What’s it Like Following a College Team?

There is always a deterministic sense of following hometown teams. I would guess that the majority of Cal fans are also Bay Area fans (or So Cal counterparts), and their emotions fall and rise with the A's and the Giants, the 49ers and the Raiders, Warriors and Sharks.

Since you associate with these teams earlier, it’ll always carry more weight. But there’s also been a traditional sense of distance you feel with these athletes. They’re pros, and they’ve already obligated themselves to something higher; we’re just amateurs watching from the stands, second-guessing our prognostications and re-defining our expectations.

For most college fans though, it starts much later. Unless your parents are diehard alums, you aren’t born with the burden. It starts young. Unless you’re a school steeped in tradition, where the bandwagoners flaunt the colors and hate on each other like the posers they are, you almost certainly have to end up attending the school to stick with them.

I only have one hometown team (the Bills), and the joy I’d have for them to win a Super Bowl would be 10 times what it’d be like to see Cal make a Rose Bowl. But it’s the team more so than the players that gives me pride; although individuals, more than in any other sport, it is a team that wins the title. It’s a collective spirit that drives the enterprise, a common pursuit of one goal that outweighs fame and fortune.

In college, except for the teams with so-called tradition and history, it’s something deeper—they’re our guys from the beginning. We can relate to the players because we share a common experience of entering through one place.

As I begin my passage through and out of Cal, I can only stare and wonder at the work they must put in. They’re my damn age, and I have enough difficulty getting out of bed every morning.

These guys are hauling to practice almost every day for half the year. There’s no incentive to this other than love for the game and the dreams of what lie beyond. And over 90 percent of them will never touch the NFL; their personal destinies lie elsewhere.

How many of them have the skills to get to the next level? Who can incorporate their game to benefit others? Which quarterbacks show the flexibility to develop their game? Which running backs are physical enough to handle the monstrous NFL linebacker? Which defenders show a knack for being at the right place at the right time? Who can follow their coaches while still displaying their own ingenuity at the same time?

We ask those questions about Aaron Rodgers now, as he saddles into the position a legend once occupied.

More importantly, we contemplate the potential, the possibilities of what these individuals can do for 15 weeks, and what they can prove to their teammates and themselves. The characters change with every season, but they don’t get any less colorful or spectacular to watch.

It’s like watching that first episode of Band of Brothers, and seeing everyone coalesce into a unit before shipping off to war. What they’re getting in college is basic training before parachuting into Normandy a few years later. They’re only at the start.

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