Welp, it’s not a Dawg kickoff this weekend, but the long stretch of college football-less weekends ends Saturday, and with a couple of teams that at least gives us someone or something to hate: Georgia Tech and a team from Florida. No, not that one, one of the other ones that self-proclaims championships because the machine worked against them. No, friend, not UCF.

Leave it up to the ACC to determine that their season opener has to go international to garner more viewers. Thanks to the expansion era and lawsuits pending from the two most successful schools in your conference to get the hell out of the league, the Another Crappy Conference is looking more and more like it’s throwing its own hail mary in an attempt to garner some respect, wherever they can find it. After the Seminoles were left in the rain on the side of the road as the party bus with the rest of college football drove off to the prom, the Seminoles and Georgia’s week 1 opponent, the Western Carolina Can’t-amounts, I mean, Clemson, are both doing everything they can to get out.

So where is the league headed for this week’s opener to the 2024 season? Dublin, Ireland.

Oh, and great news…the Gameday Crew, along with their poster child for Adderall, White Claws, and skinny jeans, Pat McAfee, will be in tow! And he could care less if you like the show or not, apparently, because they’re popular, bro. Quit being so extra, boomers. Skibbidy sigma, they’re entering their international era, and they know they ate. (Translation, if you don’t have a teenager in your house…quit throwing shade at the crew, old timers. They’re going global, because they know they’re good like that).

So I know what you’re thinking. What does a country – where football is what we call “soccer” in our unrefined state – know about American football? Do they even care, and what’s the draw for the ACC?

Let’s start with the easy part…why the ACC is choosing Ireland. The NFL began their International Series in 2002, starting in England, where NFL research (they do research?) estimated a 14.3 million NFL fans existing in the country. As far back as 1910, American Football made its way to the UK, but was mostly played between American servicemen and women until the 1980s, when the NFL first started toying with playing preseason games at Wembley Stadium. In 2007, an actual league game was played when the Dolphins played the Giants, and has played regular season games there ever since, excluding the COVID year of 2020.

UK viewership boomed since, including TV deals that includes a British broadcasting team included in Super Bowl telecasts that reaches the UK audiences. But what of Ireland? Is there interest at all?

Surprisingly (at least to me, until I started looking into this), Ireland has its own American Football league. Called American Football Ireland, they have 20 clubs playing in three divisions, from their AFI Premier Division, to a Division 1 and Division 2. The Premier League ends its season with the Shamrock Bowl, which most recently held its 33rd (!) competition, and the reigning champion the Belfast Trojans. Before we get ahead of ourselves here, let me show you a team picture:

I’m kidding…this is one third of the club, which is the Senior Flag Football team. They also have a youth football team, and their senior Premier League team which looks like a regular football team with pads, helmets, and the whole nine yards.

They utilize NCAA rules with “slight modifications”, per their webpage, but noted that the league started playing across the continent in 2015, and most recently noted an initial success internationally when they defeated the Belgium Wolfhounds in 2019. In other words, there’s more teams out there across the pond than we may know.

Currently, there is the European League of Football, which took the place of NFL Europe League, which started playing in 1991 as the World League of American Football but dissolved in 2007 due to diminishing profits and the NFL’s move to start playing league games in Europe.

In case you’re wondering, yes, there are “college football” teams in Ireland, although they exist within the AFI and play with other Premier teams. From what I could tell, the Dublin College UDC squad plays against another Dublin squad – the Dublin Rebels – and social media and websites look like they could care less about promotions and pomp and circumstance at all. Here’s a picture of the Dublin Rebels head coach, in what looks like a sunny day in Ireland in the most Irish picture I could imagine:

Of course, I may be missing some context here, because the websites and social for the AFI have about as much details and finesse to them as a 13 year old putting together a Google Slides presentation on the differences between physical and chemical reactions. And you know what…that’s okay. It looks like they have fun, take it fairly seriously, and have an appreciation enough for the sport. Kind of the opposite of the average Tech fan.

Anyway, the strangely worded text from the title “Is Seachtain Fuath i” is my best attempt at using Google Translate to say “It’s Hate Week” in the English to Irish conversion. One way or the other, I hope both teams suffer whatever they need to start their 2024 season. It could be a win that gives false hope that’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing, or it could be the first punch in the face of reality for either group, which both deserve. I’ll be watching with a grin on my face either way, knowing that one group’s last taste of college football was an old-fashioned “take your medicine” beatdown, or the other that hasn’t seen the happy side of football success in close to a decade.

Interestingly enough, my sentiments regarding the North Avenue Trade School are no different. I tried to type my most common thoughts about Tech into the Google Translate, interested to see how it read in another tongue, and I was pleasantly surprised. Here’s the translation, from English to Irish:

Fuck Tech.

Some things just really bridge the language gap nicely, don’t they?