Pretending To Care About the Hall of Fame Game Dilutes the Real Return of Football

If you hopped on social media this morning, you may have thought you had just woken up from a month-long coma due to the ubiquitous declarations of football being back. "Did I have a horrible accident and it's actually August 30?" I thought to myself briefly. Thankfully, I quickly realized I was fine and it was just people pretending to be excited to watch the Hall of Fame Game.

This fake excitement does all of us a disservice. We did not slog through the last six months waiting for the glorious return of football just to act like a Kyle Allen-DJ Uiagalelei duel in Canton, Ohio, is actually what we were building towards.

Four weeks from this Saturday features Texas-Ohio State, Alabama-Florida State and LSU-Clemson — all on-campus, by the way. The following Thursday has the Cowboys and Eagles opening the NFL regular season. Those days are the return of football. They are cause for genuine celebration. Trying to place that sort of importance on a July 31 scrimmage that nobody is going to watch is pissing on me and trying to tell me it's raining.

Just stay the course, everyone. We've made it too far to quit now. Tune in to a couple drives of this slop if you absolutely must, but do not confuse it for the return of actual football. We are almost home.