Saturdays during the fall have long served as weekly celebrations of the pride and pageantry of college football, but recently, thanks mostly to ESPN, they have also become object lessons in the sweet symbiosis between the sport and the medium of television. On your typical Saturday, nine games, two scoreboard shows and one pre-game show are knitted together into over 14 hours of gridiron-related programming that blankets virtually the entire day, and leaves plenty of time for a few trips to the bathroom and, well . . . that’s about it. So if you’re going to do it right, you’re going to have to sacrifice Saturday to the pigskin pantheon. And you’ll also need a high priest to help you along, so in order to help you turn you’re Saturday into a righteous burnt offering, I’m offering the following walk-through.

10:30 a.m.: College GameDay "OK this is a little early for a Saturday, and GameDay is probably non-essential. Though the pitch-perfect chemistry between Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit and Lee Corso make this a peerless pre-game show, it is still, after all, just a pre-game show. If you’ve been paying attention all season long, then you shouldn’t have to watch. A good litmus test for the beginning of the season is that if you know who Dave Ragone* is, then you can skip most of it. If you do abstain, then you have to optimize you’re free time because once the games start coming fast and furious, you’re not going to have much left. I suggest grabbing some foodstuffs, supplemented by at least one large cup of coffee. One caveat: so as not to spoil the ethos of the exercise, I’d avoid Starbucks and its crunchy gourmet coffee progeny. Can you imagine Woody Hayes delicately sipping a Decaf Caffe Verona? Please, he’d literally strangle you first. His ornery ghost is choking me now just for thinking about it.

Once you grab a coffee and a donut or bagel (I’d avoid a heavy "sleepy" sandwich, especially if you’re in for the long haul) make haste to get back for the last ten minutes of GameDay, so you can catch Saturday’s opening bell -- "Coach" Lee Corso’s prediction of the "headgear game." If GameDay is on the road at a college campus, this usually involves Lee picking the winner of one of the day’s featured games by donning the oversized head of the projected winner’s mascot in front of a crush of bleary-eyed college students that has assembled to watch the show being taped (think the Today show, except infinitely cooler). This simple act of an old man transforming himself into a cartoonish hydrocephalic invariably whips the throng into a frenzy because it means that Lee has just picked their school to either win or lose one of the biggest games of the year. While capturing everything that is sublime and ridiculous about college football, the "headgear moment" -- with Herbstreit cracking up and Fowler bopping Corso on his giant Styrofoam head while Lee shouts "Forget about it" and gesticulates wildly -- transcends the sport and stands alone as inspired pop culture entertainment. For God’s sake, even my wife likes it. "I like it when the old guy puts the mascot head on," she often says. "How could you not?" I usually answer.

Noon: The first two games kickoff, one of which will be played at a Big Ten stadium that can seat a large city and will be turgid with fans and tailgaters. Once the leaves turn and the air gets chilly, these venues become the sun-splashed Elysian fields of college football. I usually sit transfixed in front of the TV for about a quarter, ruminating on the atmospherics and the realization that this is why the game was invented. During this meditation period, I’ve had many conversations with my parents and wife that have gone something like this:

Them: "Can you come over hear and help me with something?"
Me: (not paying attention): "Yeah, one second."
Two minutes later
Them: "I really need some help over here."
Me: "OK."
Another couple of minutes pass
Them: "Forget it! I just did it myself."
Me: "Uh . . . ok."

After you come out of this trance-like state, during which you should never promise to do anything for anybody, you should start working on your food and coffee. But remember proceed at a measured pace, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

2 p.m.: We’ve reached critical mass -- four games going on simultaneously. No picture-in-picture can help you now. Neophytes may find themselves shell-shocked at this point, but veteran TV parallel processors should be able to hopscotch among the games without seeing a commercial or missing a crucial play. If you’ve ever done this in a college dorm room, where the slightest misstep is greeted with a hail of profanity-laced invective, you know how nerve-racking this could be. So if you’re unsure about your ability to intuit the length of a commercial break, you may want to concentrate on only one or two of the games and track the rest on the updated scoreboard crawls. Of course, if you do this, I have no respect for you.

4 p.m.: Hey, aren’t the WNBA Playoffs on? Hahahahaha. Seriously though, there’s often only one game on in the late afternoon, so if you need to watch baseball or something, now may be the time to do it. At this point, I usually lapse into a hibernation stage in which I’m still watching the game, but mostly just marshalling my strength for the long night ahead.

6 p.m.: The Inflection Point -- If sit down for the 5:30 game, you’ve passed the point of no return and made a conscious (and noble) decision to bivouac in front of the TV and waste the entire day. The finality of this decision should not be pooh-poohed. If someone calls to ask you to do something at 7:30 p.m. and you’ve been watching college football for a little over 8 hours, you owe it to that person to disclose the fact that you are borderline catatonic: "No, dude, I can’t. I’ve been watching college football all day. Sorry." Once you resign yourself to the fact that you can’t possible to do anything else, you may soon experience a sort of runner’s high for couch potatoes, if that makes any sense. There are many permutations to this sensation, but it may feel as if you’ve unscrewed the coaxial cable from the TV and have inserted it into your arm and are now mainlining televised football right into your bloodstream.

8 p.m.: The maw is opening . . . it’s too late. Thanks to college football, the TV has animated and now finally absorbed your entire day. By now, it has developed an event horizon from which escape is impossible. Not that you’d want to go very far. Because you haven’t turned on a light all day, the areas of the room outside the warm glow of the tube are cloaked in a stygian darkness that could be hiding a minefield of hazards: magazines, pizza boxes, pieces of furniture and who knows what else.

10 a.m.: Huh!?! Who’s winning? Two games on . . . recall button on remote showing noticeable wear . . . just seen your fifty-second three-yard plunge . . . and twenty-first general studies major . . . losing consciousness.

Midnight: That second cup of coffee is enabling you to endure College GameDay Scoreboard, which is comprised mostly of highlights that you’ve already seen seven times. But you’re still watching. The College Football gods are smiling. Well, there you have it. Baseball can disingenuously cling to the distinction of being our national pastime but it can never have Saturday. We’ve already given it to College Football.