A Colts Fan From 643 Miles Away

While walking around Upstate New York with an Indianapolis Colts hat and Super Bowl championship t-shirt, it's fair to say I get plenty of people who give me the "why?....how?....oh he is just another front-runner," looks.

I can understand. When you root for a team that routinely goes 13-3 or 12-4 in the regular season and has continued post-season success, it is hard for some people to grasp that you are a true fan of that team, not just some bandwagon fan.

So the real question is how did a kid from Syracuse, New York grow up to root for a team that is halfway across the country and doesn't have a team in the division closer than Tennessee?  It all started back in the hay day of Syracuse football.

You have to think back to the mid-90s when players like Donovan McNabb and Marvin Harrison were dominating the Big East, winning bowl games, and receiving countless honors.  The concrete monster, that is more commonly called the Carrier Dome, had anywhere from 40,000 to 50,000 for each football game.  These were the years when the Syracuse tradition was still very alive and the people in Upstate New York loved their Orangemen (soon to be changed to just Orange).

Growing up just fifteen minutes outside of Syracuse, my family always had four tickets to every Syracuse home football game and two tickets to Syracuse basketball games.  Saturdays with 'Cuse football were glorious days.  There was real excitement in the air as the Orangemen welcomed the likes of Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech into the Dome for what would usually turn out to be great college football games.

These are the games I grew up on.  Not the Greg Robinson era of ten total wins over four seasons era, or the 3..count them...three...Big East wins during his tenure.  This is not Syracuse football, and for those of who still follow the team, we can only hope that Doug Marrone brings in the aura that used to surround SU.

My early years of Syracuse football are some of my fondest football memories and it was players like Donovan McNabb, Marvin Harrison, Dwight Freeney, and James Mungro who were forever engraved in my head as the players whom I cared most about.  It made perfect sense therefore, that I follow these players into the pros where they would continue their careers.  My love for the orange and blue ultimately was the reason that I became a fan of the blue and white.  Players have left and gone on to other teams, but it were those players who originally left Syracuse that forever changed the way I root for the NFL.

This year there are only two Colts players who hail from Syracuse: Dwight Freeney, by far one of the premiere defensive ends in the game and Taj Smith, a rookie wide-receiver who probably should have stuck around Syracuse for his final year of eligibility, but none the less made the roster.

No one knows how Marrone will turn around the Orange, but one thing is for sure: Peyton Manning and the rest of the Colts will be in the hunt for another AFC South Championship, and most likely a Super Bowl Championship, and I will be there for the ride no matter if there are 10 Syracuse Alumni on the team or two.