it happened. In a driving rainstorm, Missouri scored 27 fourth-quarter points, turning a 10-point deficit into a laugher. With Nebraska leading, 24-21, Missouri lined up to attempt a field goal to tie the game. I couldn't watch, so I turned my back, only to hear my friend Seth scream, "Oh they faked it!" with a cracking voice. I turned around in time to see backup quarterback Sonny Riccio's lob falling into tight end Victor Sesay's arms in the end zone. I watched Missouri force a three-and-out, then score again, then pick off a pass and score again.

After the game, while rushing the field along with every other Mizzou fan in attendance, I grabbed Riccio while he was doing a postgame interview and screamed, "I love you SO MUCH." His response: "Thank you?"¹⁷Riccio transferred two months later. The commonly accepted reason was that he was going to be stuck behind quarterback Brad Smith on the depth chart for the rest of his career. But I knew the real reason. I made snow angels (plastic pellet angels) on the 50-yard line with a friend. I bought the poster.

9. November 24, 2007: Missouri 36, Kansas 28.

This was the most important game in the history of both the University of Missouri's football program and that of its biggest rival. Both Missouri and Kansas were having dream seasons. In 2002, they had combined to go 7-17. In 1988, 4-17-1. But heading into a matchup at Arrowhead Stadium over Thanksgiving weekend 2007, they were a combined 21-1. With LSU's loss to Arkansas the day before, the winner of this game would almost certainly be No. 1 in the BCS standings, with only a date with Oklahoma in the Big 12 title game separating them from a spot in the BCS Championship game. It had been 47 years since Missouri had spent its lone week at No. 1 in the rankings. (They had beaten Oklahoma that year, moved to 9-0 and No. 1, then lost to Kansas, of all teams, and lost the national title.) Kansas had never reached the top spot. Kansas was known mostly for basketball, Missouri for ... self-pity, I guess? Regardless, this was the one game in the series that Missouri just absolutely, positively had to win.

And they won. After a tense first few minutes, quarterback Chase Daniel did what Chase Daniel did all year. He found tight end Martin Rucker for a touchdown on fourth-and-goal late in the first quarter. He scrambled around for about a day and a half and found receiver Danario Alexander for a touchdown early in the second quarter. He completed 40 of 49 passes and helped to stake Missouri to a 28-7 lead heading into the fourth quarter. Kansas made a late charge, but in the Jayhawks' last gasp, the entire Missouri defensive line piled on top of quarterback Todd Reesing for a safety with 12 seconds left, solidifying a 36-28 win and a No. 1 ranking.

I was not at Arrowhead, by the way. I had committed to meeting family in Oklahoma for Thanksgiving long before, and while everyone involved would have probably understood if I changed plans ... I didn't want to. This was too personal a moment; I decided I didn't want to share it with anybody else. I watched in our dark basement with the laptop pulled up (to Rock M Nation, my Missouri blog, of course), fought the urge to curl into the fetal position, and called Seth when it was over.

Missouri lost the next week, of course. In the third quarter of a close game, Rucker let a ball go through his hands and into the hands of Oklahoma linebacker Curtis Lofton, setting into motion a brief domino effect from which the Tigers wouldn't recover. They lost, 38-17, then destroyed Arkansas in the Cotton Bowl and finished 12-2.

We don't all get to be Alabama fans. For the week after Arrowhead, I got to bask in the fact that Missouri won, that they were in the "Final Four," so to speak. I got to help my former roommate Andrew Lawrence, a Sports Illustrated writer, piece together feature story ideas on the off chance that SI would be making a "Congrats, your team just won the national title!" commemorative edition a few weeks later. Most of us will follow college football for all of our lives without getting to experience the feeling of actually winning a title. This was my moment to bask in the almost.

10. December 17, 2011: UL-Lafayette 32, San Diego State 30.

We finish this list with some randomness. The 2011 season was my first as a full-time college football writer for SB Nation. It was a job, complete with 60-hour work weeks and occasionally smattered with tasks I didn't really care about or enjoy (like a weekly Heisman column, for instance). But it was a job writing about college football. All fall, I felt paranoid that this was some elaborate prank, and that I would have to go back to my old job, one I liked at times but didn't love.

The 2011 season was full of "I cannot believe I get paid to write about this" moments. The New Orleans Bowl was potentially my favorite. While most were mourning the fact that we got a national title game - an Alabama-LSU rematch - that few wanted to see, some of us watched a game that reinforced all of college football's strangeness and sheer joy. San Diego State and UL-Lafayette faced off in the Superdome. For Louisiana, it was the program's greatest moment. Drifting through the Southland conference, three years in the Big West (despite being west of very little), two stays as an independent, and more than a decade as a Sun Belt also-ran, the Ragin' Cajuns had never been to a bowl game and never threatened to get noticed by the college football world. But in head coach Mark Hudspeth's first year in Lafayette, his Cajuns came out of nowhere to go 8-4 and earn their first ever bowl invitation.

Hudspeth and his team treated this minor bowl as their Super Bowl. He had them doing the Oklahoma Drill - a risky, full-contact, one-on-one tackling drill, basically - on the sidelines before the game. He dipped into every page of the playbook. The Cajuns took a 19-3 lead early in the third quarter, completely ran out of steam (there's a reason why you don't usually do the Oklahoma Drill before you have to play a real, 60-minute game), and eventually fell behind, 30-29, with 35 seconds remaining. But as time expired, kicker Brett Baer made a knuckling, wobbling, terribly unlikely 50-yard field goal, snaking it just above the crossbar and just inside the right goal post. And the team celebrated like it had won the national title. A couple of fanshots from the stands made it onto YouTube. From the first game of the year to the national title game, everything matters to somebody. What was a minor, inconsequential bowl to some was the greatest sporting moment of some Louisiana fans' lives. It was an absolute joy to watch.

So that's my list. It directly reflects where I grew up and where I went to school. I wanted to see the same lists from other college football fanatics, however; the best way to illustrate how regional college football's history is, is to look at the games that had an impact on people from different regions. So I approached a few of my favorite blogger friends - a man who goes by "Senator Blutarsky" at his blog, Get the Picture, and the duo that runs the Solid Verbal Podcast (Ty Hildenbrandt and Dan Rubenstein) - for their takes as well. Here are their lists and explanations. You'll notice almost no overlap whatsoever from list to list.

Senator Blutarsky, Georgia fan

1. November 19, 1966: Notre Dame 10, Michigan State 10

"This was the first college football game that seeped into my (then 10-year-old) conscious mind. Lots of pre-game hype, followed by lots of post-game second guessing, thus proving that the Internet and ESPN are evolutionary, not revolutionary, developments."

2. November 25, 1971: Nebraska 35, Oklahoma 31

"A game-of-the-century game that lived up to the hype and then some. It cemented one of college football's great rivalries for me, which is one reason why the collateral damage from college football's current realignment obsession saddens me so."

3. October 28, 1978: Georgia 17, Kentucky 16

"Three years of watching Virginia's football program go down the toilet had soured me on the sport as a whole. [Georgia radio announcer] Larry Munson rekindled my love in one night with a radio call that Lewis Grizzard aptly described as ‘better than being there.' Munson never did call the winning kick good. It didn't matter."

4. November 8, 1980: Georgia 26, Florida 21

"The one game here that needs no explanation."¹⁸Quick background, just in case: With Georgia’s national title season hanging in the balance, the No. 2 Bulldogs rallied to beat No. 20 Florida late in the game when quarterback Buck Belue found Lindsay Scott for a 93-yard touchdown pass on third-and-long to pull off an improbable 26-21 win. Larry Munson called it like this: "Florida in a stand-up five. They may or may not blitz. Buck back, third down on the eight. In trouble … he got a block behind him. Gotta throw on the run … complete to the 25. To the 30. Lindsay Scott 35, 40! Lindsay Scott 45, 50! 45, 40! Run, Lindsay! 25, 20, 15, 10, 5! Lindsay Scott! Lindsay Scott! Lindsay Scott!" Georgia would win the national title two months later. Run, Lindsay, Run: Senator Blutarsky’s Immaculate Reception.

5. January 1, 1981: Georgia 17, Notre Dame 10

"When it's your team winning its only national championship of your lifetime, yeah, it's gonna make the list."

6. November 1, 1997: Georgia 37, Florida 17

"While it didn't herald the next step in the program many hoped it would, this game was still the only win Georgia claimed over Steve Spurrier during his time in Gainesville. Robert Edwards' clinching touchdown marked the closest I've ever come to fainting at a game due to sheer joy."

7. November 16, 2002: Georgia 24, Auburn 21

"The game that marked the return of Georgia to SEC relevance after nearly two decades. It was kind of a big deal, in other words."

8. January 4, 2006: Texas 45, Southern Cal 42

"The high water mark for the BCS (and Texas head coach Mack Brown, too, come to think about it), a game matching the undisputed top two teams in college football that went down to the wire."

9. November 23, 2007: Arkansas 50, LSU 48

"This was the insane capper to an insane season, still my favorite college football season of all. Arkansas' Darren McFadden running a mutant version of the Wing-T ... what's not to love? Added bonus: [Arkansas head coach] Houston Nutt's post-game babbling."

10. December 1, 2012: Alabama 32, Georgia 28

"If part of being a fan is suffering through pain, then this game surely qualifies. I still haven't worked up the resolve to watch the replay, although I can't bring myself to erase it from my DVR, either."

Ty Hildenbrandt, Notre Dame fan

1. January 2, 1989: Notre Dame 34, West Virginia 21

"My earliest euphoric experience due to a college football game.  West Virginia never had a chance as Lou Holtz cemented his legacy as a great coach by winning his first national championship in the then-Sunkist Fiesta Bowl."

2. November 25, 1989: Miami 27, Notre Dame 10

"My mom thought it'd be a novel idea to arrange a trip to Miami to see this game for my eighth birthday. Consequently, it's my earliest (and only) memory of having beer bottles thrown at me for wearing a Notre Dame T-shirt. Miami's improbable third-and-44 conversion was just insult to injury."

3. January 1, 1991: Colorado 10, Notre Dame 9

"My first exposure to untimely officiating, as Rocket Ismail was robbed - robbed, I say!¹⁹Yeah, I concur. The clipping call that negated what would have been the game winner in the final minute was, at best, an illegal block that happened far behind Ismail’s return and, at worst, non-existent. Colorado’s run to the 1991 national title (well, co-title) was blessed, to say the least, by this penalty and the Fifth Down incident discussed earlier. - of a game-winning punt return in the 1991 Orange Bowl."

4. November 14, 1992: Notre Dame 17, Penn State 16

"As a Pennsylvanian, no game defined my fandom for the Irish more than the famous ‘Snow Bowl,' in which Rick Mirer hit Reggie Brooks for a game-winning two-point conversion. This dramatic victory over ‘hometown' Penn State - a school from which I would eventually graduate - cemented my rooting interests and forever labeled me as the oddball among friends and fellow alumni."

5. November 20, 1993: Boston College 41, Notre Dame 39

"A week after Notre Dame's watershed victory over Florida State, the cold-blooded foot of Boston College's David Gordon taught me the cruel reality of let-down losses and, really, life in general."²⁰Gordon’s field goal gave Boston College an improbable win and knocked No. 1 Notre Dame from atop the polls. In one of the best examples of the "It’s better to lose earlier than later" meme that dominated our poll-driven sport for a long time, Notre Dame’s loss boosted Florida State back to No. 1 in the AP poll. The one-loss Seminoles would finish the season No. 1, just ahead of the one-loss Fighting Irish who had beaten them in early November.

6. September 4, 2004: BYU 20, Notre Dame 17

"My most vivid memory of a look-ahead loss. I watched this game, with unfettered excitement and inebriation, from The Rathskellar in State College, Pennsylvania, and proceeded to spike my cell phone into a million pieces in the middle of the bar. Notre Dame came back the next week and knocked off Michigan."

7. October 15, 2005: USC 34, Notre Dame 31

"The ultimate stomach punch game. I watched in a catatonic state from the stands of Notre Dame Stadium as the ‘Bush Push'²¹USC scored the game-winning touchdown with just seconds remaining when quarterback Matt Leinart sneaked over the goal line with help from what was probably an illegal push from running back Reggie Bush. kept USC unbeaten. As history would show, this game may have been the ceiling for [Irish head coach] Charlie Weis."

8. November 7, 2009: Navy 23, Notre Dame 21

"With Notre Dame's second straight home loss to Navy, it became a near certainty that the Irish would fire Charlie Weis and, again, be looking for a new coach to shepherd their program back to greatness. Also, it was really embarrassing to be a fan, especially after losses to Pitt, UConn and Stanford soon followed."

9. September 3, 2011: South Florida 23, Notre Dame 20

"The game during which every Notre Dame fan wondered if head coach Brian Kelly would have a heart attack, get struck by lightning, or both. After months of anticipation, a sloppy, home loss to South Florida with weather delays and backbreaking turnovers kicked off a season of quarterback controversies and disappointment."

10. October 27, 2012: Notre Dame 30, Oklahoma 13

"Possibly Notre Dame's biggest win in 20 years - on the road in Norman, Oklahoma - with a freshman quarterback in the midst of an undefeated season. It was significant for the program on so many levels, and a symbolic breath of fresh air for self-loathing Irish fans around the country."

Dan Rubenstein, Oregon Fan

"Having parents who didn't go to schools with big football tradition, I wasn't born into team loyalty, so I generally grew up watching big national games and a random smattering of west coast games with my dad. This is my story."

1. January 2, 1996: Nebraska 62, Florida 24

"I was late for a parks league basketball game because my eyes were too wide open from watching both Tommie Frazier break all of the tackles and the Blackshirts²²That’s the nickname given to the Nebraska defense. It stems from the Bob Devaney era, when defenders wore black pullover jerseys in practice. completely swallow up the fun 'n gun."

2. December 5, 1998: Miami 49, UCLA 45

"At least in today's statistical terms, Cade McNown was pretty ordinary, but man, did he look great to my 15-year old eyes, which made the possibility of the local team going to the national championship kind of fun until Edgerrin James was all like, ‘Nope.'"²³UCLA was undefeated and ranked third in the BCS standings until a trip to Miami in early December. No. 2 Kansas State had lost to Texas A&M in the Big 12 title game earlier that day, and all UCLA had to do was beat Miami to get a shot at Tennessee in the national title game. Instead, James rushed 39 times for 299 yards and three touchdowns, and Miami scored three fourth-quarter touchdowns to win, 49-45. UCLA gained 670 yards but lost.

3. January 1, 1999: Wisconsin 38, UCLA 31

"I always had really good Chinese chicken salad (big ups, Abe's Deli) at an annual New Year's Day party, so the bummer (but secretly fun) experience of watching Ron Dayne run all over UCLA was made a little easier by both wonton noodles and announcer Craig James brilliantly calling the Badgers the ‘worst team to ever play in the Rose Bowl' before they dominated the Bruins."

4. September 22, 2001: Oregon 24, USC 22

"It was my first Duck game at Autzen Stadium my freshman year, which meant it was the first time I walked the footbridge from campus to the stadium and the first time I experienced the wall of Autzen sound when Joey Harrington led a comeback win against the Trojans late in the fourth to seal a win, ultimately leading me down my personal and professional college football path."

5. November 19, 2005: USC 50, Fresno State 42

"With shrugging apologies to Vince Young et al, Reggie Bush's college football thesis was the single most dynamic performance I've seen in a single game."²⁴Bush rushed 23 times for 294 yards and two scores, caught three passes for 68 yards, and threw in 151 return yards to boot.

6. January 4, 2006: Texas 41, USC 38

"I didn't really like either team going in, but I couldn't ever turn away from watching Reggie Bush, so I went west coast and had the privilege of rooting for a team that looked great, predictable, dumb, and helpless in a matter of minutes."

7. November 18, 2006: Ohio State 42, Michigan 39

"I watched this in a great, packed Palo Alto, California, bar called The Old Pro, which was split down the middle with Wolverines and Buckeyes, and I couldn't have been happier to watch Troy Smith and high level (No. 1 vs. No. 2) Big Ten football without a rooting interest other than for cool things to keep happening."

8. January 1, 2007: Boise State 43, Oklahoma 42

"I watched this game alone because one of my then-roommates was jet lagged and passed out and the other was still traveling. So nobody heard my screaming when Boise State broke out the hook-and-ladder and Statue of Liberty play."²⁵A Statue of Liberty play is when the quarterback fakes a pass while handing the ball to the running back behind his back.

9. September 8, 2007: Oregon 39, Michigan 7

"I was traveling for work and had to watch it a day late on the DVR, but the introduction to America of [new offensive coordinator] Chip Kelly and the great version of quarterback Dennis Dixon, which included both a Statue of Liberty play and fake Statue of Liberty, was the first of countless giggle sessions, both as an Oregon fan and a college football fan."

10. October 20, 2007: Oregon 55, Washington 34

"Beyond Chip Kelly realizing that Washington's defense wasn't going to stop anything on the ground (and running the same three plays all game), the sound of the Husky crowd cheering running back Jonathan Stewart getting blown up on a zone read while Dennis Dixon was 18 yards down the field running with the ball always makes me smile."

These four lists produced 40 games, and only two were listed twice: Tommie Frazier's iconic decimation of Florida, and the USC-Texas game that felt more like a Super Bowl than a lot of Super Bowls. The four of us have all obsessed over college football for the vast majority of our respective lives, and we produced 38 different games as sources of our obsessions.

**********

Because of numbers, I know just how important a fast start to a game truly is. Or how those long, satisfying, 15-play, seven-minute touchdown drives do not happen often enough to rely on them. Or how much of a difference second-and-8 can make over second-and-6 in the long run. Or how random fumble recoveries (and games that turn because of them) can be. Or how one team's offensive personality differs from others'. These are innate truths to me now; I don't need to keep a running track of a team's success rate in my head, and I don't need to calculate a team's average yards per play on first down while I'm watching. Numbers have simply given me a better intuitive feel for this game I love. They have also given me a stronger voice.²⁶They also give me a way to talk about the sport every single day of the year.

I obviously talk about numbers a lot, but they aren't what made me a college football fan, and my obsession with them has not been some sort of attempt to beat the game or pound others over the head with them. As I say many times in my pieces, if you don't like numbers, skip to the words. Hopefully some of them are worth reading. Numbers help me set better expectations, both for my team and for others, but when the game's on, the game's on.

**********

"I want them to be great people, great fathers, great husbands, great businessmen. Football is a vehicle for this."

(USA Today Images)

"I'm getting 18-year old young men and helping them grow as people. When they leave here in four or five years, they have a degree, and they have a clear picture of what they want to be in the future. They are learning to prioritize their life. I want them to be great people, great fathers, great husbands, great businessmen. Football is a vehicle for this. It builds character and reveals character. It's a tough, tough game. Every day I'm making a little bit of a difference in people's lives."

Colorado head coach Mike MacIntyre is explaining why he has dedicated his life to coaching the game of football, and why college football has drawn him in so much. An NFL assistant for five years, he returned to the college ranks as Duke's defensive coordinator in 2008, earned a promotion to head coach of San Jose State in 2010, turned a flailing program around in just three years, and was hired to do the same at Colorado following the 2012 season.

"I enjoy the college process," he says. "When I was coaching in the NFL, I got my Ph.D. in coaching - Bill Parcells [his mentor with the Dallas Cowboys], Eric Mangini [his boss for one year with the New York Jets] were great. But I missed the everyday interaction with these kids. You are mentoring kids."

Head coaches are paid quite well at the higher levels of college football. But when you get into coaching to begin with, you don't know that you're going to make it that far up the ladder. Nick Saban, a national title-winning head coach at LSU (once) and Alabama (three times), spent five years as a low-level assistant at Kent State. Texas head coach Mack Brown spent seven years as a low-level assistant, at four different schools, in the 1970s. Pete Carroll, most recently the head coach at USC and for the NFL's Seattle Seahawks, spent five years as a graduate assistant: four at the University of the Pacific and one at Arkansas.

There were no guarantees of future success and four-million-dollars-per-year contracts when these coaches got started in the business. They followed their chosen path because of the game itself.

"I didn't know it was something I was going to do when I went to college," says California head coach Sonny Dykes. "I was actually playing college baseball. I started to think about my life without football, and honestly, I got into it because I couldn't imagine my life without it. It's a strange way to make a living, but it's something I enjoy doing. If I won the lottery tomorrow, I would keep doing it."

And while it is easy to become cynical about the money involved in college football, and the way it has impacted the game as a whole,²⁷Trust me, that conversation is coming. that cynicism does not pervade the coaching ranks, especially at the mid-major level.

Ball State head coach Pete Lembo: "I have no desire to coach in the NFL. College football is the whole package, the whole organization. I love everything that goes into making Saturday happen: the recruiting process, program management, the organization of practice week. I really enjoy bringing the right people into the organization - athletes, coaches, support staff - and helping those people develop and maximize their potential, academically, socially, personally, and athletically. I love seeing assistant coaches thrive and grow. It's applying business management principles to running a football program. I enjoy a lot of the macro, too: the dealing with constituents, interactions on campus, all of the different areas you deal with."

UL-Monroe head coach Todd Berry: "It's really the opportunity to work with this age group. They're into the game, and you know it, and they're fascinated with learning the game at this age. We don't have to deal with the ego and the divas. The NFL thing's just not for me. Younger than this age is fun, too, but they're not quite as into the game as I am. This group's a lot of fun to work with. It's easy to get a really strong team mentality at this point."

Ohio head coach Frank Solich: "I love working with young men. To me, the job of a college football coach is threefold. You have to help a player maximize his goals academically, athletically, and personally. You can have an influence on college kids. I want them to have a lot of opportunities open to them when they leave here. I enjoy that part of it. Now, I know as well as anybody that you need to win football games, or someone else will be in your job. That's the nature of the business. But I see my job as much more than just that."

Wake Forest head coach Jim Grobe, who bounced around as an assistant at quite a few mid-major schools early in his career: "I wanted to play. I wish I was still playing - I'm still waiting on the NFL guys to call me! I would rather play than coach. I just wasn't good enough to play at the next level, and when I figured that out, I decided the only way I could stay in football and stay a kid was to coach. I would have been perfectly happy being a high school coach for my entire career. A colleague ended up at Emory & Henry, so I went along with him. Then another colleague ended up at Marshall, then a Marshall coach ended up getting defensive coordinator job at Air Force. It's not your plan where you're going to be or what level you'll coach at. I just knew I wanted to stay in football."

New Mexico head coach Bob Davie, who spent a decade as an ESPN color commentator after a five-year stint as the head man at Notre Dame: "I had a lot of time to reflect on this and think about it. I had been in college coaching for 25 years, and I spent 10 at ESPN. The biggest thing about it is, 365 days a year, you have a chance to compete, and you have a chance to make a difference. There are so many different facets - the fall, and the games, and then recruiting. Think about the time involved in just those two things. And then you've got player and staff development in the spring. It's such an energized environment year-round.

"I loved television, and I loved going to games. But the reality is, when the game was over, you didn't have anything to do with the outcome. You didn't have the development, the preparation, the thought process. It was kind of hollow. It's kind of a shock when you get out of coaching, and you realize that there's a whole other world going on. There's such a tunnel vision going on in coaching, and in a lot of ways that's a positive and a negative.

"Every year, the demons would take over, and I'd want to get back into it."

The origin of those "demons" could go far back, to high school or even earlier. For former Air Force head coach Fisher DeBerry, football gave him structure that didn't otherwise exist. "I was a product of a single-parent home. My mother had to work all the time. If it hadn't been for my coaches, I don't know where I would have landed.

"All I wanted to do was be around athletics," DeBerry says. He played baseball and football at Wofford College in South Carolina and saw playing time on both sides of the football field as a receiver, linebacker, and defensive back. He coached in South Carolina high schools throughout the 1960s, ended up an assistant at Wofford for two years, moved to Appalachian State as part of Jim Brakefield's staff in the 1970s, landed on Ken Hatfield's coaching staff at Air Force in 1980, took over as offensive coordinator in 1981, and landed the head coaching gig when Hatfield moved to Arkansas in 1984. From his freshman year at Wofford to his final year as Air Force's head coach, he was "around athletics" for more than 50 years.

**********

We hang around, join arms, and sing the alma mater after the game. We think we're trying to set an example for others, but really we just do it because it feels good and we don't want to leave the stadium yet. We eventually make the weary walk back uphill for liquids, brownies and some general lingering. We are hoarse, tired and dehydrated. Some have to make a two-hour drive east or west to get home.

Maybe you grew up in a large metropolitan area, where pro football is king. Maybe you attended a school that was smaller or more prestigious (and less football-inclined). Or maybe you simply grew up in an area of the country that doesn't give a damn about college football. You may like pro football more than college - plenty do - but you aren't me. When you grow up in an area obsessed with this sport, and when you take in the collegiate game day experience enough, it becomes a large portion of your identity, more than perhaps any other sport in this country. You cannot fathom another way to spend autumn Saturdays. You get nervous when friends announce they're getting married in September. Cracking open a beer at 8:00 a.m. is, on Saturdays, completely defensible. Driving 12 hours round trip for a big conference game? Not only logical, but necessary. NFL fans who say things like "Well, I don't really follow college football..." make you question both their integrity and their morals. You perhaps cannot justify some of college sports' shadier dealings, but you believe there is enough good to outweigh the bad, and it is difficult to imagine what might change that.

By Monday, I'll have pored through the box score of every game, looking for the important stories, stats and narratives. But today, I am a college football fan in the heart of Saturday's America, tired and buzzed and trying to get home. Depending on how many people left early, or how horrendous the new event staff plan for directing traffic may be, I find my destination between 15 and 75 minutes after I got in my car (with no traffic, it would take me about eight). On the drive home, I have been plotting what I will be writing and saying about the game, replaying virtually every play in my head, listening to the local post game show hosted by Former Player A and Former Coach B, charging my cell phone and trying to pull in some scores. I shower, I grab a bite to eat, and I open the laptop. It's time to start getting ready for next week's game.

**********

"It's typically at this moment when I get very sad and nostalgic about another season gone. Miss you guys. Let's do it again soon."

~ Paul Myerberg on Twitter after the 2013 BCS title game

Being a college football fan is like wearing a special members-only suit jacket (like the ones that bowl committee members were known for wearing and probably still do). When you find another one out in the real world, you just smile at them and nod.

In this way, the Internet has allowed for this club to grow. You can find like-minded individuals in seconds. And in recent years, that club has taken to Twitter, the Internet's version of a sports bar, to bond and commiserate. It is how I got to know Paul Myerberg, for instance. Author of a well-known, and excellent, college football blog called Pre-Snap Read before he was snatched up by USA Today, he and I bonded over nerdery: We had both written lengthy previews about all 120 (then 124, now 125) FBS teams through the years in the football offseason, we had compared notes, and we had chatted at length - with others, of course: Spencer Hall and Jason Kirk from SB Nation, Andy Staples and Stewart Mandel from Sports Illustrated, Holly Anderson from Grantland, Bruce Feldman and the blogger team from CBS Sports, Adam Kramer, Michael Felder, and company from Bleacher Report - over time. We have met in person just once. But when he posted the above quote, it hit me hard. I knew just how he felt.

"I got caught up working harder on college football this year than I ever had," he says. "I didn't realize until the year was over, but ... I think I'm sadder this year than I ever have been before." The more involved you get with college football, the more you grow to love it, it seems.

College football is, quite simply, about bonding. It's about players and coaches, players and players, coaches and coaches, players and fans, fans and writers, writers and writers. It is about shaking hands with somebody you haven't seen for nine months each September. It's about the weird traditions. It's about the way Twitter erupts when something amazing happens anywhere in the country. It's about hugging your old stars on the way out the door.²⁸Myerberg: "Your heart explodes when you see [Outland Award winning Texas A&M offensive lineman] Luke Joeckel writing a letter to the A&M fan base, thanking them before leaving for the pros. Reading that made me very sad." I got to experience the same thing watching Missouri receiver Jeremy Maclin choking back tears while announcing he was going pro following the 2008 season. Head coach Gary Pinkel basically had to talk him into leaving because he was desperate for a reason to stay but had nothing more to prove. It's about hoping your new stars are right around the corner. It's about making snow angels at the 50-yard line. It's about some town of 50,000 becoming the center of the universe for a few hours on a Saturday. Sure, it's about the bad things, too. And we're getting ready to talk about those. But the loyalty this sport engenders starts from a pure place. It's also a silly, irrational, ridiculous place. But it's pure. And sometimes it's beautiful.

Antonio "Tiny" Richardson's legacy as an All-SEC tackle should be judged by his status as a plug-and-play pass protector at the next level. The Tennessee junior is projected to be one of the first lineman selected in next year's NFL Draft, yet another player from the SEC's war chest of size-and-speed monsters that annually flood the first round.

He should be prepping quietly for millions in the way most offensive linemen do, but instead he's the failed foil of one superstar defensive end, Jadeveon Clowney.

Richardson saw Clowney in roughly 50 one-on-one situations when the Vols nearly upset South Carolina in 2012. He stopped him roughly 49 times, and then he didn't:

Richardson has spent 2013 wading through Clowney questions -- at SEC Media Days, after practices, and at countless other media ops -- but he doesn't do so begrudgingly. Like the rest of us, Richardson has manufactured his own Jadeveon Clowney hyperbole, except that his is far more personal than a message board campfire tale about verticals or 40 times.

"He has all the intangibles you ask for," Richardson said. "He’s the prototypical defensive end. I heard he ran a 4.46, but I’d have to see that to believe it. That’s freakish, though. His first step off the ball is freakish. He can make you get off balance."

Richardson has repeatedly told the media he watches tape of his performance against Clowney in the 2012 Tennessee vs. South Carolina game on a near-loop. Or at least weekly, he concedes when pressed.

"He's the guy I go against that I look forward to the most," Richardson said.

While Clowney's shadow has become seemingly inescapable, Richardson knows that Clowney can be beat. Richardson did it almost 50 times.

"You have to let him know that you’re there to stay," Richardson said. "For me, what I had to do was be in his ear the whole time, letting him know that, hey, I’m not going anywhere, and I’m going to bring the same intensity the whole game. That’s what I did last year, and that’s what I’m going to do this year. Except I’m going to be a year older."

But the definition of winning is slanted against offensive linemen. So Richardson has embraced his failure and added to the myth of Clowney. He's done it to serve the purpose of winning. He doesn't even mind that Clowney complimented his ability to get away with holding.

"Some of the best offensive linemen can hold and get away with it. Jonathan Ogden, Anthony Munoz, all those guys could get away with it. But sometimes you gotta stop crying and move on," Richardson says with a smile.

* * *

While he was considered an offensive master mechanic at the pro level, Kansas head coach Charlie Weis' succinct diagnosis of Clowney could pass at any casual tailgate: "My advice to everyone right now is to run to the other side.

"I don't think it's hype, what you're seeing in the media. He's the real deal."

Weis advises against an empty-backfield formation, conceding its potential plays.

"You can't spend the game in empty and ask the lineman to go one-on-one. You're asking for a butt-kicking, and that's just not giving your players a competitive chance."

As offensive coordinator of the Florida Gators in 2011, Weis schemed against Clowney once, and the freshman finished with one tackle for a loss. Looking back, Weis emphasizes that a single elite pass-rushing end is only one half of an unsolvable problem.

"The critical factor isn't how good he is, it's whether or not he's the only one you have to worry about," he said. "The one year I saw him he was the second-best pass rusher on the field. What they did was line up 7 [Clowney] and 9 [former Gamecocks defensive end Melvin Ingram] right next to each other, and you couldn't assign enough protection to that end. As the game would go on, they would move one to the other side to take away help on both of them."

While the freshman was a statistical non-factor against the Gators, Ingram finished with four tackles (two for a loss), including one sack of quarterback John Brantley in the third quarter of a 17-12 Carolina win.

Here's an example against Clemson in 2011: Clowney (outside) and Ingram (inside) are paired on the left. Jadeveon draws the double team when the the running back shifts to help the left tackle before flaring out, leaving Ingram in a one-on-one on the way to quarterback Tajh Boyd:

"When I was in the NFL, you'd look at the Colts and how Dwight Freeney was one of the best pass rushers in the game," Weis said. "One of the reasons why is because you had [Robert] Mathis on the other side. If you slid protection over to Freeney, Mathis would kill you. My first year in the league, I'm working on defense and we've got Lawrence Taylor rushing one side and Carl Banks is rushing another. As good as LT was, Banks helped make it work."

While the Gamecocks have lost all their linebackers who had more than five tackles last year, defensive end Chaz Sutton (seven tackles for loss, 25 tackles in 2012) and defensive tackle Kelcy Quarles (eight tackles for loss, 38 tackles) return. With that much returning experience up front, Weis advises keeping a loaded backfield.

"You can chip [with running backs] on two different guys, but now you're only free-releasing three [receivers] into the play," he said. "That's taking away the effectiveness of your passing game."

Even then, two sets of double teams won't guarantee a clean pocket for the quarterback. And Weis has a warning for read-option proponents.

"With a guy like that, he’s athletic enough to take the back and the quarterback," he said. "Only the truly exceptional ones can do that. Hit you with a flat stance, and if you go to the back, take him, but still also be able to get to the quarterback."

* * *

2013 season preview

(USA Today Images)

• Comprehensive previews of every FBS team
• Why we love college football
• Predictions for every conference
• Complete preseason bowl projections
• The most entertaining games of the season
• The worst wedding weekends this fall
• Preseason All-American teams
• Who replaced the top 50 NFL Draft picks?
• More South Carolina: Visit our Gamecocks blog

The psychology of facing Clowney seeps into the coaches' meeting room. To ignore the mental hurdle of his media profile would be to do your offensive linemen and quarterbacks a great disservice.

At least 12 coaching staffs will take their turns demystifying the man, trying to instill some sense of faith into their inferior, by comparison, players. Walt Wells is the offensive coordinator and offensive line coach for South Florida, part of new head coach Willie Taggart's staff that moved from Western Kentucky in the offseason. Taggart's Hilltopers routinely faced national title caliber teams in pay-off non-conference games, including two No. 1's (2011 LSU and 2012 Alabama) in recent seasons.

"When we were at Western, we always said that playing against guys with more accolades made you a better football player," Wells said. "You always played against a really good guy in high school, that one guy who went on to play at a major university. You have to look at it like that, that it's just that one guy from high school you never stopped hearing about. This is a big opportunity for you."

USF under Taggart will employ a traditional power offense that comes straight from the Harbaugh tree: big running backs, big linemen and crafty tight ends working in a series of shifts and players in motion pre-snap to confuse defenses into missing assignments. There's no search for open space, a la the spread, or any reading off a defensive end in this offense. So the assumption might be that if any philosophy dictates bucking up and going head-on after a talent like Clowney, it's here.

Not necessarily.

"To me, you would try and create extra gaps and run away from him," Wells said. "It depends on where they'll use him at, and that's where our shifts and motions come into play. In the running game, it's easier to find out where he's playing certain formations. Then you line up like that, then shift and run away from it, or use play-action. Line up to find out where he's at, then kill the play and go away from him."

Power is sometimes considered a simplistic approach, but the pre-snap shifts in the USF offense are designed to confuse would-be blitzers as to where their gaps are. Like a spread offense, a simple base set of plays can be called ad nauseam in the power, with variations coming only in where the players line up. But the wrinkle before the snap adds the dilemma of when.

"Anybody of that caliber, even they're going to make some mistakes. It's about taking advantage when that happens. You have to heighten your awareness on your technique and your abilities and try and challenge him every play."

"You better respect him, but you don't have to fear him," Wells said.

* * *

So what if it was possible to run an offense that didn't give up sacks, thereby voiding the most dangerous facet of Clowney's game?

Middle Tennessee tied for third in the nation in sacks allowed in 2012, giving up only eight in 12 games. Clowney had four and a half in a single game at Clemson. In the Football Outsiders adjusted sack ranking, MTSU ranked eighth nationally.

It's a system, explained by offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner, that's predicated on up-tempo pace, a variety of cadences before the ball is snapped, and quick throws to the perimeter, sometimes specifically to change the hash for the next play and exhaust bigger defensive players early by running laterally.

"We want to get the ball out quick, in space, to a playmaker," Faulkner said. "We'll throw a 5-yard ball and hope that it goes 15 yards if a guy misses a tackle. We recruit guys who can make one guy miss, and you'll see it all the time with us: We'll throw a 2-yard crossing route that turns into a 15-yard gain."

Faulkner's armchair scheme is similar to Weis' and Wells': Have backs stay in and chip, or slide the protection to Clowney's side of the line for an extra blocker. There's even a new trend of bluffing a blocker at a defensive end to confuse assignments (a technique Faulkner notes that was made popular by the San Francisco 49ers last season).

But MTSU's biggest and most unique advantage is in seconds. The average passing play in its offense is executed long before anyone, even Clowney, could get to the passer.

"I'd say on average last season, there's probably only five or six called plays a game that could result in a sack," Faulkner said.

MTSU uses a quick-release, hurry-up attack to both combat elite opposing athletes but also to suit what's available for the Blue Raiders in recruiting. As is the case with many sub-BCS programs, smaller available recruits put the emphasis on athleticism and timing.

"Against a BCS team like Georgia Tech [whom the Blue Raiders beat] last season, I think we only had four true dropback passes that relied on protection. Everything else was playing at a high tempo, changing the cadence to make them show what they were doing, and then get the ball out quick to win leverage."

There are drawbacks to Middle's quick-draw passes, namely the ability to draw out longer downfield plays. Faulkner said that against "any elite talent" like Clowney, the emphasis has to be on preventing the disparity of one-on-one matchups that could create failure.

"We'll give up things to make sure we get what we want, and what we want most to is take care of the quarterback and get the ball out of his hands," he said.

* * *

A funny thing happened between Alabama's 9-6 loss to LSU in November 2011 and the Tide's 21-0 domination of the Tigers in the national title game that January: a homecoming game against FCS power Georgia Southern in Tuscaloosa. The Eagles of Statesboro are a triple-option offense in the Paul Johnson family. Alabama won 45-21, but in one half of football, GSU scored two more touchdowns on offense than LSU did in eight quarters.

More importantly, it's been suggested in coaching circles that Alabama learned something from GSU. After LSU leaned on traditional option runs to gain 148 yards and a 3.6 yards per attempt average in the 9-6 win, it was held to 39 total rushing yards in the national title. The Eagles' triple option yielded 302 rushing yards against the Tide, and it provided a tutorial on option mechanics.

Southern's triple option adds a crucial element that complicates defensive line assignments: an extra read. Whereas the read option usually means reading a defensive end and then keeping the ball or handing to a rusher who is headed either to the perimeter or inside, in the triple option a quarterback has backs headed in multiple ways.

"I think that's some of what you saw in the [2011] National Championship game," Georgia Southern offensive coordinator Brent Davis said. "We're multiple in the options we run, instead of a team that just runs to the perimeter. When you have the option of going to the fullback inside, it slows a defense down a little bit. We like to work inside to outside."

So what does this have to do with Clowney? Two things. First, a menu of nearly perpetual run calls means that GSU almost always throws out of play-action and does so out of formations identical to runs the defense has already seen (sometimes on the previous play).

"Our protection looks like run, so it’s a run read for a DE and everyone up front. That means they’re trying to play off as a run block instead of getting to the edge," Davis said.

Second, that potential inside option of the fullback, be it a handoff or pitch, complicates the rare outright passing down.

"Against a more conventional offense, you'll see the ends line up wider in obvious passing situations. But because we have the threat of the fullback in a triple option, they have to stay inside to account for that, as well. Having the fullback inside helps tremendously."

A tighter break off the ball can limit even elite ends from being able to execute their technique, be it a bull, swim or whatever superhuman power move Clowney exudes. And let's not forget the simple math of opportunity. Against Alabama, GSU was 1-of-7 passing for the entire game. Seven total pass attempts makes double-digit sacks hard to come by. Also, that one completion was a 39-yard touchdown pass.

Against triple-option Navy in 2011, a freshman Clowney was held to only three tackles and was routinely out of position against the run. South Carolina escaped with a 24-21 win. In this clip, YouTube user BigPlayBreakdown contrasts the effect of Clowney making the right read and the wrong one:

"Neutralize him. You don't have to block him. The fact [Clowney] is an amazing athlete shouldn't make him any tougher to read," Davis said.

* * *

University of Louisiana at Monroe's Todd Berry is working to rebrand a doormat program with the luster of an SEC upset. Granted, the Arkansas team the Warhawks knocked off in Little Rock last season had nothing in the way of Clowney's ability on the edge, but Berry's entire offensive philosophy at little ULM translates to any SEC staff preparing for Clowney.

"Read him. One of the reasons why I got into the spread offense is because I was here at ULM in '04 and '05 and we were playing Auburn and LSU, and my little tackles that were freshmen couldn't block those ends," Berry said. "So I had to take those ends out the game. Start reading them."

Berry preaches a never-ending succession of looks before the snap, similar to the shift/motion changes in the power offense but constant and almost never repeated. The idea is that even Clowney can't overcome a seemingly brand new look in protection schemes on each and every play.

"If you can't slow him down physically, which is going to be hard to do, you've got to slow him down mentally. Anyone can be challenged by seeing lots of things. And so all of a sudden you're singled, you're doubled, you're reading him, you're bringing a guy from the backside, you're bringing a guy from the outside in. You want them to stop and have to think, 'Who is blocking me on this snap?' Because that slows them down. They have to play the block," Berry said.

"If you're just going to line a player up in front of him and say OK, he's blocking you? You better have a guy just like Clowney, and there's not many of those guys out there."

* * *

it's unanimous in film rooms around the league that the beast is evolving. Quickly.

Getty Images

According to a current assistant coach for an SEC team scheduled to play Clowney this season, it's unanimous in film rooms around the league that the beast is evolving. Quickly.

"Last year was the biggest difference, I thought," the assistant said. "He became very disciplined in his keys, what the offense was telling him when the ball was snapped. As a freshman, if you watched him he was just a freak in general. His specialty was up-the-field pass rushing and all that stuff, and he was susceptible to getting trapped and having guys run up underneath him. In the zone read, he was getting read."

Because of his freak status, Clowney's biggest growth hasn't been a refining of pass-rush technique. That's basically perfect, according to coaches, and has been since he was a freshman. Instead, the improvement has been adjusting to play-action passes by becoming a better defender against the run. It's also why the SEC assistant suggests options might not be as effective this season against Clowney.

"He became a more complete lineman in terms of his ability to read and react and stay disciplined without losing that edge presence that makes a great pass rusher. That's where a defensive end like him differentiates himself from others in that position. That's where he's really made himself some money next year."

With a working game knowledge of Clowney, the assistant offered a rough game plan against South Carolina's defense.

• "In terms of players, I think all that psychology stuff is overblown. You know who he is. I don't need to remind you who you're playing against."
• "From a schematic standpoint, you probably want to to put a tight end over the top of him, even if the tight end's going to release. That way the tight end might be able to maneuver him outside before he can start [to pass rush]."
• "If the feeling is that the protection is outmanned no matter what, hesitation is the only equalizer. Remember the shell game? Where's the ball at? You have to go with a lot of misdirection, orbit motions, fake reverses, play-action passes, and all off your normal looks to cause him to think more and not play as fast."
• "Don't go right at him running it. There are guys, elite defensive ends I've seen in the past, that didn't like it if you ran right at them. They preferred to be in backside pursuit to get speed and make the big play. Not him. It doesn't bother him."
• "Take a running back and then a tight end or h-back and chip. See how he deals with getting chipped early on, but change up who's chipping him. He'll learn."
• "Watch him on play-action closely. If we play a hardball play-action and the OL is giving him a run read, it still takes him that much more of a second to react to the pass."
• "Above all else, avoid third and 15 at all costs, because at that point, you can forget about stopping his edge rush. It's all assholes and elbows then."

The plan seems to incorporate the suggestions from what other coaches said. It's reasonable to believe that for all the variety and nuance across college football, there's a universal narrative on Jadeveon Clowney: Do what you can to move away from his direction, prepare to sacrifice something in the backfield and accept the hype.

"Hey," the SEC assistant coach adds, "all this stuff sounds good and great, but there's some players that just transcend all that shit. And this son of a bitch, he's pretty good right now."

Usain Bolt took six strides and then ripped his singlet off over his head. It dropped to the ground, a crumpled pile of yellow fabric on the midnight blue track. Then he shouted, his mouth open wide, his body bounding up and down into the air, as if the energy pulsing through him was too much to contain. The crowd - 30,000 strong - shouted along with him, in shared disbelief.

Moments before, as he lowered his sinewy body into the starting blocks, television announcers told the world that only the headwind that blew through the night could stop him from "running one of the best times in history."

It was not an unreasonable claim. Prior to the race, Bolt, the world record holder in the event since 2008, had run two blistering heats in the men's 100-meter trials, effortlessly overtaking his opponents, even slowing his pace over the final 30 meters and still winning, defiantly. But now, the announcer said something else.

"Look at his face," he said. "He knows he's just committed the biggest mistake of his career."

That was two years ago, at the biennial International Association of Athletics Federations World Championships in South Korea. Bolt, seemingly unmovable at the top of the sprinting world, had fallen before the IAAF's newly instituted rule that a single false start meant automatic disqualification.

Bolt walked away from the track, but not out of sight of the cameras. The sprinters returned to the starting blocks and settled into place. This time, they waited for the gunshot to ring out. In the end Bolt's fellow countryman, Yohan Blake, won the gold and claimed the world title.

Bolt sat with his back up against a wall, his head propped up in his hands, his eyes sunken and deflated. The icon, the legend, the savior of the sport, had finally stumbled, tripped up by a rule.

This August, Bolt and 43 others from Jamaica's elite track and field corps traveled to Moscow to compete at the 2013 World Championships. Blake did not join him due to injury. Veronica Campbell Brown, who won gold in South Korea in the 100 meter and silver in the 200 meter, and Olympic gold medalists Asafa Powell and Sherone Simpson also didn't make the trip. Their reasons were more troubling. The trio, along with two other members of Jamaica's team, all tested positive for banned substances.

The story had seemed too good to be true, a tiny Caribbean island, home to less than three million people, churning out the fastest athletes in the world. And when the team first began to arrive in Moscow on Aug. 1, they all knew that their reputations, justly or not, were now on the line. Maybe the drugs explained it, maybe the accusations were right.

In light of the doping scandal, the pressure for Bolt, already immense, grew even more staggering. It was now up to him to take the stage and make things right again.

***

Back on the island, as the team traveled to Moscow, it's 100 degrees outside Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay - 116 according to the heat index, which factors in the humidity. In the distance, the horizon ripples under the weight of the heat. A swarm of drivers-for-hire rush the airport's exits, fighting for the attention of tourists and idling taxis fill the parking lot.

Just beyond the airport are a Harley Davidson shop and a few American chain stores. Past that, there's a roundabout that shoots outgoing traffic into the countryside. There are a few golf courses, giant swathes of clear-cut land with hard brown grass, but not a single golfer in sight. Resorts line the north side of the road, their ocean front facades only visible above the concrete fences and steel gates that keep them enclosed and protected.

On the south side is the Jamaica the guidebooks ignore, a mix of homes, mostly concrete with patchwork tin roofs, and small shops. Every third or fourth building appears to be abandoned, or burned out and unliveable, or in some other critical state of decay and neglect.

Merchants sit along the roadside behind wooden stables stacked with sugarloaf pineapples. Others wander through the traffic when it comes to a stop, holding out stems of bright green grapes. Police stand on the shoulder, watching the traffic pass, dressed in navy blue fatigues, with black bulletproof vests, high boots and heavy looking automatic weapons strapped across their chest.

There are laws on the road, of course, but no one seems to obey them. In a 50-kilometers per hour zone, the traffic moves at twice that speed. Cars zip by, over solid median lines and oncoming traffic casually pulls onto the shoulder to avoid head-on collisions. No one seems bothered, save for a large American tourist seated at the front of a taxicab, who, after a series of tight turns at high speeds, vomits all over the van's gray vinyl flooring. The vehicle pulls into a bar called the Coconut Tree where the drink special of the day is called the Dirty Banana and costs three American dollars. As the driver splashes buckets of water into the van, plumes of white smoke rise on the horizon from burning piles of rubbish. Goats stalk the roadside grass.

This is not the Jamaica one is supposed to see, what Jamaica wants you to see.  Jamaica wants you to see Usain Bolt.

His image is everywhere, from the moment one leaves the jetway. It's on the front page of newspapers and on magazine racks, on advertisements and posters, on T-shirts and baseball caps. And now, in the days before the World Championships, the headlines make their case - once Bolt runs, the doping scandal will be forgotten and everything will be all right again, as best as it can be.

Up the road from the Coconut Tree, there's a billboard for Digicel, a mobile telecommunications company that operates in 31 markets across the Caribbean and Central America. On it is a photograph of Bolt's back, taken from behind.  His arms are outstretched, forming a straight line. The caption reads "Living Legend." He is all that and more, simultaneously not just the face of Jamaica, but its heart, soul and, increasingly, its hope for the future - both symbolic and tangible.

Bolt, at 26 years old, made more than $20 million last year, almost all of which came from endorsements. In its annual ranking of the most marketable athletes in the world, British magazine SportsPro placed Bolt, the only Jamaican on the list, at the top of the pile, even ahead of LeBron James.

Across from the billboard, two boys run barefoot across brown dirt, racing each other down the street. They run 50 meters, then stop, turn around, and run back. They shout and laugh afterwards and then do it again. The country is captivated by sprinting, mesmerized by the transformative power of human athleticism and speed. Athletes like Bolt, whether they are equipped for it or not, are whisked into the spotlight, role models of a developing nation. Bolt and sprinting are transcendent - in sport, there is promise.

This northwest corner of the island is known as Trelawny Parish, home to slightly more than 70,000 residents. It relies, as most of the country does, on tourism, fishing, agriculture and manufacturing. It has also yielded one of the highest concentrations of track and field stars in the world. In less than three decades athletes from the area have captured 25 Olympic medals, nine of them gold.

Ben Johnson, the discredited world record holder, was the first Olympic medalist from Trelawny. After moving to Ontario at 15, he ran for Canada, setting consecutive 100-meter records in 1987 and 1988 only to have them rescinded a year later. Bolt, also from the parish, has, of course, reclaimed the 100-meter title since, and set three consecutive world record times along the way. Veronica Campbell Brown, a seven-time Olympic medalist is also from the area. As is Michael Frater, a member of the men's 4 x 100-meter relay team that set back-to-back world records at the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, and Shelly-Ann Fraser Pryce, who, at 21 years old, was the first woman from the Caribbean to win Olympic gold in the women's 100-meter race. There are many others who tried to capture the world's attention with a few seconds of breathtaking speed, only to lose by inches.

Trelawny is mountainous, almost impenetrable, featuring heavily forested, steep-sided hollows. Escaped slaves known as Maroons once built entire communities here tucked away in the hills, out of the reach of encroaching British and Spanish colonialists. Bolt, the son of a coffee laborer, has attributed his speed and mental endurance to his early days in Trelawny, where he spent his days running up and down the mountainsides.

Here, in Trelawny, and the rest of the country, media coverage of the World Championships will be constant, its presence felt everywhere. At the same time, away from the world's gaze, and not far from Bolt's billboard, the bodies of two young children will be found, victims of a murder-suicide. Back in Kingston, the capital city, two men will be taken into custody when the body of Father Charles Brown, a retired 71-year-old priest, is found decomposing near a back road off the Mandela Highway. In the next week, more murders will be reported, raising concerns not only about the violence, but also for the impact on tourism and the economic cost. Jamaica, already facing crippling debt, cannot afford to lose business. Its economy, in effect, has not grown by any substantial margin in more than 30 years, and this summer, the International Monetary Fund loaned the island $1 billion to aid in debt payment.

There is poverty, violence, hopelessness and distrust almost everywhere, but when Bolt or one of his teammates is on the track, there is a glimpse of a different Jamaica, one the country hopes to project to the world. The Jamaican sprinters are relaxed, jovial, unconcerned and confident. They tease each other and their opponents and play up to the crowd. They are charismatic, and the track, in many ways, is their stage. But beneath that surface and beyond the playful antics, back home the fight for a better life wages on. In some ways, the flag they wear on their chest is also the most powerful opponent they face.

***

"Anywhere there is people in Jamaica, there is a church," says Frank Watson, a local driver in St. Ann, a neighboring parish. He weaves an aged gray Toyota Camry through back roads of the north coast, where the tourists visit.

Religion is deeply embedded in the Jamaican culture, a measure, perhaps, of the desire to escape the restrictions of mortality for something more, yet even God, it seems, cannot provide sanctuary for everyone. Watson drives past a Seventh-Day Adventist church, its concrete walls painted yellow and its blue tin roof rusting along the edges. A week earlier, in Kingston, a man was gunned down at the altar of the Church of God of Prophecy while a crowd was gathered inside. A 6-year-old girl, a bystander, was also shot in the attack.

"Religion is very big here," Watson says, "just like track and field." The sprinting tradition is so rich in Jamaica, as ubiquitous and ever-present as church steeples, that it seems as if nearly everyone is only one person removed from a sprinting royalty - someone who either knows Bolt, or trained with Campbell Brown, or was coached by the island's most celebrated teachers, Stephen Francis or Glen Mills.

Watson's own son once trained with Asafa Powell and under the tutelage of Francis. His abilities earned him a college scholarship in North Carolina, where he stayed. He works for Pepsi now, his sprinting days long behind him.

"He was good, he just didn't fall in the top line," his father says. "But he still got the opportunity to get to America, to go to college, to have a good life."

The car winds down the dirt roads and cyclists ride by on old bikes with frames that are too small and force their knees up into their chests as they pedal. They pass by with bags filled with fruit and slung over their shoulders and threads of rope dangling with fish, the sun reflecting off their scales. Away from the resorts, where sugar plantations, and alumina and bauxite mines propel the sputtering economy, life is lived day-to-day. Yet economic growth is thwarted by crime, corruption and one of the highest murder rates in the world. On one corner two locals barter, trading fish for a bottle of overproof rum.

In contrast, the economics of sprinting are booming. At the World Championships in Moscow, more than $7 million in prize money will be handed out. An individual gold medal nets $60,000 and even a last-place finish in the finals still delivers a  $4,000 guarantee, a significant sum on the island. Such financial incentives are driving more and more Jamaicans into the sport. There is a reason to run, for just as the church offers salvation to the faithful, the finish line offers opportunity, stability, and the possibility of a more comfortable and secure future. But it's not guaranteed. The shelf life of a sprinter is short, success and failure measured by split seconds. Speed fades, and for many, when it does, so does their chance for a better life.

***

In the days leading up to the start of the World Championships, the local media in Jamaica has decided that Bolt has to win, and win in dominant fashion, to take the spotlight away from the doping accusations. Anything less will be failure.

The men's 100-meter trials begin on Day One and in the first race, Jamaica's Kemar Bailey-Cole leads the field with a time of 10.02. In Heat Two, Nesta Carter, the second Jamaican on the track, wins with a time of 10.17. It's not until Heat Seven, the last of the day, that Bolt arrives. He's light and animated, but his pre-race antics are subdued.

Those who have watched Bolt perform over the years know that his races, which themselves usually end in a matter of seconds, are a spectacle that stretches far beyond that. He often mugs for the camera in the starting blocks, even antagonizes his opponents with his showmanship, drawing energy from the crowd, and vice versa.

Today, however, things are different. Bolt is serious, perhaps saving his energy for a later performance. He gives a quick salute to the crowd and then waits in lane three. All eight men lower their bodies into the starting blocks and wait for the gun to fire - except for the sprinter to Bolt's immediate right, Kemar Hyman of the Cayman Islands. He lurches forward pre-emptively. Beside him, Bolt jumps up and takes a few strides before realizing it's a false start. He's made that mistake before. Hyman's race is over.

When Bolt settles back into the blocks, the pressure feels more palpable, yet he seems even less affected. The gun fires, and the men blast from the blocks in unison. Bolt, running with his body almost perfectly vertical and with the effortlessness of someone on a neighborhood jog, overtakes everyone by the 60-meter mark. He cruises to a first-place finish, crossing the finish line in 10.07 seconds.

Afterwards he tells reporters that he was "really looking forward for this time to come" and that the false start didn't affect him, that he had learned from that mistake two years before. Back home, in Jamaica, the island celebrates, and for a brief moment, the air feels a little lighter.

***

The University of Technology, in downtown Kingston, offer more than 100 programs in a variety of fields, but refers to itself as the home of world-class athletes. Some of the finest sprinters in the country have studied at UTECH, or, at the very least, trained at its facilities. From the road leading to the main entrance, one can see two Burger King logos stamped prominently on either side of the passageway. Beside that, there is a large billboard calling for an end to human trafficking.

The Department of Sport is on the back corner of the campus and on this day the auditorium's heavy steel doors are propped open with rocks in the 110-degree heat. Inside, summer students sit at wooden desks inside, taking their final exam. On the second floor of the building, Dennis Johnson, the school's first director of sport, is in a staff meeting. His picture is framed above the doorway, his smile wide and knowing. The sports program at UTECH was once only a vision of his and over the last four decades, he has seen it through. At age 74, he shows few signs of slowing down.

In 1961, a feature about San Jose State College track and field coach Bud Winter appeared in Sports Illustrated. Winter was a revolutionary in the sport, and is regarded by many as the greatest sprinting coach of all time. Over a 39-year coaching career at San Jose State, he produced 102 All-Americans, 27 who went on to become Olympians. He was a soft-spoken man, but persuasive, and his students responded to his often inventive approach. When he was not searching for a way to improve the physical mechanics of his sprinters, he was working on their mental preparation, either scientifically, or according to the wisdom that comes with age, experience and a desire for innovation.

One of the students studying under Winter at the time was Johnson, who the magazine proclaimed, "may soon break the world record." They weren't far off. Officially, Johnson equalled the world record of 9.3 seconds, set by Mel Patton, on three separate occasions, but the record should have been his alone.  At the time, though, differences were registered in tenths of a second, not the hundredths used today.

Johnson was a schoolboy sprinting sensation in Jamaica and was widely recruited by the best American collegiate programs, but he went to San Jose because of Winter and his approach to coaching. He connected with the coach and became his protégé. Winter emphasized the importance of relaxation, both physical and mental, as a key to sprinting success, and Johnson, who made two Olympic teams, adopted Winter's philosophy.

Johnson's decision to attend San Jose State was, in effect, and unknowingly, one of the earliest and most important moments in shaping Jamaica into a world sprinting power. After his college career Johnson returned to the island and began laying the foundation for what would eventually become the sports program at UTECH. Before, Jamaicans had to leave the island to receive world-class instruction, and their raw talent was sometimes wasted, the opportunity coming too late.  Now they could stay, and Johnson's program at UTECH inspired pride within the Jamaican sprinting community and gave it new direction and sense of purpose.

The school operates as a mini-farm system, feeding athletes into running programs in the United States. The students spend their first two years of the four-year program training and competing on the island and then, if all goes according to plan, their final two years on scholarship in the U.S., competing at an American school.

Bolt has come through his doors, and so have Powell, and Shelly-Ann Fraser and Campbell Brown. The school has helped countless others who, while never reaching the upper echelon of the sport, still won scholarships to attend college in the U.S.

Three cardboard signs are taped to the back wall in the office of Lawrence Garriques, Johnson's much younger colleague and friend, a lecturer in the Caribbean School of Sport Science. The signs read dream,believe, and create in rainbow-colored text. Johnson reclines in a leather-backed chair directly beneath them as Garriques works at his computer.

Johnson is upset. There are the recent drug accusations that have harmed the reputation of his program and of his sprinters, and there are fewer colleges seeking Jamaican talent. "The United States are killing off their programs," he sighs, pushing his weight further back into the chair. "People are staying here now. They have nowhere else to go."

This may not be an entirely bad thing. After all, UTECH has produced 11 Olympic medalists. In 2008, at the Beijing Summer Olympics, UTECH athletes made up nearly a quarter of Jamaica's team. But for the athletes that are not elite, whose skills won't carry them to the world stage, the opportunity to gain a U.S. scholarship is vital. "I don't know why the demand is slowing," he says. "Maybe they want to focus on other sports. I don't know."

He staunchly defends the recently accused sprinters, saying that it seems it's more of an attack of the program, of Jamaica, than anything else. That others are jealous of their success.

He says there is only one athlete who he knows took hard drugs, Steve Mullings, who trained in the same U.S.-based camp as Tyson Gay, the American sprinter who also tested positive for a banned substance leading up to the World Championships. In fact, most of the notable Jamaican sprinters who have recently tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs have trained in the United States.

Mullings's mandated blood tests revealed Furosemide, a masking agent. He was tested while at home, after running in the Jamaican national trials. Three months later, the Jamaican Anti-Doping Disciplinary Panel banned him for life. The vote was unanimous.

"The history of drug use in Jamaica is very little" Johnson says. "And most of those who were caught weren't the good ones.

"I'm a little hurt right now because of the drug scandal, because it looks like we aren't really working. But what we've done here at UTECH is not a secret, we've been at it for a quite a long time, but, like anything else, the rain must fall.

"It's been blown up in the media because we're at the top, the rest of the world thinks it's presumptuous of this college to produce more top sprinters than any other country in the world, including the United States." Johnson adds that all the testing that was done on the recently accused sprinters, the tests that resulted in their suspensions, was done at home, in Jamaica.

"We have nothing to hide."

Johnson knows about scandal, and its costs. His cousin is Ben Johnson, who, for a short time, was the fastest man in the world. But in aftermath of his 1988 Olympic gold medal performance, he tested positive for Stanozolol, an anabolic steroid. He later admitted to having used steroids the year before and was also stripped of his World Championship medal. When the news broke back home that he had tested positive for steroids, Dennis said the reaction was strong and adverse.

"He was disgraced," he says, lifting his glass to his mouth. "He was totally disgraced." He chews on an ice cube, his jaw clenched, and stares through the window, looking out at the outdoor track on the other side of the building. The field's markings are burnt into the ground, the grass grows in patches between dark soil. Two students playfully wrestle each other in between sprints.

"We're proud to get a small area like Jamaica to conquer the world," he continues. "Even to do that for one day would be an accomplishment. A Texas ranch is bigger than this whole damn place."

***

Running, by its very nature, is symbolic of freedom and in Jamaica that connection is evident everywhere.  When the island achieved independence from Britain in 1962, they installed the country's first-ever year-round running track. In 2002, in the heart of New Kingston, Emancipation Park first opened, seven acres of open lawns and trees, framed by a running track. Bolt, who now lives in the city, has said it is one of his favorite places to run, not only because of what it represents but also because of his connection to Kingston, where at 15 years old he won one of his most important gold medals.

He was competing at Champs, the first organized athletic event in the country, with roots dating back to 1904. Held each year in Kingston the week before Easter, the four-day meet brings together the best young track talent in the country, with high school students competing in the name of their schools.

Many of the country's finest sprinters have been discovered at Champs, including Bolt. More than 30,000 people pack the National Stadium for the meet, where young athletes not only receive their first taste of world-class competition, but the nerves and expectations that come with it.

For many young athletes, Champs is an opportunity to attract the attention of scouts and coaches on the island. They learn how to relax under pressure, a skill that becomes invaluable the further you progress in track and field.

"We've always taught relaxation exercises," Johnson says, while highlighting the importance of the meet in developing young sprinters. He shakes his head back and forth vigorously, a movement that loosens the muscles in the face, and one that he teaches his students. His cheeks bounce as he moves, his tongue extended. "People used to think we were idiots."

"I would think so too," Garriques chimes in, looking away from his computer long enough to see Johnson bobbing his head up and down and from side to side.

Johnson begins to laugh, a booming laugh that raises his mouth into a smile, his white mustache curling up at the sides. "Anything you can do to relax is good. The thing is - our philosophy - it's a blend of knowledge, of science, of learning and reading, and then common sense. But commons sense is not so common."

Like young athletes everywhere, Jamaica's next generation of sprinters look up to the likes of Bolt and Blake, the island's celebrated sons. But they do not always see everything they should.

Cush Lewis, executive director of Youth Opportunities Unlimited, a Jamaican charitable organization, works with troubled youth in Jamaica and wants more from Bolt and the other stars. Every day, he sees the pressures and the obstacles and the temptations that come with wanting something more - how bad luck or bad choices, or some combination of them both, can change the course of a life, or even make it disappear.

"Our sprinters are celebrities, but I would caution using the term ‘role models'," he says. "Role models speak to not just showing people there's a lot of avenues to make money, but also speak to morals and values.

With the magnitude of their celebrity and the high-profile stage on which they perform, he thinks athletes like Bolt can help influence a shift in the direction of the country. He believes that, when properly utilized, sprinting and athletics can be a vehicle for change.

"Our athletes, particularly those on the international scene, they should live by a certain standard to bring out a positive behavior change in our children. Male athletes should exemplify what we believe a man should be, which is responsible and honest. Our male population is falling way behind in terms of values and morals in relation to our females.

"From my vantage point, I don't see much changing in how sport positively impacts our youth culture, primarily because there has yet to be a significant movement demanding more of our athletes. It's my opinion that those who have great power also have great responsibility, especially in developing nation like Jamaica, where we have serious issues and a very decisive political situation." His voice grows louder and stronger as he speaks, driven by the weight of working every day with Jamaican adolescents who may not ever run 100-meters in world record time and have far fewer options in their lives.

"When you have a national hero, someone that people can come behind and unite, that hero should be moving, not just themselves, but the country, in a way that will lift up everybody."

***

At the end of the second day in Moscow, just before 10 p.m., the sprinters are on the track for the 100-meter final. Bolt has had two years to think about his disqualification in South Korea, and in the last few weeks has come to understand that it is up to him to erase the doping scandal, to make amends for Jamaica through victory.

As the sprinters loosen up beyond the starting blocks, rain falls through the stadium's open roof and thunder rolls overhead. Tonight, Bolt seems more himself. He mugs for the camera and mimes holding an umbrella. He stands in lane five, and to his left, his main competitor, American Justin Gatlin, waits in lane four. In June, Gatlin beat Bolt in the men's Diamond League final in Rome with a time of 9.94 seconds - nearly four tenths of a second slower than Bolt's current world record time of 9.58, set in 2009 - a loss that Bolt attributed to his own lack of preparation.

Two months later, his attitude on the track here in Moscow is noticeably lighter. Even in the rain, he seems confident. He drops his body into the starting block, marks the sign of the cross with his right hand, and then points to the sky.

When the gun goes off, Bolt and Gatlin begin to run in stride. Afterwards, the clock will reveal that their reaction time at the start was equal: 0.163 seconds. They battle, bodies bounding forward, muscles relaxed, their bodies and faces rippling with each stride. In the last 30 meters, Bolt begins to pull away from Gatlin and the rest of the field. He crosses the finish line in 9.77 seconds, the fastest time he's posted in months. He celebrates with an extra lap around the track while camera bulbs explode in the stands and, fittingly, lightning bolts flash in the sky. Across the stadium's PA system, Bob Marley assures the world that "every little thing is going to be all right."

Later, Bolt tells reporters, "I was made to inspire people and to run, and I was given a gift and that's what I do."

***

Back home in Trelawny and across the country, locals fill the pubs and the streets, watching television screens and playing radio broadcasts that boom down the streets.  In Sherwood Content, Bolt's hometown in Trelawny, residents tell the local press that there was never any doubt. The village has known him since he was a child and knew he could not lose.

The day before Bolt's reclamation of the world title was Emancipation Day in Jamaica, a day to commemorate the island's freedom, the end of slavery, and the start of a new nation. At the stroke of midnight, drums rang out across the island, celebrants lit fires for all-night vigils, and bells pealed into the morning. With Bolt's victory, the celebration continued into another day.

Bolt's success is everywhere, sprinting is everywhere, but beyond that realm of success there is still a developing nation whose future, like most all developing nations, is troubled and uncertain. Bolt, for all his abilities and transcendental talents, cannot lift the economy out of debt or put an end to the island's violence. All he can do now, for a fleeing moment, is push the problems into the background. Sprinting will continue, as it always has, but the immediate future requires something more - a cause to unite behind, a force that brings the island together, something that can provide hope and stability for more than the time it take to run 100 meters.

Speaking at UTECH a few days earlier, Garriques said, "We are investing in the future and part of that vision is that we continue to grow what is already here. That vision includes development of our coaches." Then nodding in the direction of Johnson, he added, "When the guru goes, we need to find another guru."

In Kingston, on the side of one of the tallest buildings in the downtown district, there's another sprawling picture of Bolt. Like the billboard in Trelawny, his arms are outstretched, the muscles of his back and shoulders are clearly defined, tracing over the building's wall. The text above Bolt's frame is even bigger, but it says something different. Tourists stop and point at the larger-than-life image, some taking photos, while locals walk by, unbothered and unaffected, seemingly accustomed to the sight.

In large block letters, the billboard reads, millions of dreams need strong shoulders.

This is why football is so important in Alabama.

Otties William Brewer III, a good kid, failed algebra his freshman year at Southern Choctaw High School, which meant he was ineligible to play for Coach Jeremy Noland at the start of his sophomore year, which meant Otties William Brewer II, his father, was not happy.

Mr. Brewer was not happy because William, who everyone called "BooBoo," was now missing football practice. Even though BooBoo was not even officially on the team, to his father, being ineligible was the same as quitting. William still needed to be out there, his father said, to learn the essence of playing football, which is discipline, teamwork and resolve. The elder Brewer, who drives a truck and looks like he could flip one over, wanted the grit and perseverance that football requires to rub off on his son. He wanted his son to be part of the team, part of something larger.

He ordered William to march into Noland's office and request some football-related duties. Noland agreed and made William a team manager. He became the guardian of the water bottles, so precious during practice in the August steam, the young man who would carry the footballs out to the field, and the guy who would scamper for ice whenever one of the Indian players turned an ankle. William, who likely would have played center, was also ordered by his father to pay attention to formations and what plays were called and learn as much football as he could without actually playing. There was always next year.

William was an enthusiastic member of the Southern Choctaw Indians right up until he died.

Otties William Brewer III, courtesy of the Brewer family

William was an enthusiastic member of the Southern Choctaw Indians right up until he died at 12:03 a.m. Sept. 3, 2011.

William was in the second row, aisle seat, passenger side of the yellow Choctaw County school bus, No. 07-9, one of two team buses hauling the Southern Choctaw Indians back from a Friday night game at Flomaton, a 35-7 loss. They were being escorted by both an Alabama state trooper and Choctaw County Sheriff's cruiser, one in front and the other behind. The first bus, driven by the head coach Noland and carrying mostly veteran varsity players, safely rolled through the intersection of State Routes 84 and 69.

Bus No. 07-9 carrying the younger varsity players, did not make it through the intersection.It was struck on the left rear fender, driver's side, by a 1999 Nissan Maxima that hurtled through a stop sign.

The bus, driven by Judy Franks, the softball coach, the only occupant with a seat belt, had already traveled 93 miles when it reached the intersection at Coffeeville. The Indians still had almost 20 miles to go to reach sanctuary at the front door of the Southern Choctaw High School gym when the Nissan collided with the bus.

When the car hit, it drove up under the bus, lifting the back left side off the road and the larger vehicle rolled onto its roof. Except for Franks, everyone and everything in the bus -- football helmets and shoulder pads, water bottles and backpacks -- tumbled through the air inside, boys banging into the seats, the walls, the ceiling and each other. The bus slid, sheet metal screeching on asphalt, and finally stopped at the edge of a ditch on the side of the road in front of the GoCo gas and convenience store, equipment spilling out the windows and scattering over on the ground.

William Brewer, who authorities believe was asleep when the accident occurred, tumbled from his seat and died of a head injury. He was 15-years-old.

There were four men in the Nissan Maxima. Two jumped out of the car immediately, took off running toward the bridge over the Tombigbee River and had to be tracked by canines from a local prison. One went to the hospital. One stayed at the car to talk to police. The driver of the car, Brandon Randolph Jackson, who took off on foot, was arrested and is still in jail on charges of vehicular homicide and hindering prosecution. His trial is set for Sept. 4.

After the bus flipped and rolled, there was panic, of course, and screaming and hollering. Billy Covington and Dustin James, two sophomore players and pals of Williams', were in the back of the bus. Billy said Dustin opened the rear emergency door and all the kids and coaches scrambled out, either unhurt or with only relatively minor injuries, all except William. He left behind his father, his mother Allana, and younger sister Ashley, 13-years-old.

Dozens of friends will never forget his flashbulb smile. "He was a big-hearted kid," said his father. "William couldn't walk past somebody being sad without trying to make them smile."

Mr. Brewer looked out on the football field for moment, as if he was imagining his son playing center. This would have been his senior year. "He looked like me a few years ago," William Brewer said as he patted his ample stomach, "but he had lost some of this and he looked good, he was adding muscle for football, he was getting in shape."

In pictures, he always holds his head high, proudly showing his round cheeks on top of a wide smile. He was only 5'8, but his big personality made him seem taller. His principal, Dr. Leo Leddon, Jr., said William was an LSU fan and when the Tigers would beat the Tide, William would stand in the middle of the hallway and make sure Dr. Leddon saw this big fat grin.

William also played the saxophone in the band and wasn't at all shy. Covington said his friend had a politician's vibe. "He would see somebody he didn't know and stick his hand out and say 'Hi, I'm William Brewer.'

"He was a good kid," said Covington.

"He was a good kid," said Leddon, the principal.

"He was a good kid," said his father.

What happened in the next seven days in memory of a good kid -- and what happened over the following year in memory of a good kid -- is why Alabama is perhaps the No. 1 football state in the country. It's why 100,000 people squeeze inside Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, and 80,000 inside Jordan-Hare Stadium at Auburn, and one reason the national championship trophy of college football has lived in the state of Alabama for so long -- four straight years -- it needs to start paying taxes.

***

In the late summer and fall, football drenches nearly every household, neighborhood, town and city in the state. Sunday is a holy day, but they pray on Friday and Saturday, too, usually right before kickoff. When one local football coach declared his team would practice Sundays, some folks gasped, but most understood. There was plenty of time for both traditions on Sunday, Church and football -- in that order, of course.

Southern Choctaw is a small high school, located on Alabama State Route 17, about halfway between Silas and Gilbertown. The region is in the southern tier of what is known as the "Black Belt," in part because of the rich, loamy soil, but also because as many one million African-Americans were once enslaved working on plantations. Now small farms and other entrepreneurial endeavors have replaced the cotton fields and mills that once dominated the area. Georgia-Pacific, the Atlanta-based paper and pulp company, and its consumer products division, is the largest large employer in the area. While money may grow on trees, jobs don't. The pulp mills and the catfish farms in Choctaw and other neighboring counties employ relatively few people, and those who have those jobs tend to keep them for a long time.

One of only two public schools in the county of 14,000, Southern Choctaw serves 192 students grades 9-12, and, like the rest of the county, is split more or less evenly along racial lines. The other public high school, Choctaw County, is in Butler, 17 miles to the north, and there are also two private schools, which opened after integration, South Choctaw Academy and Patrician Academy.

they all know each other's names, and the bonds they forge with one another are deep, genuine and long lasting.

Southern Choctaw is 151 miles west of Montgomery, 94 miles north of Mobile, and 118 miles south of Tuscaloosa. Its students live scattered about the southern half of the county, in Cullomburg, Toxey, Bladon Springs, Barrytown, Isney and everywhere in between, but in such a remote, rural area, they all know each other's names, and the bonds they forge with one another are deep, genuine and long lasting.

Football is more than football in Alabama, and people here know what you mean when you say that. When they all hang together Friday and Saturday nights in the fall, they usually do so at a football game. So when tragedy struck the Southern Choctaw High School Indians, a small 2-A program, the school community turned to football to help cover the wound. They always have.

***

Gilbertown, with one stoplight, seems cryogenically frozen, with the same storefront buildings as it had 20 years ago. Due to the dwindling population and lack of jobs, there is virtually no new construction, and it's not much different elsewhere in the county. Tommy Campbell, the publisher of the Choctaw Sun-Advocate, the local weekly newspaper, said the county is losing 1,000 residents every 10 years. The young are moving out.

Although the economy may be sagging, there is still intense loyalty to this place. Campbell, a sixth-generation Choctaw County resident, and his wife Dee Ann, once left to take newspaper jobs in North Carolina. They stayed only a short while, and then moved back because their children were homesick.

Football endures. It is one of the few constants, one of the few things that move the communities forward together, even in the midst of what could drive it apart, sometimes has and sometimes still does.

"New" Southern Choctaw High School opened in March 2005 in Gilbertown, but many still refer to the school and its team as Silas, the nearby town where the high school was located for more than 75 years before it moved.

The team "up north," Choctaw County High School, is usually referred to as "Butler" because it is in Butler, the county seat. To hear the Southern Choctaw-Silas folks talk, it's as if Choctaw County High School supporters fought for the Union at Gettysburg. Forget that when the folks in Butler give directions they say, "You go up a heel and down a heel," which is "up and a hill and down a hill" and all their "y'alls" are completely authentic. White or black, in southern Choctaw County residents of Butler and the students of Choctaw County H.S. are still regarded as "the folks up north."

Vernon Underwood, the Choctaw County superintendent of schools for seven years, said that, historically, the southern part of the county was more white than black and maybe that's how the intense rivalry between the two public high schools started, but now it's mostly just about football. Underwood is African-American and was elected by the white citizens on the south end of the county and black citizens on the north end. They could agree on some things, he says, but not everything, and for a long time, not even about football.

Both sides -- Southern Choctaw High School and Choctaw County High School -- refer to the school zone boundary that crosses Route 17 as the "Mason-Dixon Line." The road on top of that "heel" is inappropriately named Pleasant Hill. During football season, the fire tower might as well be a lookout post for intruders from either end of the county.

"The south end, we have always been a small school, while Butler was once a 5-A," said Wayne Banks, who went to Silas and whose son, Jeffrie, played there. "On the north end, the kids drive their own cars to school, their parents work in the paper mill, and the kids get more. [But] The north end does not have the control of their kids like we do in the south. You leave the south and go to the north, it's a whole different world."

Banks, who owns a grocery with his mother and also owns Banks Pallet Company, has pulled the chains and the yard markers at Southern Choctaw-Silas football games for 27 years, so, of course, he is somewhat biased against "Butler." His loyalty is intriguing because when Silas was integrated in the late ‘60s, all the white kids walked out. Banks was not even allowed to play football there because of the color of his skin, and Underwood, then the successful football coach at the black school, was not permitted to coach. Still, Banks refers to Southern Choctaw as "my school."

Coach Noland says of the Butler-Silas rivalry, "It's not that bad." But it's not that good, either.

The Campbells, who run the newspaper, said that when parents were surveyed about consolidating the two high schools in the small county, restructuring was ruled out. Parents said it had to do with the rivalry in athletics, a rivalry that also includes the two private academies, South Choctaw and Patrician.

"We proposed a fund-raiser for charity where there would be a four-school Jamboree. South Choctaw Academy, Southern Choctaw, Patrician, Choctaw County, would play each other," said DeAnn. "It would have raised a lot of money, but the people didn't want to hear of it, even for charity."

Wayne Banks will not admit the belief that the majority of parents sending their children to the two private schools do so for racial reasons. He thinks academics and the fact that in the private schools students can pray all day has something to do with it, but he believes it's mostly because of football.

He really means it. Football is really that important in Alabama.

"They go to those small [private] schools and they can play football," Banks said of the students that attend the two academies. "But if they come here to [Southern Choctaw] Silas, they don't get as much playing time."

Still, there's no lack of talent. South Choctaw Academy, which is in Toxey, has won a private school division state football championship. So has Patrician Academy, in Butler.

In one conversation, a prominent area man connected with Southern Choctaw High School football, who did not want to be named, leaned forward in his chair and smirked, "You know the one school around here that hasn't won a state title don't you? Butler."

He smiled wide and leaned back in his chair and smirked some more. Indeed, Butler has not beaten Southern Choctaw/Silas since 2001. Meanwhile Southern Choctaw/Silas has won three state championships (1998, 1999, and 2002) and played for the title in 2005. Winning a state championship is the dream of most boys who play football, or who want to play football, and William Brewer was no different.

"We call those state championships ‘national championships'," said David Lewis, a former assistant coach with Southern Choctaw. He was sitting in the 90-degree heat outside Banks Grocery on Route 14 explaining the culture of Southern Choctaw/Silas football and how, in the 1970s, after integration, the black kids from Shady Grove and the white kids from Gilbertown came together and created a powerhouse at the school.

"There's some pastor up on the north side talking that this is the year Butler takes down the Indians," Lewis said. "The man has been around here but three years. He don't know."

***

It doesn't always take a tragedy to get people to look after one another here, but when one does strike, it creates a bond.

Courtesy of the Choctaw Sun-Advocate

Still, despite the divisions, this is a place where you look after theirs and they look after yours.

It doesn't always take a tragedy to get people to look after one another here, but when one does strike, it creates a bond. While that bond might loosen its grip when the tears stop, that doesn't always happen. Sometimes the goodwill can linger.

People in the county can cite examples of that. Jeffrie Banks was 13-years-old and working in his father's pallet shop when his arm was cut off below the elbow. He planned on playing football and baseball at Southern Choctaw. The accident was devastating to everyone but Jeffrie, who told his parents, "I'll be all right."

When the finally came home from the hospital, there were balloons lining the fence in front of the family's house for 100 yards on Melvin Road/Route 14, and they were put there by white and black folks. And with the help of the community, Jeffrie ended up all right, just as he promised. Even with a prosthetic arm he hit .456 his senior year at Southern Choctaw High School, played wide receiver in the state championship football game in 1998 and caught a play-action pass for a touchdown as Silas won a state title. That was a long time ago, but for Wayne Banks it is more proof that Choctaw County is special place, and the kind of place that makes Alabama special.

"This is a small county, but even from the private school sector, when something happens like it did with the Brewer boy and Jeffrie, all the boundary lines are torn down and everyone comes together, black and white, that's the truth," said Banks. "Trust me, these people will come together. They will pour out, private and public, white and black, to help folks.

"No matter the reason why we have these two private schools, when there is a tragedy this small little county comes together.It's really amazing. You would think this county is split black and white, but when something like this happens, people throw all that stuff out the window. It is an amazing thing."

It is a remarkable statement coming from a man, whose mother, Annie, was the first African-American to work in the sewing mill in Needham in 1966. On her first day her supervisor stayed home after somebody called to say they were going to blow up the building because the mill had hired an African-American. Annie worked by herself, alone in a room for six months because none of the white women would sit with her.

Tragedy is not reserved for Southern Choctaw High School, and it is not the only place in Choctaw County where football eases pain. In 2008,Randall Jackson, a Southern Choctaw graduate and local contractor, lost his wife, Becky, to cancer. In 2009, his little girl, Heidi, was diagnosed with leukemia.

The Jacksons live right across the street from the South Choctaw Academy football field. The day Randall brought Heidi home from a 17-day stay in the hospital, SCA was playing football. The crowd stopped watching and many came to the fence, waving balloons and signs of encouragement as they cheered for the little girl.

"All you could do was cry," Randall Jackson said.

***

After the bus accident, half of the Indians' football equipment -- shoulder pads and helmets -- was strewn about and unusable. According to state regulations, when equipment is involved in an accident, it has to be re-certified as safe to use. Noland, the head coach, had to gather it up and send it to the manufacturer, Riddell, to be examined, a process that can take weeks. There was barely enough equipment left to hold a full practice.

Noland, just 32-years-old and in his third season as head coach, guided the program through the week and prepared the team, as best he could, to play Leroy the following Friday. Assistant coach Dana Adams, had his shoulder in a sling, an injury from the bus crash, and the boys were emotionally banged up, but wanted to play. Still, Noland didn't know if he would have enough gear.

And then something happened. It was the same kind of thing that happened when Jeffrie Banks lost his arm and the little girl got cancer, something that shows how much football matters in Alabama and something about the might and measure of the people -- both those who love the game and even those who don't, but understand what it means here.

On Monday, two days after the accident, the same day as William Brewer's funeral, several cars and a truck pulled up to the doors outside the Southern Choctaw High School gymnasium. A tailgate flipped down, trunks popped open, and shoulder pads and helmets of all sizes and colors were unloaded for the Indians to use in their next game. There were black helmets from the high school in Leroy, green helmets from the one in Millry, white helmets from Clarke County. The Indians' colors are red, but they probably would have played in pink, just so they could play, so they took the borrowed equipment with glee and got ready to play a game.

Play a game? Didn't a child just die?

"Somebody mentioned something about postponing the game," William's father said. "William would have wanted us to play the game. We were going to play the game. I never thought they were going to postpone the game."

A few days after the accident, Flomaton High School, which had defeated Southern Choctaw the night of the accident, sent a $1,200 donation and a William Brewer Scholarship Fund was started. The arms started wrapping around the kids left behind at the high school.

There was a service for William Brewer at White's Chapel in nearby Cullomburg, an all-black church, and a collection was taken up and given to the Brewers, who are white. The other three high schools in the county, Choctaw County High, South Choctaw Academy and Patrician Academy, also made donations. Goodwill and generosity just flowed.

A delegation of coaches and starting players from Choctaw County High went to the funeral, a much-appreciated gesture of support. The Butler community sent food for the funeral service and left dozens of expressions of sympathy on Facebook.

Courtesy of the Choctaw Sun-Advocate

"We were in mourning,"said Leddon, "and the students here found out how much people cared about them. That was important."

When Friday came, and time to play Leroy, the stands at the stadium were packed with 4,000 people. They stuffed themselves into the cement grandstands whether they had a child at the school, or not. Randall Jackson once attended Southern Choctaw. Even though his son, Brandon, played at the private white high school, South Choctaw Academy, and his daughter, Heidi, attends SCA, Jackson showed up and dropped money in a hat like a lot of others from all over the county. Now it was his turn to give.

The players wore black armbands that read "WB." A local insurance company made "WB" T-shirts. Leroy had won the 2-A state championship in 2010 and Southern Choctaw/Silas was a decided underdog coming off not only a big loss, but also a horrible experience, yet on that night the memory of William Brewer was the 12th man on the field.

"We wanted to win so bad for William," said Covington. "We dedicated that Leroy game to him. We were hyped."

Noland somehow prepared his team in spite of the tragedy, and Savon McCoy ran the opening kickoff back 80 yards for the Indians. For most of the next 48 minutes, it appeared as if Southern Choctaw could pull off an upset, only to lose on the last play of the game, 20-14.

"Not a dry eye in the place," said Jackson about the game. When William Brewer died, Jackson had remembered where he came from. In tragedy, it was as if Jackson had never left the school. Like everyone else in the county, he felt it was important to be there, to show he cared.

And in the time since William Brewer died, in ways large and small, people have kept caring.

And in the time since William Brewer died, in ways large and small, people have kept caring. A year after the accident, Under Armor donated brand new jerseys to the Indians and Phil Savage, the executive director of the Senior Bowl in Mobile, showed up to deliver them during an on-field ceremony before the 2012 Southern Choctaw-Flomaton game. The public address announcer was so overwhelmed by emotion he could barely finish introductions.

That same night, members of the Flomaton Quarterback Club walked up to Leddon at the concession stand and handed him another $1,000 for the William Brewer Scholarship Fund.

But it didn't stop with the death of William Brewer. Caring runs both ways on Route 17, north and south. Last March, a fire in Butler destroyed 25,000-square feet of a wing of Choctaw County High School. People came running to help, again.

The faculty at Patrician Academy, from which you can see Choctaw Count High through the winter woods, rummaged through closets and desks and for any spare equipment or supplies and carried them over to Choctaw.

"It haunts me, it still haunts me," said Noland about William Brewer's death. "It was an amazing thing to see the community pull together in a tragedy. It's too bad it took a tragedy to do it. It should be like that all the time."

Sure, there are communities all over America that take care of one another following a tragedy, but in these rural outposts in Alabama, football is as vital as air conditioning and it is especially vital when life turns upside down, when the pain of death burns deep inside. Communities want to mourn together, and in Choctaw County, that means a football game on Friday night.

That's maybe one reason William Brewer's father is still part of the football program at Southern Choctaw. He considers one of the players, whose parents are not very involved in their son's life, his "adopted son" and he badgers him over his grades like most any other father, keeping the young man eligible for football.

And even if his own son was still alive, he would probably still do so anyway.

***

In the wake of his son's death, William Brewer II wants a law for seat belts in buses for kids who ride these dangerous two-lane roads to school and to so many football games. It is a 120-mile trip for Southern Choctaw to Flomaton for a game and 39 miles to Sweet Water and 43 miles to Leroy and 17 miles to the Indians "cross-town" rival, Butler. Most of the travel is on two-lane roads with oncoming cars going 60 miles an hour just an arm's length away. "You don't drive and text on these roads," David Lewis said.

Driving here is hazardous. Noland got an assistant coaching job at Southern Choctaw in 2004 after assistant coach Cornelius Mitchell was killed in a motorcycle accident, and Leddon still shakes his head with despair over all the local students who have died traveling on the same roads. For years, many families have wanted the same law that William Brewer is pushing for, but their pleas, and his, have gone nowhere.

And so, you ask yourself, if William Brewer II can't get seat belts in a bus for kids going to football games, what impact did his son's death have on the community, really?

Leddon believes it had plenty. William Brewer's picture is up in the cafeteria as a reminder to students that people care about them, and will continue caring. There is also the William Brewer Scholarship Fund, now funded by the Southern Choctaw's boosters and coaches, providing a small scholarship to either a football player or a member of the band.

Eddie Abston, who works for the water department in Gilbertown and calls the football games on Internet radio, will not say that life rolls on the same way as before William died.

"I think there is a little more harmony now since William's death," Abston said. "People understand you got to live together in this county. That was a reminder."

Abston thought about the local divisions and the rivalries and how, in spite of these, the community is pulled together by what they share -- their children and football.

"I think we can all agree why the private schools were started years ago, it was because of segregation," he said. "But things have never been that bad between communities. There is some ill will, especially with the football, but things have never been bad."

Dee Ann Campbell said the jealousies and rivalries are not going to the scrap heap with William Brewer's death, but the community grows closer when tragedy strikes and it turns down the heat on the feud between Butler and Silas and the other nearby schools.

"The bus accident did profoundly affect our community, from north to south -- as does nearly every tragedy that occurs here," Campbell said. "It is a fact of life here: We are divided in rivalries, differences and divisions of race and geographic areas. Yet we are a 'family' when one of our own is hurting."

That's part of living in a rural community in a lot of places. It is just that here in southwest Alabama, football is the where the community comes together. In his recently released documentary "Three Days at Foster" writer/director Keith Dunnavant insists the integration of the Alabama football program in the early 1970s helped integrate the rest of the state because black and white started winning championships together for Bear Bryant.  What happened after the bus accident that killed William Brewer underscores just how important football can be in such a place. Football was like a hero, providing something powerful to rally around.

Indeed, the allure of football here is so strong it washes over anyone who comes in contact with it. That's why Otties William Brewer II wanted his son to play football in the first place. He and Allana taught their son some basic values. They looked to football to provide the rest.

"When Nick Saban gets these small town Alabama boys they have some discipline," said Lewis of the kind of boys he once coached in Choctaw County.

"I had the sheriff tell me one time, ‘I can count the boys from the south side in my jail tonight.' There were none. The boys wanted to stay out of trouble and play football."

One the second day of school this year, which would have been his son's senior year, Mr. Brewer visited practice and was standing outside the gates to the field when Coach Noland got irritated at a player who was not paying attention to the coaching. The Indians had just 26 players dressed for practice, but when the player continued to be obstinate, Noland told the player if he didn't behave, he could quit and not come back, no matter how depleted it might leave his team. After a moment, the player conformed and practice rolled on.That's the kind of lesson Brewer was hoping his son would learn playing football in Alabama.