Road Trip: This is Big Ten/Big 12/ACC/SEC Country
A 600-mile drive to Pittsburgh drives home just how much college football has changed.
It wasn’t a football trip. Our July 4th journey was technically our family vacation, but, really, we had a wedding to attend in Pittsburgh. That’s why we went. It was the first long car ride with two toddlers in tow.
We did our best to make it a vacation, planning a two-night stopover for sanity and toddler energy release in Cincinnati. That was halfway on the 9-hour drive, but with a 3 and 1 year old in the back seat, 9 is more like 14. Standard deal.
I did my best to not make the trip about my primary interests. I considered the indulgence of taking the older one to a baseball game, Mets-Pirates and Tigers-Reds were both plausible Sunday day games, but stepping outside in either city felt like being a damp sponge inside a microwave. Standard deal for July.
Instead, I just thought about college football when the kids slept in the car. It wasn’t until we reached Pittsburgh and saw what used to be Heinz Field that I realized our pretty straightforward drive from Chattanooga had taken us through the homes of two SEC schools and one each from the Big 12, Big Ten and ACC. Six-hundred miles, all four power conferences.
That wasn’t the standard deal for a long time, but I guess it is now.
“Where are we going?” I answered that question approximately 500 times on the trip. Easy enough to answer for the 3-year-old. Harder to answer for myself when, alone with my thoughts behind the wheel, I put it in a college football context.
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