Football Is Back
How I learned to love football season without developing any interest whatsoever in football
“Sports give people a reason to gather.
When a team is good, or a school means something to you, or a whole city simply agrees to care about the same thing at the same time, it creates a kind of communal momentum that has very little to do with the game itself.”
I need to establish something before we go any further: I do not care about football. I don't have a team, or fantasy players, or any real grasp of what a blitz is, and I have never once turned on a football game voluntarily when no one else was in the room. After years of fairly intense exposure, I understand the rules better than I used to, though this knowledge has done almost nothing to increase my interest in what is actually happening on the field. And yet sometime in the last few years, I became a person who gets genuinely excited when football season starts. This is confusing even to me.
I grew up in New England during the Patriots dynasty, which left me with a badly distorted sense of how professional sports usually go. The Patriots made the Super Bowl so often during my childhood that I assumed a Super Bowl party every February, capped off by your hometown team winning, was simply part of the annual cycle. I had no idea we were living through an exceptional stretch of New England sports history. I thought this was just how football worked. So although the sport itself never interested me, I came away with an extremely warm feeling about it. Football meant crowded living rooms, absurd spreads of food, everyone you knew caring about the same thing at the same time for a few hours. It meant Tom Brady winning again. It meant adults being happy and not stressed. Football, as far as I could tell, had excellent vibes.
Outside the Patriots, though, football was never central to my life. I went to a tiny private high school where the real sports were lacrosse and rowing and field hockey and ice hockey. We had a football team, but I think most of the players were guys who were primarily good at other sports and happened to be physically strong enough to survive on the football field. College didn't change much. I attended a Division III school in Maine with a total student population of less than two-thousand, where we technically had football games but lacked most of the ingredients required to turn them into a cultural event, chief among them a large student body and bearable November weather. By midseason, standing outside for three hours felt like an act of real physical endurance. I had no idea what I was missing.
Then, in 2021, I moved to North Carolina and discovered that the rest of the country had built an entire civilization around this sport. My first real taste of Southern college football was something like a religious experience: tents, elaborate spreads, coordinated outfits, alumni who had been doing this same ritual for 30 years. People built their entire Saturdays around a 1pm kickoff. Some of them tailgated for hours and never went inside the stadium at all. This was when I first understood that you could have a deeply rewarding relationship with football without having the faintest interest in football.
This turned out to matter even more when I married a former frat star who loves college football without irony or reservation. For Kevin, fall is the best season of the year largely because it means college football is back, and his idea of a perfect Saturday involves friends and a sunny patio and as many consecutive hours of televised football as the human body can be reasonably expected to withstand. Left to my own devices, I would never do this. But marriage occasionally requires you to step into someone else's world, and somewhere between North Carolina and Texas, I worked out my own approach to football season. I stopped trying to talk myself into caring about the sport and started paying attention to everything around it instead. Essentially, I romanticized football until I liked it. The strategy works shockingly well.
Kevin went to SMU for undergrad, and we have season tickets now. On home-game Saturdays, we meet friends on the Boulevard before kickoff, where SMU has perfected exactly the kind of spectacle I never got to experience as a student myself: tents, Greek life, alumni, a crazy amount of food for 10 o’clock in the morning, and everyone dressed in a curated combination of red and blue. The wives and girlfriends in our group, none of whom actually attended SMU, have been automatically absorbed into the institution by marriage. And I love it. I love deciding what to wear for a red-out or a blue-out. Southern game-day dressing turns out to be its own entire fashion category, something I never encountered growing up in a climate where the only real question before a football game was whether your barn jacket would be warm enough or if a parka would be overkill. In Texas, women show up. There are dresses, boots, custom stadium bags designed with real deliberation, an entire wardrobe built around a single message: I am here to support the Mustangs, and I understood the assignment.
I have also discovered that almost any activity becomes more appealing once you assign it a seasonal drink. This fall, mine is a Sarti Spritz. I can already picture it: a September tailgate, my little spritz sweating in the heat, my friends around me, a fresh blowout, and an outfit I put more thought into than the game itself. Suddenly football season sounds genuinely delightful. Away games have their own charm, too. Because we're in Central Time, the first games kick off at noon instead of 1pm, which means a football Saturday can really just be brunch with a television somewhere in the background. If we're hosting, I get to build a spread. If we're at someone else's house, there's usually food involved. If we're at a bar, every screen is showing a different game and everyone in the room has somewhere specific they need to be looking. I still don't much care where I'm supposed to look. I've just learned that it doesn't matter.
The older I get, the more I’ve learned that the easiest way to make life more enjoyable is to romanticize things by giving yourself small, specific moments to look forward to: a drink you only make in a certain season, an outfit saved for a certain occasion, a meal you cook every year without fail. A Saturday ritual that would mean nothing to anyone else but tells you, unmistakably, that you've arrived at a particular point on the calendar. Football has become one of those markers for me, and it matters more here than I expected.
Fall was one of the things I missed most when I left New England. You didn't need a calendar to know September had arrived; the mornings turned cool, the light shifted, the leaves changed color, and summer gave way to something else in full view of everyone. Dallas does not do this. September can still feel like the surface of the sun. The trees stay stubbornly green while the rest of the internet posts sweaters and foliage, and I'm still calculating the fastest possible route from an air-conditioned building to an air-conditioned car. For the first few years, this made fall in Dallas feel totally unmoored. I knew the season was changing, I just couldn't see it anywhere.
Football gave me another way to feel it. The next Boulevard is always around the corner. Saturdays turn social again. There are games on every television in the city, and plans start flowing through the group chat without anyone having to ask. The physical world may not be offering much proof that fall has arrived, but the social world is shouting it. That, I think, is a real part of why I've grown so fond of a season built around a sport I don't care about.
Three years ago, I moved to Dallas without knowing a single person. Today I have a group of friends I love spending time with, and when I trace back how those friendships actually formed, a surprising number of the memories involve football. We've stood together at tailgates in brutal September heat. We've met at bars for away games and championship games and drowned our disappointment with tequila shots. We've spent entire Saturday afternoons at someone's house, shared Mambo Taxis in the stadium from the Mi Cocina stand below our seats, watched some fraction of the actual game, and then, on the hottest days, collectively agreed at halftime we'd demonstrated sufficient school spirit and relocated somewhere with air-conditioning. Football gave us a standing appointment with one another. There's something almost old-fashioned about that. Adult friendship usually runs on logistics: calendars, group texts, plans made three weeks out and confirmed twice. Football season removes some of that friction. Of course we'll see each other Saturday. There's a game.
I think this is exactly what I was sensing as a kid growing up in New England, long before I fully understood the adult dynamics. Sports give people a reason to gather. When a team is good, or a school means something to you, or a whole city simply agrees to care about the same thing at the same time, it creates a kind of communal momentum that has very little to do with the game itself. At least it does for me.
So here is my survival guide for any woman who finds herself attached to a man who treats the return of college football as a major annual event: don't bother trying to become a football person if you aren't one. Find your football-adjacent thing instead. Buy the chic gameday outfit. Claim a seasonal cocktail. Plan an elaborate brunch. Go to the tailgate. Bond with the other WAGs who also didn't go to that school. Ask what happened when everyone suddenly starts yelling. Develop a loose, mostly instinctive sense of which team you're supposed to favor in any given game. Leave at halftime if it's 98 degrees and sunny. Relentlessly romanticize the whole production without shame. You’ll probably never care about 3rd-down conversions. I certainly don't. But you might eventually notice that you've started looking forward to Saturdays anyway.
Summer is still my favorite season, and I will go on mourning it every Labor Day weekend. But now, when it finally ends, I know what's waiting on the other side: Saturdays on the Boulevard, a reason to get dressed up, something good to drink, and a group of people I didn't know existed three years ago. Football, it turns out, has brought quite a lot to my life. I just wish I didn't have to watch so much of it to get there.
