An autumn's Saturday is football Your TV tells you so, and if you live in a college town, the traffic jams and the squawks and bellows coming from The Stadium confirm your diagnosis. If you like football, well easy, since your TV will have offered a dozen games before Saturday's midnight. Or if you are an alum and have squandered a week's rent on tickets, you can grab one (or two, if the lil' gal wants to go) and pick up a blanket or two (blanket? we're up north in the Big Tent Conference here) and be right there, squeezed in somewhere that might offer a view almost as good as that on your TV screen. Yes, and go, go, go give us the ol' rah rah... kill those bastards (bastards? That's the visiting team, eh?) Yes, we're in the Big Tent Conference (okay, okay, "Big Ten" if you're with us here for a diet of "facts") where really exciting and interesting things happen at the stadium - and perhaps outside the stadium as well. For examples, we encounter rival coaches Buff Chucklebuffer and Woody Hawse after their annual hate match at season's end (yes, we're back in the twentieth century here). Likewise, there's highschool quarterback Roger Crossfoot as he tries to escape the too-many recruiters that haunt his town during his senior football season. Then there's an auto industry exec who chooses football over the carnal attractions offered by his secretary (virtue triumphs). Then there's the prof who - no, professors are too stoggy for that - who tried to print the face of Woody Hawse on throwing-grade toilet paper. And... well, enough of hints. Well, maybe not quite enough. I just remembered a chapter about the professor - at a football game - who used a stickpin to jab the rumpus behindus of a large woman fan who sat in front of him. Curse her She was forever jumping up when the action approached some exciting climax. (The real-world climax came when the professor's attorney demanded that the offended one show her alleged wound to the jury.) And so on. Your author was a professor, blessed with wordiness and stodginess. But when football's the subject he does seem to break free into really good English. Try him and you'll see. And all of that in a cheap paperback book