\u201cThere\u2019s always room for family.\u201d The greatest mind of our generation Dominic Toretto.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I wonder why I come back to college football year after year. Season after season. No mater the highs, a Purdue Rose Bowl appearance, a Big Ten Title Game appearance, or the lows (waives arms around to indicate the recent past), when it hits the end of August or beginning of September I can\u2019t help but be locked in on Purdue football. It\u2019s just always how I\u2019ve been. When Drew tasked us to answer the question of why we are Purdue football fans or maybe even college football fans, my answer always kept coming back to family.<\/p>\n
My father is a Purdue graduate, all three of my older brothers are Purdue graduates. All three of their wives are Purdue graduates. I\u2019m a Purdue graduate. My wife is a Purdue graduate and as of last year she works for Purdue. Being a Purdue fan is in the blood I guess. But, why football? Why not just stick with basketball? Well, I guess it\u2019s because football, like life, is fleeting. It\u2019s just 12 games a season for a few hours each game. We look forward to it. We cherish it.<\/p>\n
I lived in Maryland for over a decade and I was away from my family for most of the year seeing them usually just on Christmas and on 4th of July. But, the one way to get me home for a non-holiday was to have a family tailgate. In fact, in 2019 we came to a Purdue football tailgate, just my wife and I, when she had just found out she was pregnant and we had to hide it from everyone. That\u2019s a memory with family I\u2019ll never forget. Without football I wouldn\u2019t have that memory. Even when I was 10+ hours away from family you always knew there would be texting during a football game. It\u2019s how we stay connected. It\u2019s how we stay in touch.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a recurring joke online that men can hang out with each other for an entire weekend and come home to their spouses with no updates on their friends lives more than the bare minimum. Oh, so and so got divorced, but we have no knowledge of why, how, or if someone was at fault. There\u2019s certainly some truth to that. I think like most men my age, I\u2019m somehow 39 years old, talking about feelings and emotions is hard, but being there for each other, spending time with each other, watching a game together, that\u2019s easy. It might not be the healthiest way to connect or the way that some would like, but it keeps us close. I recently went to a Cincinnati Reds game with one of my best friends, that\u2019s around a 3 hour drive from West Lafayette. He was planning a wedding in a few short weeks. I got home and my wife asked me questions about the wedding and honestly, it just didn\u2019t come up. We had 6 hours in a car, and 2.5 hours at a game, but I didn\u2019t ask what the dress code for the rehearsal dinner was. But I had a great time with my friend. The same thing is true with my brothers and my dad. Football is a way for all of us to stay close and connected. Now that I\u2019m back in Indiana we will see each other every weekend at football games and we will get together to watch away games when possible. We won\u2019t necessarily talk about our feelings or any huge life updates, but we\u2019ll spend time together and that\u2019s what it\u2019s all about.<\/p>\n
With Purdue football starting this weekend I can\u2019t say for sure what Purdue\u2019s record will be at the end of the season, it certainly won\u2019t be 12-0, but I know I\u2019ll have 12 game days where I\u2019m reconnecting with my dad, with my brothers, and with a handful of friends. My son, he\u2019s 5, isn\u2019t big into sports just yet, and maybe he won\u2019t be (that\u2019s fine I keep telling myself), but he will be right there with me as we watch the away games. He\u2019s also going to his first college football game this season thanks to our very own Travis Miller who had some spare tickets. Maybe I\u2019ll get him initiated, maybe I won\u2019t, but we will spend that time together and it wouldn\u2019t have happened without football. So, why college football? Because as Han said in Tokyo Drift \u201cYou know, who you choose to be around you lets you know who you are.\u201d I\u2019m a sports fan, I always will be, and those folks who watch with me and chat with me during? That\u2019s my family, and that\u2019s what\u2019s real.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThere\u2019s always room for family.\u201d The greatest mind of our generation Dominic Toretto. Sometimes I wonder why I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":316475,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2026],"tags":[7,59033],"class_list":{"0":"post-316474","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-purdue-football"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115089703251844397","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/316475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}