In trouble with the pastor’s wife

As I was greeting and passing out bulletins this morning, Elizabeth walked slowly toward me. She had a stern look on her face. This was cause for concern, because I love Elizabeth to bits. Everyone does. She’s one of the warmest, most genuine people I know.

She put her hand on my shoulder and looked at me for a moment.

“Bo, I love that you came back to Facebook.”

(But…what was the but?)

“But how many football posts was that last night?” she asked, finally letting me off the hook with a smile.

Heh. Yeah, I got excited. And, I might have been a little lubricated. I honked a bit on Facebook. I thought Alabama had a good chance to win, but I didn’t expect the outcome to never be in doubt.

But if I didn’t think it was all pretty silly, I wouldn’t ever talk trash.

What did he just say?

Well, it is all pretty silly. Clearly it’s important to me in that I spend time and effort on it, and I enjoy it very much, particularly when Alabama is doing well. In the preceding four seasons, Alabama won 48 games. That’s doing very well.

But I can remember a four-year period during which Alabama won half that many. Funny thing—I don’t remember that as an awful period in my life.

There is a lot of substance to college football. We can talk about discipline, or setting goals and working hard to reach them, or players and coaches using their celebrity for good causes. But guess what? We can legitimately talk about those things at any school, no matter where it is or what color shirts their players wear.

All of the other stuff? Yeah, it’s a blast—just as it’s also utterly incapable of surviving any rational analysis.

Nathan is positive he’s going to Alabama. That may well happen. But, even after this conversation, I don’t think he even believes me when I tell him that I would be just fine with him going to Auburn, Tennessee, or LSU.

Elizabeth was teasing me this morning. She took it in the intended spirit. I have, however, actually had acquaintances choose to drop out of my life because my trash talk offended them so.

Lighten up, Francis.

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