Blog
The Commanders Made Me a Florida State Fan. My Wife Made Me a UVA One.
Growing up, I did not care about college football. Not even a little. It existed in the background of Saturdays the way lawn care and grocery runs existed, stuff adults did that had nothing to do with me.
Sunday was the day that mattered. Sunday was the only day that mattered. Sunday was when the whole house reorganized itself around one television and one team, and everything else in the week was just the stuff you did while waiting for Sunday to come back around.
With exactly one exception, and the reason for it is so dumb that I have to lead with it: I loved the Florida State Seminoles.
Not because of Bobby Bowden. Not because anyone in my family went there. Not because of geography, since I have never lived in the state of Florida for a single day of my life. I loved Florida State because their logo looked like the Redskins logo. Garnet and gold, burgundy and gold, a profile, a spear, a helmet. My eight year old brain ran the numbers in about a second and a half and concluded these were obviously the same organization, and one of them simply preferred to play on Saturdays.
That is the entire origin story. There is no deeper layer. I have gone looking for one and it is not there. My first college football allegiance was just my Commanders fandom in a slightly different hat, which in hindsight tells you everything you need to know about how my brain is wired. I did not pick a college team. I picked the closest available approximation of the only team I had.
I went to a handful of FSU games as a kid, and here is the part that still gets me. The last game I ever attended as a Florida State fan was at Scott Stadium in Charlottesville, Virginia.
My memory of it is that Peter Warrick was on that FSU team and the Barber brothers were still at UVA, which, if you go check a calendar, means my memory has quietly fused two entirely separate games into one composite event. That is what thirty years does to a person, and I have decided not to look it up, because the unreliable version is the one I have been telling for decades and I am not about to let facts get involved now.
What I know for sure is that I was a kid in full garnet and gold, in a stadium full of people who wanted the exact opposite of what I wanted, with no idea whatsoever that I was sitting in a building I would walk into six or seven times a year for the rest of my adult life.
Nobody warns you when you are being foreshadowed at.
And there is one other thing about that day, which will matter more in a minute: that was the last time in my life I have watched a football game at Scott Stadium while exposed to weather.
The part where we moved
Nicole and I came to Charlottesville during COVID, a sentence that sounds perfectly normal now and was completely unhinged at the time.
I said goodbye to people I had worked with for almost twenty years over Zoom. Twenty years. Two decades of inside jokes and shared war stories and knowing exactly who to call when something broke, closed out in a grid of thumbnails with somebody's dog barking in the background. There was no last lunch. There was no walking out to the parking lot one final time. There was a mute button.
Then we packed up, left our hometown, and moved to a city where we knew almost nobody. Nicole kept her old job remotely. I started as an IT manager in a world that had temporarily stopped making sense.
I met my direct supervisor in person maybe a dozen times that entire first stretch, because we were rotating who was physically allowed in the building. Social distancing. That is a phrase I have not said out loud in years, and I did not realize I had been actively avoiding it until I typed it just now.
I will say this for that stretch, though. The Commanders came with us. That is the underrated part of carrying a team around for thirty years. You can move to a city where you know six people and still have somewhere to be on Sunday.
The part where UVA happened to me
Fast forward a few years and a few job interviews, and Nicole now runs the president's suite at Scott Stadium.
Which means I have become a very particular kind of husband. I help out when I can. I haul things. I design lanyards. I have developed genuine opinions about lanyard font weight, which is not a sentence I ever expected to be true about myself. If there is a task and I am available, I am on the task. This is what love looks like at our age and I am completely at peace with it.
Gameday has a choreography now, same as Sundays do. I drop her off. I hang around the tailgate a while. I head inside about an hour before kickoff.
And that tailgate. When we first got here, honestly, it was not good. Was it COVID? Was it complacency? Was it a fanbase that had gotten a little too comfortable expecting nothing? Who knows. Whatever it was, it is gone. That tailgate is hot now. Genuinely hot. Something turned over the last couple of years and you can feel it in the lot before you ever feel it in the stadium.
The tradition is simple and I would not change a thing. We find our closest friends. I make something with a theme, because if I am going to cook I am going to commit to a bit. Last tailgate was tikka masala wings and POG wings, passionfruit orange guava, because apparently I decided the parking lot needed range. Next one is trending southern in my head, maybe smoked beef ribs and collards. I genuinely do not know yet. That is part of the fun.
We eat too much. We drink an amount I would describe as adjacent to reasonable. Then we all walk in together.
And then, because my wife is very good at her job, I go sit somewhere with climate control.
I want to be honest about how funny that is. The last time I sat in the elements at Scott Stadium, I was a kid in Seminoles gear who genuinely believed FSU and the Redskins were the same team. I have not been rained on at a UVA game since. Not once. That kid would not believe a word of this.
What Saturday cannot do
Here is the tell, though. Here is how you know which team actually owns a person.
I watch UVA football in a climate controlled room with catered food and a clean bathroom and reasonable people around me. I watch the Commanders in a bar packed shoulder to shoulder with our people, or at home with a PBR in my hand and no dignity whatsoever, saying things out loud that I would never repeat in mixed company.
Nobody put me in that second situation. I sought it out. I built a Sunday around it and I have been protecting that Sunday for thirty years.
That is the difference. UVA is fun that keeps getting more fun. The Commanders are a thirty year open wound that occasionally does something so good it makes the whole thing worth it. On Saturday I get to just enjoy a football game. On Sunday I am doing emotional math from the opening kickoff, running the odds on every drive, already bracing for the play where it all goes sideways.
One of those is a hobby. The other one is a condition.
A UVA loss on Saturday does not reach into my Sunday. It cannot. It does not have the clearance. But a UVA win sure helps, the way a good Friday helps a Saturday. It does not change a single outcome, it just means I walk into Sunday in a better mood, which for a Commanders fan is not nothing. We take our advantages where we can find them.
And if you want to talk commitment, it is not close. I am one thousand percent more committed to the Commanders. That number is not a typo and I am not rounding. The Commanders have thirty years of my emotional records on file, itemized, notarized, with an appendix. UVA has about five.
Why I ended up caring anyway
But here is what I did not expect. Being this involved in UVA football turned me into an actual fan of it. Not a polite one. Not a guy in the suite one. A real one, the kind who checks a depth chart and has takes nobody asked for. I never sat down and decided that. It got smuggled in through a move, a pandemic, my wife's career, and a truly staggering number of lanyards.
People keep asking me for the moment, the one game where it clicked. I genuinely do not have one, and I have looked. It was not a moment. It was seasons. Every year here has been more fun than the year before, and every year the team has actually gotten better, capped by their best season in a long, long time last year.
Now, I am not going to sit here and take credit for that. I am simply going to point out that Nicole and I arrived, and the program improved every single year afterward, and that the timeline is what it is. Draw your own conclusions. I have drawn mine.
There is something else in it, too. Watching a program climb like that is a genuinely different experience than what I am used to, and I do not think I understood how different until I lived it. UVA has been getting better on a schedule. The Commanders spent two decades getting worse in creative and unpredictable ways, and now we are finally in a stretch where up looks possible again, and I catch myself flinching at it. Because I am not used to good news arriving on time.
Saturdays have been teaching me that sometimes it does.
The part that actually counts
So Friday the 11th is the one. Norfolk State at Scott Stadium, seven o'clock, under the lights. UVA already opened the season with a 34 to 8 win over NC State, so this is not technically the first anything, but the 11th is the first time I get a night at Scott Stadium and then a Sunday that actually counts, with one lonely Saturday sitting in between them doing nothing at all.
A Friday night kickoff is also a straight gift to a tailgate, and everybody in that lot knows it. Nobody has anywhere to be in the morning.
Friday I will cook something with a theme. I will hand out lanyards. I will find our friends in the lot and I will go inside before kickoff and enjoy a football game like a normal, well adjusted adult.
Then Sunday the Eagles happen, and I will stop being that person entirely.
September 13th is where the actual season starts for me. Jayden Daniels on the road in a building that has taken things from us before, an offensive line I am still nervous about, and a division rival I would very much like to see have a bad afternoon. That is the one I will lose sleep over. That is the one where I will be up at 6am for a 1pm kickoff with nothing to do but think about it.
Saturdays are real now. Saturdays matter. Even when one of them turns up on a Friday, they matter. Saturdays are the opening act, and I mean that with total affection, because the opening act is where you get your beer and find your friends and remember why you came at all.
But the headliner is still September 13th.
The headliner is always going to be September 13th.