I began writing this at the beginning of the week and then decided to shelve it for a few days. It's not super time-sensitive, and I wanted to be able to finish the week with some lighter fare.
As things have turned out, that was a good call.
Wednesday holidays are weird. The next time a holiday falls in the middle of the week, I'm just going to take the rest of the week off. Thursdays should never feel like Mondays, and I'm going to take a stand.
This column is for the hopeless sports fans like myself. Regular readers of mine know that I just can't quit baseball or football. I'm aware that there are a lot of people who have, and I applaud them. But I know my limitations. After attending the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl last weekend, I am more comfortable than ever with those limitations.
The full rebranded name of our little desert bowl game is the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl Presented by Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop. It's like if you gave my Polish relatives vowels to play with for the first time and told them to name a sporting event. Despite the exceedingly lengthy sponsorship plug of a name, this game was all about Snoop.
Snoop is a huge football fan and has been a big sponsor of youth football since his kids were young. The Arizona Bowl put a spotlight on the young players, bringing them in from all over the country and having them scrimmage prior to the game. It's a celebration of football before the myriad modern media factors try to suck the life out of it.
The atmosphere was fantastic. Colorado State University and Miami University (the Ohio one) were well represented by their fans. What Snoop's involvement with the game did was get the locals to buy tickets. There were so many Tucsonans wearing University of Arizona gear that one might have thought that the Wildcats were playing. Put very politely, this bowl game has been sparsely attended since its inception. Saturday's attendance was the largest in the Arizona Bowl's relatively short history.
It would have been very easy for Snoop to simply attach his name to the game, cut a couple of ads for it, and be done. That's not his style though. He approached it with the same level of enthusiasm that he did in his role with NBC during the Olympics last summer. He showed up to a tailgate party on the UofA mall. He went out with the team captains for the coin toss. He manned the t-shirt cannon. At halftime, the bands from both schools joined each other on the field to be conducted by Snoop in a medley of his greatest hits.
Marching band Snoop is a thing now.
For the trophy presentation after the game, mats were placed on the field and Snoop rolled out of the visitors' tunnel in his sweet 1964 Chevy Impala convertible to congratulate the game's MVP (Miami's Kevin Davis) and his coach Chuck Martin.
The whole thing was pure showmanship and so much fun that I forgot how much money I was spending on beer.
The almighty television dollar is doing all it can to make college football as lifeless as most of the NFL. Every game in the bigger conferences is televised, which means that the games are longer. As everything becomes more commercialized, it's occasionally easy to forget why one fell in love with the sport in the first place.
Snoop Dogg brought the kind of energy to the Arizona Bowl that I used to feel when I was in my 20s and attending University of Arizona games. He's a great ambassador for sports and athletes, as we saw in Paris last summer. He proved that college football's devotion to television money can coexist with the game being fun again.
I'm sure the contact buzz helped.
