Photo from Icon SMI

Mark Twain once called golf, ‘a good walk spoiled.’ I can’t imagine what Twain would call a beautiful Saturday spent indoors, watching every team you wanted to win, lose.

It started early, too early in my opinion. Why teams continue to play games in the morning after the invention of lights is beyond me. LSU gets it, no one else does. Of course I know it’s all for television but still, Saturday mornings are for cartoons, Saturday afternoons and evenings are for football.

It had been a long time since I’d watched Auburn play football from the comfort of my couch. Every weekend of the 2009 season was spent writing a book, and every weekend of 2010 was spent selling it, so you have to go back to the 2008 Iron Bowl, a traumatic experience I’ve buried deep in my subconscious.

I went to a few games growing up, one or two a year, but football for me meant waking up early on Saturday and planting my butt firmly in the recliner. It wasn’t until I enrolled at Auburn that I began to think live and in person was the only way to see my team play. And somewhere in the past thirteen years I’d forgotten that watching your team on television could actually be fun.

First of all you get to sleep as late as you can, which for me these days is around 8:15, but even so, it’s nice not having to wake up early, drive to campus, set up tailgate, and all the other chores involved in going to a game these days.

The air was crisp this Saturday morning, and just standing out on my porch I could feel the excitement of football, even though a mile away Jordan-Hare stadium sat empty. Cool air gives my stomach butterflies. It reminds me of walking out of my parent’s house on a football Friday night. Even from a couple miles away you could hear the marching band warming up, and the PA announcer encouraging fans to buy a split the pot ticket. I guess cool air just feels like football, and football gets me excited.

Auburn had me pretty excited in the first quarter when they led 21-7 in the second quarter, but then things started to go wrong. The offense began to sputter, the defense grew allergic to tackling, and it was 21-21 at the half. This is when I remembered what I don’t like about watching games at home, namely, I feel helpless. All through the second half I wanted to yell encouraging things to the team, but they were hundreds of miles away, and would never hear me. When you are in the stadium, you somehow convince yourself the noise you make can make a difference. At home, the noise you make can only annoy your neighbors. So you change shirts because the one you are wearing is unlucky, or you try a different chair, but nothing works, and soon you are deleting the 38-24 Clemson victory off your DVR.

And this brings me to the real problem with early morning games; when your team loses, the last thing you want to do is sit and watch football all day. Which I suppose is all the same, since the teams I’d arbitrarily decided to cheer for (Michigan State, Tennessee, Florida State) all lost. So Tricia and I got out of the house and ended up going for a very long walk around Auburn. There air was still crisp, and it was still a beautiful day.

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Editor’s Note: Chad Gibbs is an author with two passions in life: God and SEC Football. His first book was a humorous look at his struggle to balance the two things. Check it out – God and Football: Faith and Fanaticism in the SEC. Read more from Chad on his blog at ChadGibbs.com