WHITING: College football comprehensive

While we don’t exactly have a big football obession here at Boston University, we do have a club team clad in scarlet jerseys and helmets that plays on MIT’s field and is thus a little undercover. With our size and cosmopolitanism it’s a little hard to get the total “rah rah,” “Go team, go” mentality to dominate the weekend scene. I’m not saying I’d necessarily have it another way &- as of late I’m just a little nostalgic for the age old collegiate pastime of the All-American football game.

The coming of fall has incited a resurgence of my back-to-school spirit. And I know that I have other sports to choose from, but I got my soccer fix with the World Cup and rowing isn’t as easy to watch. Football games, however, are the most quintessential way to address my less-than adequate interest in sports.

So on Sunday I bought myself a red sweatshirt and trekked over to MIT to join a small sea of scarlet fans under the warm and hazy autumn sun in watching the Terriers tackle their opponents. I finally understood how my other friends must feel at schools where there is nothing else to do but watch bulky men pound each other into the turf.

As much as I don’t understand the game, college in the fall is hardly collegiate without the football team. There’s something about the autumn air, the bleachers filled with school colors, the hot chocolate at the concession stands. Few things so totally capture the American zeitgeist as the team spirit, victory and glory that accompany rough and tumble football.

BU lacks little, but I sometimes feel like I miss out on the typical experience of spending Saturdays painting my face and dancing to the marching band, all to watch men in helmets bash into each other. I opted for a city, not the traditional campus with the coliseum-like football stadium. If I wanted otherwise, I should have gone to Notre Dame. But then I’d be in South Bend, Ind.

I know we have hockey, in which we’re the best in the league. But hockey is a winter sport, and while as a native northerner I’ve a strong appreciation for the cold and the ice, I still crave the customary ritual of tailgating, the letter jackets and the need for wool socks on cold game days. I miss pom-poms and school-colored Mardi Gras beads and the swoon over the honor of wearing the Homecoming King’s jersey.

That all said, I loved Sunday. I loved the constant blowing of the referee’s whistle, the scoreboard at the end of the field and the bad announcer atop the bleachers. I liked being outside, cheering on offense or defense without really having any idea where the pigskin was.

It saddens me that I may never be one of those alums who gather at games to grill burgers, eat brownies and reminisce about the best years of life. At the game there was an old man wearing a red hat covered in BU pins. It must have been his from when he went to BU, when we had an official team.

It’s not so much the sport I like as much as it is the camaraderie it spurs via face paint, red sunglasses and pep bands. I miss joining my fellow students in a fight song chorus, holding up signs and stomping on bleachers. I know that a terrier isn’t exactly the strongest or most football-esque of all mascots, but I’m really happy we’ve got this club team. Now all we need is for Rhett to join us at one of the games.

Luckily fall in Boston offers much more than game days. Never mind the fact that the season sometimes just entails more rainfall than it does the actual falling of leaves (I think their greenness is probably artificially preserved by all the traffic exhaust). I still love the apple picking, the last tans on the Beach, the cider in the GSU.

But as I whip out my red and white scarves and hats I’m glad that I now have a place to wear them. There may not be pep rallies or 80,000-plus screaming fans wearing scarlet wigs and waving foam fingers at a club team’s game, but I plan to get my fix of bratwursts and autumn air as much as I can before falling leaves turn into falling snowflakes.

That’s my bleacher report. Now go Terriers!