I was just reminded of what made me fall for CFB while answering a comment in another post. I didn’t grow up in a football house. Both my parents immigrated to the US as adults, and from countries where football isn’t really a thing. Most people, in my experience, pick up their love of the game from their parents. But in my case it was by chance. Back in 1995, when I was around 6 years old, my family lived in Columbus, OH. My mom was a PhD student at Ohio State and one day she was randomly gifted tickets to an Ohio State home game by her advisor, who gave away her tickets because she was going to be out of town. My dad didn’t know shit about football but he knew that OSU football was a big deal in Columbus and figured it might be fun to take me. So he bought us some random OSU gear and we went. I couldn’t have asked for a better first game: Ohio State vs Notre Dame, both ranked (though I obviously didn’t know anything about that at the time). I’d never really seen football before, in-person or otherwise. It was ELECTRIC in there. The roar of the crowd was louder than anything I’d ever heard in my life. We had great seats, right around the middle of the field and we could see everything. The plays, the screaming, the cool uniforms, the smell of stadium food and sweat, it was intoxicating. I fell in love.
When we moved down to Georgia less than a year later I immediately latched onto UGA, mostly because they were red and so was Ohio State lol. I learned ‘red team good’ at an early age and it stuck with me haha. I wanted to play myself so bad when I got to middle school, but due to a medical condition (mild asthma that I outgrew) and their concerns that I’d sustain a serious injury, my parents forbid me from joining the team, something I regret to this day. Somehow they had no problem signing me up for after school martial arts classes though, where I proceeded to get concussed a bunch anyways lmao. But anyways, a few years later I was enrolling at Georgia and that was that. That first Ohio State vs Notre Dame game became a core memory for me and started me on the path to fandom. How about y’all?