I used to play this game with my kids when we were traveling. Like most kids relegated to the back seat for long car trips, they would inevitably ask, “Are we there yet?” When my patience waned, I would get creative just for my own sanity.

“I have bad news, kids. We’re not going to get there today. In fact, we will never get there. Because as soon as we get there, it won’t be there anymore. It’ll be here.”

That bought me at least another five minutes of peace while they processed the message. Hey, you take whatever amusement you can get on a 16-hour drive from the Tri-Cities to the frozen tundra of Minnesota.

What’s that have to do with Tennessee football? I’ll let you figure that out for yourself. It’s a long summer.

“Best meaningless games”

A couple of weeks ago, SI.com published an article entitled The Best Meaningless Games of the 2017 College Football Season. The piece caught my eye, of course, because Tennessee’s season-opener against Georgia Tech made the list, but I found it especially interesting for another reason entirely.

The use of the two-word phrase “best meaningless” presupposes two kinds of games: (1) those that are “meaningful” in that they in some way impact the race for a championship, and (2) those that don’t and yet have some value anyway.

Categorizing football games like that suggests that there are two primary things we’re watching and hoping for when the season kicks off: The Race and The Moments. One, however, is threatening to eat the other.

The Race

The ultimate goal of every team’s season, of course, is to win it all. We enter the season hoping our team will become the national champion. Failing that, a conference or divisional championship makes a nice consolation prize. We root for our team to not only win the games it plays but also to finish the season ahead of everyone else in the standings.

This is The Race. It’s awesome (if memory serves), because every game matters, and not just your own. Win any given Saturday, and on Sunday you’re checking your stride, your pace, your standing with respect to everyone else still in the hunt for the championship. Lose, and you start rooting for those ahead of you in the standings to stumble as well so that you can catch up. Each week, the pack of contenders thins out until there is only one remaining on the podium hoisting the trophy.

The Race adds a layer of excitement to the college football season. Unfortunately, it is reserved for the elites, those teams with some degree of reasonable expectation that they can contend with the others for the crown.

The Moments

There are other reasons to watch college football as well, and they can be either in addition to The Race or entirely independent of it. The college football season provides each team an opportunity to create Moments that make watching worthwhile.

Take Rivalry Week, for instance. The last week of the regular season each year is one of the best of the entire fall because it features games that matter for reasons that might be completely independent of The Race: Alabama-Auburn, Georgia-Georgia Tech, Clemson-South Carolina, Oregon-Oregon State, Washington-Washington State, Arizona-Arizona State, BYU-Utah, Florida-Florida State, Kentucky-Louisville, Michigan-Ohio State, just to name a few. Some of those games will impact The Race, but many will not, and they are all important to their respective fan bases. These kinds of games provide Moments worth watching even for teams no longer in contention for a championship.

Moments worth watching can arise out of other contexts as well. Close, dramatic games usually make the networks’ evening highlight reels for a reason, namely because they make for good stories to tell. That’s the reason last year’s Tennessee-Georgia Tech game made SI.com’s list of “best meaningless games” of the 2017 season. It was a back-and-forth event that was sent to overtime by a blocked field goal attempt and was ultimately decided by a single play in double overtime. Dramatic games make shorten your life expectancy, but they make for good Moments.

Moments worth watching can also occur in non-rivalry, non-dramatic games that don’t impact The Race. These include individual highlights in the form of athletic, acrobatic, ESPN Top 10-type plays that make you glad you saw them live.

The Impact of The Race on The Moments

Fans of teams that are actively engaged in The Race have it easy. They have legitimate expectations of competing for the crown, and, in addition, they’ll have the extra benefit of some memorable Moments along the way.

Fans of teams not in contention for The Race only have the Moments, but first they must decide how to process the irrelevancy of The Race.

The over/under for the Vols this fall is 5.5, meaning the experts think the team should win between five and six games. If correct, that win total will keep Tennessee out of contention for any kind of championship, whether it be national, conference, or divisional. It will make The Race irrelevant.

And it will likely do so swiftly. According to one source, the Vols are currently a 9.5-point underdog to season-opening opponent West Virginia. If that’s accurate, they’ll suffer a loss right out of the gate, and wins against ETSU and UTEP the following weeks will gain them no ground. Then comes a stretch of games against Florida, Georgia, Auburn, Alabama, and South Carolina that will likely result in a record of between 2-6 and 4-4, not exactly a championship resume. The Race will be run, but the Vols won’t be in contention.

For Tennessee fans interested only in The Race, their college football season will be over the day it begins.

Ugh. That doesn’t sound fun at all, but what’s the alternative?

There’s a Ted Talk from a guy named Matt Killingsworth that stands for the proposition that people who live in the moment are happier than those who don’t. He conducted a survey through an app that randomly pinged users to ask them a series of questions: How are they feeling at that moment? What were they doing at that moment? Were they thinking about something else at that moment? And if yes to the last question, was the thing they were thinking about pleasant, unpleasant, or neither?

After 650,000 responses, what he found was that our minds tend to wander from the moment 47% of the time, and when they did, participants were less happy than if they remained in the moment.

It wasn’t just that folks also tended to think about unpleasant things when they lived outside the moment, although that was true. The results were more surprising than that. Participants were unhappier even when they were already unhappy in the moment and daydreaming of something pleasant. In other words, what they thought about while mind-wandering mattered – thinking unpleasant things made them much unhappier than thinking about pleasant things – but mind-wandering always resulted in an unhappier state when compared to living in the moment. Killingsworth likened it to playing a slot machine where you could lose $50, $25, or $1. You’d never play that game.

Mind-wandering and college football

How might this apply to the context of college football? Might it be true that we spend half our time foregoing the moment and mind-wandering to The Race? Is it making us happier? Alabama fans might not even notice. In keeping with the slot machine illustration, they may be losing only $1. But Tennessee fans? Dwelling on The Race could be costing us 50 bucks a pop.

The same phenomenon that occurs within the context of an entire season may also happen within the context of any given game. Does thinking we know the outcome of the game before it starts negatively impact our ability to enjoy it? Do we think we’ll win? Know we’ll lose? Do these thoughts cause us to miss Moments?

No doubt, fans have a legitimate reason to be presently unhappy about a bad play, a bad loss, or a bad season. But if Killingsworth is right, entertaining unpleasant thoughts about the future impact of those things only makes it worse.

There is a time for considering and planning for the future, and there is a time for living in the moment. But the slot machine apparently costs either $1 or $50. We should probably figure out which, and only then decide whether playing is worth the cost.

We’re all daydreaming of the day that Jeremy Pruitt and Phillip Fulmer get the Vols back to running, and winning, The Race.

We don’t know when that moment will arrive, but we do know that it is sometime in the future.

I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but we’re never going to get there. Because as soon as we get there, we’ll be here.

Where will our minds be?