GAMEDAY OPEN THREAD: LEAVE 'EM IF YOU GOT 'EM

I’m not the nostalgic sort, except when I am, but my college football consciousness probably begins with the Orange Bowl, specifically the January 1, 1988, mythical championship game between Miami and Oklahoma. I did not attend, but my parents did, and so for the first time I was aware of something known as "the Orange Bowl" and the fat, Man-on-the-Moon-like cartoon orange with the crooked crown and the idea that Miami and Oklahoma, these are teams to know, even if my immediate thoughts when the game was on concerned finding a way to finish my aunt’s potato salad (even my parents were distracted – they had been evacuated from their hotel by a fire the night before. Welcome to Miami!) The stadium was also the site of one of my earliest emotional reactions to the game: I cried when Stanford Jennings ran a kickoff back for a touchdown to put Cincinnati ahead of the 49ers in Super Bowl XXIII, for reasons I don’t remember and certainly would find beyond inexplicable. I cheered and taunted my dad when Joe Montana hit John Taylor with the winning touchdown, then apologized, even though neither of us had any feeling whatsoever for either team.
So I don’t have the connection with the crumbling old eyesore that, say, Edwin Pope has. But I do recognize college football loses another towering, sweaty slab of concrete with history and accompanying soul when Miami plays its home finale against Virginia tonight for another cookie cutter venue, and that by the start of next season nobody outside of South Florida (including me) will care much. At least the OB will get its due in its final, probably agonizing hour.

Hackneyed sentiment almost surely will not lead me to ESPN2 tonight, though, facing as it does the dual obstacles of Kirby Freeman and the entire outfit from Virginia, which would bury the ball for three hours and dig it up to kick a field goal if it could. Au revoir, OB. May the memories swelter on into eternity.

In other exciting televisual developments, technical kinks have been vanquished with my Yahoo! Sports account, apparently giving me access to live video of Lincoln Financial’s regional coverage of Arkansas-Tennessee and Mississippi State-Alabama. These second tier SEC games are much missed and have no regional equivalent in my new locale – picking them up again will feel like a little slice of home. A little grainy, hiccupping slice.

All games are in play all day in the comments below. Happy viewing.