Bucky Badger schedule and Boise Blue blow …

For a guy who grew up in the shadow of Camp Randall, the home of the Wisconsin Badgers in Madison, Wis., you would think I would have some kind of sentimental attachment to the school’s considerable mythology in general and the football team in particular.

Naw, it just didn’t work out that way. We moved away from Wisconsin when I was 7 years old in 1957, and about the only Wisconsin link that I clung to as I got older was the Milwaukee Braves. When they too abandoned the Midwest nine years later, that was about it for me.

So despite having lived here for the last 17 years, I don’t get as caught up in Bucky Badger mania as much as my late father did and my mother still does. And thus, it pains me hardly at all to give them a Bronx Cheer for scheduling a college football game that yields a 70-3 final tally.

I know all the arguments about scheduling years in advance and how tough it is to juggle these non-conference games, but I say, phooey. For some reason or other, I thought Austin Peay was in Texas, and thus was surprised to find out it’s actually somewhere in Tennessee. Plus, I’ve never been sure how to pronounce the “Peay” part of the name on those rare occasions when I would be required to do so.

Big-time college football gives me a pain anyway as it waffles back and forth between being bigger than General Motors and alternately homespun good, clean amateur athletics in its purest form. When somebody gets thumped 70-3, pure and wholesome are not exactly the adjectives that pop into my mind.

And don’t even get me started with those knuckleheads from Boise State. Oh, I guess I technically admire their chutzpah in trying to elbow their way into the ranks of big-time college football, but ...

Blue? Really? I know I am probably way late to this dance, too, but what the hell is that football field about? That repellent blue field almost blew up my ancient television set the other day, to say nothing of nearly making be blow my lunch.

Until their grounds crew takes out a can of spray paint and fixes that abomination, I am going to actively root for a dismal outcome to their grand NCAA aspirations.

Hell, I don’t even like playing pool on some cherry-red Brunswick billiards table. And it’s not because I’m Irish through and through; there are just some things that are supposed to be green and no amount of new-age fiddling is going to alter that reality.

I’ve still got a headache from simply peeking in a couple of times at that Boise State game last week. No mas. I’m boycotting Boise until they do the right thing.

And I’m staying mad at the Badgers, too, though I can’t promise a boycott. I may be 60 years old, but you try wrestling the remote from my 86-year-old mother’s hands.