Every Friday, the Friday Five will rank something in the world of college football -- anything and everything from the logical to the illogical. This week, we rank the best way to kill time until the 2015 season starts.
February sucks for sports fans, especially college football fans. The season is over, and National Signing Day is done, and the start of a new season is so far away. Also, depending on where you live, the weather totally sucks.
Much of the country has been cold this week -- laugh now, California, before the Pacific Ocean swallows you whole -- and you're typically stuck indoors with nothing to do. Now, try as you might, there's nothing you can actually do to make the next six months or so go any quicker.
But there are things you can do to pass the time and keep you sane until the 2015 season is here, and these are my suggestions.
5. Follow other sports.
Odds are you already do this, as I don't know many people who only follow one sport. Now, February is a bad time for sports in general, but there are reasons to start paying closer attention to other sports at the moment. It's almost March, which means the fun part of college basketball season is going to be starting. So if you're a college football fan, it's really not that difficult to make the transition to basketball.
Sure, just about everybody sucks except for like three teams in college this year, but sometimes bad basketball makes for fun basketball. Just think of it like the MAC in football.
The NBA and NHL are still going, though the playoffs are still a ways off there. But it's televised somewhere on a nightly basis, so even if they're boring old regular season games for now, they're still there for you to help kill two to three hours at a time.
MLB teams have begun reporting to spring training camps, and the new NASCAR season starts on Sunday with the Daytona 500. This is the time of year when I convince myself I'm going to start paying more attention to NASCAR. Now, part of this is due to the fact there's not much else to do, and once baseball starts I'm gone. But, again, it helps kill some time!
4. Spend time with family and loved ones.
I'm probably writing this more for myself than others, but I'm sure it applies to many of you as well. I know that for me personally, outside of the holidays, I'm basically non-existent to friends and family from late August to mid-February. Once the season starts I'm not getting many days off, and with college football being a sport played primarily on Saturdays, my biggest work day is the one day of the week when most people have free time.
That's no longer the case once the season is over, so make a concerted effort to spend time with these people and get out of the house and do things.
Don't worry, they'll all get annoying eventually and then you can go back home and watch television or waste time on the internet like you really want to. The difference is you'll be able to tell yourself you did your part. You spent time with them.
3. Learn a new language.
Do you know what happens to your brain if you don't use it? It just continues to get stupider and stupider, and if you're like me, you can't afford to be much stupider than you already are. So challenge that thing. Give it something to do.
My goal this offseason it to learn a new language. Or, at least, re-learn a language I used to sort of know but have totally forgotten for the most part. So I'll be spending some time this offseason with my Rosetta Stone for Italian and boning up.
Now, if you don't want to learn a new language, that's fine. But study something. Find something you've always been interested in, but never really had time to pursue, and go for it. Whether its carpentry, sewing, studying the mating habits of lemurs on Madagascar, or whatever.
Just give yourself a new challenge and go out there and try to tackle it. You'll be a better person for it, and by the time you've accomplished whatever the goal is, it'll be August! Football season is almost here and you can forget everything you just learned in order to spend more time arguing with friends about why your favorite team should be ranked No. 17 instead of No. 18.
You know, stuff that matters.
2. Read more.
Reading is fundamental! You're doing it right now, and while you should read everything I write -- at least what's here on CBSSports.com -- there's a whole big world of words out there waiting on your eyes. Go out there and read that stuff, too.
As I've gotten older, I've made something of a habit of going back and reading books that I was assigned while in school that I hated or liked, just to see how I feel about them now. I've found that most of the books I enjoyed still hold up -- though there are some I realize I only liked then because I was an idiot when I read it originally -- but I also discovered that a lot of the books I didn't like, I now do.
I don't know if it was an anti-authority thing or what. Maybe I just didn't like certain books because I was being told I had to read them, or maybe I've just changed. But what I know is that while I hated Ernest Hemingway in school, I love him now.
Just straight prose and to the point. He's not trying to dazzle you with anything fancy. It's good stuff.
But, yeah, it doesn't matter what you're reading, just read more. You'll be a little smarter for it, and we can all afford to be a little smarter.
1. Find old football games online and watch those instead.
Yeah, screw everything already on this list, just watch football. It's what you want to do, anyway.
