A College Football Fan's European Odyssey

Inside the weird reality of trying to watch CFB legally in Europe

The sixth day of our long-delayed European honeymoon kicked off the same way the previous five had.

That is to say that I was annoyingly wide awake in a pitch-black hotel room overlooking the train station in Montpellier, France — some 5,750 miles and a lifetime’s worth of cultural zeitgeist from home.

That’s where I found myself glued to my phone at 5:30 a.m. local time on a recent Sunday morning (Central European time, that is), trying to catch the final stanza of Arizona’s 23-10 upset win over Utah.

The issue is that watching American football across the pond is easier said than done, with the EU chucking your Yankee ass in the sling if you try and pirate a game and the Four-Letter Network and their domestic brethren not being available for free in the land of Napoleon (or Franco, for that matter).

That left me, the ever-addicted amateur football fanatic, with one choice to catch the Wildcats’ thrilling 13-point road win over a ranked Utes team — that being to follow the live stream on the ESPN app like a chump.

That’s exactly what I did from the bathroom of the Hotel Royal, though, as I hung out inside our spacious en suite to avoid waking up my wife, refreshing the Bristol brigade’s stuck in 2008 application to see how the events in Salt Lake City would unfold.

That morning’s escapades were the only CFB stories I got from our 12-day trek through the Mediterranean, as we landed in Barcelona on Sunday afternoon, long after the final gun on the action on Sept. 21, with a return trip back to the Valley of the Smog on Oct. 2.

That said, I learned how much of an inconvenience it is to be a college football fan in a strange land — with no amount of zeroes back home making up for the lack of TV presence across the Atlantic.

Luckily for me (and unfortunately for my non-sports fan of a wife), I was back stateside in time to catch amateur hour in its fullest yesterday, though a part of me missed the spartan nature of watching Noah Fifita chuck 50/50 balls in a land far from home.

TLDR; based on the way that Tetairoa McMillan and the Wildcats played against the Red Raiders of Texas Tech, maybe I’d be better off being deprived of live-action CFB, for the good of my blood pressure and the state of Baja Arizona.