Introducing a new fan to college football: A Blitz Podcast

COVID-19 is still dominating the headlines, but our podcast hosts take a break from that to discuss how to get a new fan hooked to college football.

The 2020 college football season is very much in the air with COVID-19 shutting down social gathering spaces and threatening to postpone, or outright cancel, the 2020 season. Spring football has already been cancelled, and the closer we get to summer and teams being unable to practice and prepare makes the season feel less and less likely to follow the status quo.

With the first topic of this week’s podcast, we discuss the potential ramifications of the season potentially being postponed to the spring. What would a December-April college football season look like? What impact would it have not just on the sport we love so much, but on lesser non-revenue sports?

We both agree at this point that the 2020 season will be played in some capacity, but neither of Zach nor I are confident in the season moving forward as originally scheduled.

For weeks COVID-19 has dominated the headlines and our podcast has devoted a lot of time to discussing the pandemic and its potential effect on the sport. After discussing that in the first segment, though, we wanted to have a little bit of escapist fun.

In our second segment this week, Zach and I put together a hypothetical five-game schedule to try and hook a new fan to the sport. If you were trying to garner a new college football fan, what five games would you choose to show them?

Zach and I put together a hypothetical schedule with one weekday game, and then the traditional four time slots on Saturdays. The only real caveat was that we each could only choose one bowl game — the rest had to be regular season contests.

We picked 10 games, but there’s an endless plethora of classic contests to choose from. If you had to try and get someone interested in the sport for the first time, which games would you choose?

To wrap up this week’s podcast, we packed up our grills and played a little bit of Chopped. With both of us missing the opportunity to cook for large groups of people on game days, and with social distancing in mind, we discussed what we could put together to eat strictly with what we currently had at our disposals at home.

The Saturday Blitz Podcast is part of the FanSided Radio Network at Spreaker. The show goes live every Wednesday morning. You can reach John Mitchell at @jlmitchell93 and Zach Bigalke at @zbigalke on Twitter.