Extra points. (Here Below).

RATIONALIZING THE American passion for football can be a brain-numbing process.

The game can be brutal. Coaches may cheat. Its philosophers exalt the game's capacity for manufacturing discipline, character, leadership, and holiness.

Football has also become a cottage industry

All of this is discomforting to the many people who love the sport and feel helpless trying to justify it. Question: How do you justify a system of higher education that tolerates dubious testing procedures, recruiting excesses, and 85 free rides?

It isn't easy. And yet... this is the same system that has produced three presidents (Eisenhower, Ford, and Reagan), a Supreme Court justice (Byron "Whizzer" White), and hundreds of senators, governors, business tycoons, entertainers, and other national figures.

Football is 76 trombones, tail-gate parties, golden memories, and a sport that always exhilarates us, enthralls us, and captures our hearts.

You don't have to draw pictures or make speeches. It all comes with the franchise known as American sport.

It is the spring in all of our lives played out in the autumn of all of our years.