The college football flavorbursting begins a few days early and ends a few hours late once again this week. Between Wednesday night (when Marshall plays Central Florida) and early Sunday morning (when either Army or Hawaii takes the final kneel-down at roughly 2 a.m. EST), you’ll be able to feast, Old Country Buffet-style, on almost 24 hours of live football fixins.

College football is now a full-time companion, a ceaseless satisfier – an everlasting gobstopper, reintroduced in pigskin shape. The married men among us might be wise to seek divorce, but let’s face it. This week, they probably won’t have the time.

Maybe you can remember, as I surely can, when college football took its quick turn in the weekly rotation – Saturdays, never before, never after – and then disappeared, vanishing like a hand imprint on a Hypercolor T-shirt.

Now, life’s not so simple. College football is played four or five days per week, and if you’re a gluttonous fan, you’re bound for exceedingly long intervals to the sofa, helpless as your midsection assumes the profile of Augustus Gloop’s.

Laziness and televised football have always made great couchfellows, of course, but never have the destructive possibilities been greater. On ESPN alone, there’s College Football Thursday Night Presented by Pontiac. There’s College Football Wednesday Night Sponsored by Professors Who Promise They Won’t Take Players’ Attendance The Next Day. There’s College Football Tuesday Night Brought To You Solely For The Purpose Of Deflowering Yet Another Day With Football.

‘Football every day,’ ESPN announcer Ron Franklin remarked during a recent broadcast.

‘They’re working on it – trust me,’ Franklin’s partner, Mike Gottfried deadpanned. ‘They just need to find more announcers.’

Well, take your pick, young professionals. Who wouldn’t want to preside, oratorically, over this Thursday’s nationally televised match-up between Texas Christian and Southern Mississippi, in a town, Hattiesburg, Miss., known foremost as a meeting point of one congested interstate road, three U.S. highways and 50,000 rusted Jeep Wagoneers?

Or better yet, claim the broadcast booth for Friday’s game, Fresno State versus Boise State, and dazzle your audience with the witty observation that neither Fresno nor Boise is, in fact, a state. ‘You’re watching the Misnomered City Bowl on ESPN,’ you can say, pre-pink slip, ‘presented by Pontiac, indifferent professors and schools sick of playing on Time Warner Channel 26.’

Above all else, though, weekday football is for the fans. (Money and exposure are but fleeting, secondary considerations). If you’re partial to Marshall, if you’re insane for Tulane, if your dormant libido soars for Toledo, then you love watching your team play before a national audience, as each of the aforementioned schools has done repeatedly.

Yet by comparison, Miami of Ohio serves up a schedule (ITLALICS)du jour(ITALICS) that no other school can match. By season’s end, the Redbirds, in a drill of calendar peripatetic, will have played games on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and – oh yeah – Saturday.

Suddenly, Saturday is archaic. Worthless. Old-fashioned. Less appealing than the swath of bedspace beside Grandma Josephine’s yellowed feet. (Hey, three Willy Wonka references in one column! Howdaya like that?)

Not even the oldest vanguards of college football stick to Saturdays anymore. To date, the Miami Hurricanes have already played twice on Thursdays. Virginia Tech has played on Sunday, Thursday and Wednesday. Even Michigan played a Friday-night game this season.

When these top football programs released their schedules, strong arguments surfaced briefly on both sides – some applauded the daily format, some yearned for the weekly format.

The new blood of college football pointed to schools like Marshall, which, based on precedent, would send its players Tuesday night cow-tipping if ESPN cameras promised to be there. Traditionalists, on the other hand, showed off schools like Syracuse, which plays this season only on Saturdays.

For now, however, that debate has subsided. There’s no time among the gridiron bigwigs for clamor, dispute or meaningful civic discussion. Everyone’s too busy watching college football.

Chico Harlan is a staff writer for The Daily Orange, where his columns appear each Tuesday. E-mail him at apharlan@syr.edu.

Published on November 17, 2003 at 12:00 pm