Who in the fuck wears a double breasted suit?

Comrades, I am from Connecticut. It’s a nice, albeit boring place. Yes, there are clam-bakes, town squares, and copious amount of lobster. Even some appreciable amounts of political corruption. There’s plenty of money (highest per capita income in the US!), lots of cigar wrappers, Julia Roberts’ old pizza parlor, guns, subs, helicopters, and plenty of Insurance. And Yale. And boat shoes, obviously.

What there isn’t, comrades, are many sports fans. Their one professional franchise – the Hartford Whalers, slinked off to frigid North Carolina after decades of being sentenced to play in a mall. Depending on their locale in the state, people generally follow New York or Boston franchises. So what I’m saying, really, is that there are plenty of front-runners. The single largest rooting interest in the state is Women’s Basketball (wonder why?) and the lone professional team is owned by (and plays at) an Indian Casino. UConn Basketball grew in possibility the moment Tate George propelled them to the Sweet 16 in 1990, and now, apparently there are college football fans.

Balderdash. I am from Connecticut. I know plenty of people in Connecticut. I don’t know a soul who has watched them on TV, listened to them on the radio, attended a game, or even checked their score in a newspaper. So what’s the deal with UConn football?

For starters, UConn is the single most bourgeois sporting endeavor in the United States. Rentschler Field (“The Rent”) was initially conceived as a scheme to lure the the New England Patriots from Foxboro, and moved to east-bumfuck (er, East Hartford) after the Pats declined. Handed off to the entertainment Goliath The Anschutz Group, The Rent, which is owned by the State of Connecticut, is actually charging the state’s University rent to play there. Well done, Connecticut!

Gameday is a little different in East Hartford. In Ann Arbor, students are accustomed to tailgating on their front porches, then walking a few minutes to Michigan Stadium. According to Google Maps, a similar walk would take UConn students 7 hours and 12 minutes (a short-cut apparently exists that cuts three minutes off the walk). Man. Not much time to pre-game, dudes.

Even if students opt to drive from Storrs, the drive, in clear traffic, is 34 minutes. On gameday, driving through the mixing bowl of Downtown Hartford (seriously), that easily exceeds an hour.  So, clearly, UConn football is not for the student body of the University, otherwise they wouldn’t have moved home games off-campus to a location more than an hour away – right?

Is it for long-time Husky fans in the area? UConn’s division one program is less than a decade old. No. UConn football is that guy in the picture – the trust-fund jagoff from Long Island Sound who wants to enjoy a lobster roll in a stadium parking lot, but doesn’t feel like driving to a Giants game in order to do it. Anyway – those fans are a bit too…blue collar. And scary.

Now, he and his saddle-shoe wearing brethren have taken to the online message boards and called US a “wine and cheese” crowd? Perhaps the elbow patches on his corduroy blazer have fouled his mind. The home of Insurance and the bedroom communities of greater Manhattan are referring to the epicenter of the rust belt, of the proletariat, as effete, wine-swilling pansies? This will not stand, comrades. Be excited, comrades. The first shots of the revolution are fired on Saturday.