It's all Tim Tebow's Fault....(or how I became a College Football Fan)

I'm a College Football fan living in Birmingham. Nothing unusual in that except this is Birmingham in England, not Alabama. This is the story of how I became a fan.

One Saturday evening in September 2009 I was bored. I was waiting for a film to start on TV, and so stated channel hopping, looking for something to watch in the meantime. During this I stumbled across a college football game on ESPN America and gave it a few minutes. Those few minutes were enough to get my attention because of one player - Tim Tebow. It was clear that he wasn't a typical Quarterback that I remembered from watching the NFL over the years and it was this that initially interested me.

When I was growing up I'd watched Channel 4's coverage of the NFL during the 80's. As I grew up, then left home to go to University in the early 90's this continued. But then, partly due to changes in my own life and partly due to Channel 4 messing about with and then dropping it's coverage, I slowly stopped watching it regularly. By 2009 it had become something I watched occasionally.

So on this Saturday evening I knew enough about the game to recognise it was both different to the NFL and basically the same. Although to this day I'm not sure who was playing other than the Florida Gators, and I'm not sure I even knew what the result was that night as I stopped watching when the film started.

The following weekend though, I'd been interested enough by what I saw to see if there was another game on. There was (I was quickly to discover ESPN America shows at least 2 or 3 every Saturday, with re-runs of others on Sunday) and again it was a Florida Gators game. So I watched for a while. And found myself on the internet after the game trying to find out more about college football.

Over the next few weeks I found myself drawn into it more and more, to the point where I cancelled a night out to stay in and watch the SEC Championship game between Florida and Alabama at the end of the season. Since then I've been watching it regularly, usually 2 or 3 games each weekend. And all because in a moment of boredom I put it on while Tim Tebow was playing.