we are setting ourselves up for a bowl game disaster

i heart football season. all football.

i tolerate basketball, but not pro ball. i can watch the olympics, but only because, well, its the olympics and everyone likes the olympics. its more about torches and flags and underdogs than anything else. otherwise, not a sports fan. i do not enjoy baseball. i think nascar is ridiculous. i think golf and tennis are ok to play, but not fun for me to watch. so the months between march madness and the start of football are fairly dull. strangely though, i don't have a favorite team other than uk. you can't be raised in ky and not support the whole university of kentucky athletics department (though some fiends like university of louisville for some reason).

for the past month, we have only been able to check scores online for local ky football. i've been very pleased to check friday night high school and saturday college scores but we hadn't figured out a way to watch or listen to any games. until two days ago.

its like a lexus and olive tree moment. friedman's book, in very brief summation, states that there are two conflicting pulls on the world, the drive for prosperity (the lexus) and the need to maintain traditions and identity (the olive tree). often, people are able to maintain both pulls when they intersect at technology. friedman opens the book with a picture of an orthodox jew praying at jerualem's wailing wall. bearded and in traditional garb, he is deep prayer. in his hand, however, is a cell phone, which he had placed agains the wall so that a relative in france can also pray at the wall. naturally, all of friedman's examples are infinitely more poignant than my tale here, but i don't care. i moved out to vegas for my job (prosperity, the lexus) and friday night, via the internet, i got to listen to my high school football team (the olive tree), the trigg county wildcats, stomp on reidland, 42-0! who would have ever thought that the country bumpkins at WKDZ would be streaming live online. we are 5 and 0, neck and neck for first place in our division. its going to be a great season.

my saturdays will soon be filled with listening to uk football (also the wildcats). kentucky is known for basketball. we dominated ncaa throughout the 90s (and hopefully will again starting this year now that we have a new couch). we're the most winningest team. ever. but, um, our football team, well, we have one, more or less. and then last year, we managed to play in our first bowl game in about thirty years. miraculously, we won. then this year. we just keep winning. we beat eastern and kent state, managing to get ranked in the 30s (probably the highest we had ever been ranked). then we beat #9 louisville and got bumped up to #21. yesterday we beat arkansas. i am dying to know what are new rank is going to be.

so don't get me wrong, i clearly love to win. but the problem is, if we have a spectacular winning season, then we'll get into a nicer bowl game and there get stomped on by a real team. we need to get into a low enough bowl game that we can do the stomping. cause really, who remembers these things?? who remembers what bowl it was, whether it was the taco bell bowl or the cingular bowl? who remembers who we played against? no one does. but saying we won a bowl two years in a row, people remember that.