After a summer dominated by a brutal Stanley Cup finals, a pathetic NBA championship and relentless talks of steroid testing, luxury taxes and revenue sharing, has there ever been a better time for the college football season to begin?

Wisconsin and every other team that opened up play last weekend kicked off a college football season that began earlier than ever before. And while the temperatures around here lately more closely resemble bikinis and spring break in Cancun, I don’t think there are many objections to the premature start for autumn’s most loved sport.

As great as college football has proven to be over the years — and I do love it — I can’t help but grimace at a few aspects of the sport that usually pop up around this time.

I’ve always been entertained by the preseason hype of college football. Experts are already predicting conference champions, players of the year, coaches of the year and busts of the year. As if they have any idea.

Some are already telling us who’s going to play in what bowl and the eventual final score of the game. Mel Kiper could probably even tell us right now who the first 15 picks in the 2003 draft will be. But how can accurate predictions be made for sport where a kid failing a test or being dumped by his girlfriend can affect the fate of an entire team?

The Heisman trophy race has always been pretty entertaining itself. It’s actually a little humorous. No longer about the best player in college football, the pursuit of the Heisman is more a political campaign than an award. It’s like the major sporting publications around the country have each nominated their candidate in a primary election and it’s up to their campaign directors and grassroots organizations to see that, come December, their man is No. 1.

A three-interception game sets a player back as much as sex scandals set back a politician. Forget about stats — if your team isn’t in the top 10, you’re not getting the award. My advice to Heisman hopefuls? Don’t waste your time or money (Joey Harrington) worrying about the fate of the award. The eventual winner’s name has probably already been inscribed on the trophy.

So they say that this is the year of the quarterback. What a shocker. Is it ever not the year of the quarterback? When was the last time you saw ESPN raving about the overwhelming influx of kickers dominating the college football scene? Rex Grossman, Ken Dorsey, Chris Simms and Byron Leftwich will all throw for 30 touchdowns and 3,000 yards this season and have the potential to be the best draft class since the 1983 draft that produced the likes of John Elway, Dan Marino and Jim Kelly. And they may very well be. But does it always have to be about the quarterback?

The regular season in college football is all about the quarterback. The best games of the year are the 57-54 marathons where two of the nation’s premier quarterbacks go head to head and a team without a potent quarterback will find itself more desperate for a win than the Brewers.

But as we’ve seen in the past, while offense wins games, defense wins championships. Look at Nebraska and Florida State in 2000 and 2001. Each team entered the game with a Heisman trophy quarterback and an explosive offense and left with nothing but a pat on the back and criticism from the fans that didn’t even think the teams deserved to be there. Which brings up the question on a lot of people’s minds: Who’s the BCS going to screw over this year?

Oh wait, apparently the system was fixed. I forgot about that. Tell that to Oregon and Miami, the two latest victims of the worst excuse for a playoff system. With all the subjectivity surrounding the BCS system, the controversy of national champions will never be solved until it is eliminated and replaced by a tournament. Some teams will already be playing 14 games this year. Why not eliminate a few of those pointless non-conference meetings and set up a bracket similar to the NFL?

Miami is the defending champion in college football and will set out this season with high expectations of winning the title again. There have only been two undisputed back-to-back champions in the last 50 years, and the Hurricanes will have their share of obstacles as this season unfolds. In addition to adding Florida and Tennessee to their schedule this season, they will also have to go through Florida State and Virginia Tech to capture another undefeated season.

Further displaying the beauty of college football, when the 117 teams embark on their seasons in late August, it can be anyone’s year, given a break or two.

The goal of most college football teams at the beginning of the season used to be to go to a bowl game. It used to be an honor and privilege to be playing a game around the holiday season. What ever happened to that? These days it almost seems that there are more bowl games than Division I teams.

Fifty-six teams will compete in a bowl game when the 2002 regular season comes to an end in December. Seven Big Ten teams alone are awarded spots in some of this year’s post-season parties. Wisconsin’s 5-7 mark last season would have been more than enough to catapult them into the Crucial.com Humanitarian bowl.

Give me a break. It’s always fun to watch a bowl game, but the line has got to be drawn somewhere.

But forget about all of that.

Despite the repetitive and sometimes annoying pre-season rituals that dominate the college football setting this time of year, it still is one of this nation’s most pure and entertaining sports. Four touchdown leads never being safe leave people watching for hours and major upsets will keep people talking for weeks.

It’s a sport that unites 40,000 strangers onto the same page of interest for at least one day of the week and for many people it is their only source of pride.

So as Major League baseball continues to unravel faster than the career of Ryan Leaf, the rest of the sports world will turn its attention toward the unique and unparalleled atmosphere of the college football venue. We’ll play it on PlayStation during the week and dedicate our weekends to watching it on TV. Its unwavering character will consume us for the next three months and our current identity will be based on the record of our school’s football team.
College football couldn’t have started at a better time. I can’t wait for the season to really get going. Because after all, this preseason hype can’t last that much longer. Can it?