Football season is a beautiful thing

Is there anything as beautiful as the beginning of football season?

There is not one thing about the start of the football campaign that particularly drives my enthusiasm, it is more a combination of things.

It's the crackling of pads, the sound of the coaching whistle, the feel of the brisk early morning air.

It's the pigskin in the sky, the sight of the blocking sled and the smell of the locker rooms.

Well maybe not the smell of the locker rooms, but I think you get my point.

While spending a little bit of time observing the Nevada football team during their camp this week, I remembered how much fun football season is.

I've played football, I've coached football and I've covered football as a journalist.

And regardless of how successful the teams have been each year, I have always loved being out on the field (at least on the sidelines) taking in a great American sport.

There are reasons that football has overtaken baseball as the most popular sport in this country. I have nothing against baseball -- I love baseball -- but football just has something extra that is hard to describe.

Maybe it is the mano-a-mano element in football. Where you line up across from somebody with the intention to whip their backside every play until the final whistle blows.

Sure other sports have one-on-one showdowns, baseball has the pitcher-batter confrontation and basketball (at least in the pro level) is one big solo effort.

But in football you have 11 players with a job to do. They all must do their jobs at the same time for things to work. If a team wants to be successful, they need 11 people to beat the 11 on the other team on each play or else success is hard to come by.

So as much as the individual effort is important, the team element is what takes the forefront.

In some sports having one great individual is enough to carry your team to a victory.

In basketball you often see a great player take over a game down the stretch. In baseball a dominant pitcher can carry a team.

But in football one player is never able to do it by himself.

This might contradict what you see on television, but there has never been one player that has won a game by himself in football.

Joe Montana was great, but he had some great offensive lines and receivers, which you might not hear about when people say Montana won games by himself.

Same goes for Emmitt Smith.

And Terry Bradshaw, and John Elway, and Tom Brady, and the list goes on.

Those players also had great coaches and great defenses.

The best example to illustrate my point is if you look at perhaps the two greatest running backs ever to play football.

Walter Payton and Barry Sanders.

Payton played for 10 seasons, establishing himself as the best runner in the game, before he finally had the team to win a Super Bowl.

If you look at the 1985 Chicago Bears (the Super Bowl team), you will see that they had two Pro-Bowl offensive linemen that season in Jay Hilgenberg and Jim Covert. They also had Keith Van Horne, who also played in a Pro Bowl during his career.

That is three of the best offensive linemen in the game during that period.

The Bears also had four Pro-Bowl defensive players and a Pro-Bowl quarterback.

So as great as Payton was, he did not win a Super Bowl until he had other great players on his team.

Sanders is a better example. Nobody I have seen has ever been able to make people miss like Sanders. He was on track to becoming the NFL all-time leading rusher when he retired during the prime of his career.

In 10 seasons Sanders never won a Super Bowl, likely because he never had a good quarterback, or a good defense, or even a good offensive line. As great as Sanders was, he could not win games by himself.

That explains why football is the ultimate team game -- and is one of the reasons football is so well liked.

Fortunately for us the summer is almost over (unfortunately for those who have school) and football season will be here.

The camps and practices are already underway, and before long the Tigers will take the field to open the 2004 season. There is no place I'd rather be than on that sideline.