Saturday returns

 Chris Schenkel always rhapsodized about those beautiful Saturday afternoons in the fall, but it's modern times now. These days we get Saturday afternoons in August, too.

You can crab about that all you want. But keep it down.

See, I'll be watching college football this afternoon, calendar be hanged. We've got the Notre Dame Fighting Irish coming at us live from Dublin, Ireland, even though they're about as Irish as schnitzel these days. On the other side of the field will be University of Navy, as Lou Holtz used to call it. The Midshipmen aren't especially Irish, either, 

No matter. It's Notre Dame vs. Navy for the umpteenth time in history, which is what makes college football special even in its current professional-in-all-but-name form. The NFL is the Titans-vs.-Jaguars since, um, 1999; college football is Notre Dame-Navy since 1927, when Calvin Coolidge was president, Charles Lindbergh was the man of the hour and Babe Ruth was hitting 60 home runs. 

Incredibly, they have played every year since except for 2020, when Covid shut them down. Today will mark the 96th meeting.

By the time the Titans and Jaguars get to 96 meetings, they'll be the Budapest Titans and the Prague Jaguars. Or something like that.

Which is only to say the NFL might claim it has tradition, but the college game has tradition. Some of its most hallowed rivalries stretch back not just to the last century, but to the century before that. 

William Kinley was president the first time Ohio State and Michigan met in 1897. Texas-Oklahoma goes back to 1900 and has been continuous since 1929. Purdue and IU have been fighting it out since 1891; Harvard first played Yale in the ivy-est of Ivy League rivalries in 1875 -- seven months before Custer got his at the Little Bighorn.

It's not remotely the same game as it was then, of course, and you're permitted to hate that a bit. The Ivies and some of the other lesser conferences still require their students actually be students, but the mega-conferences are little more than NFL developmental leagues now. The universities merely provide the football program with a brand in some of those places.

And yet, still I will watch this afternoon.

Notre Dame vs. the University of Navy. The 96th meeting. Only thing missing will be Chris Schenkel -- or perhaps Lindsey Nelson, eternally informing us that Navy failed to move the ball, and so they punted to Notre Dame.

Color me there.