Let the craziness begin; I have arrived in South Florida for the BCS National Championship game. We may commence with the festivities now.

Through a minor calendar miracle, my Christmas vacation managed to get combined with my normal 2 days off of Sunday and Monday, so I came down a little earlier to visit my mom who lives here in South Florida.

Let me tell you, it felt a bit weird to get a call from my mommy during the afternoon to see what time I was coming home for dinner after Media Day today. I think it has been about 14 years since I had that conversation with her, and trust me, if she is cooking dinner; I will army-crawl home in time if I have to. The whole Gators offensive line could eat both of my legs as an appetizer, and I will still find a way to make it in time for some of mom's cooking.

But before I got so full that key lime pie was settling in around my larynx, I actually had to do some work.

I fought morning rush hour traffic to get to the media hotel in Ft. Lauderdale to pick up my credentials. There it was the usual silliness of showing 2 forms of I.D., a birth certificate, shoe size, and a letter from your 5th grade English teacher to receive said credentials. If you successfully traversed the gauntlet of volunteers, you get a nice little gift for coming out.

This year it was a travel CD case with the BCS Championship logo and, in typical South Florida fashion, you also got a Hawaiian-type shirt with little flowers on it. Now, I am 5'6" and weigh about 145 before mom's dinner so I usually wear a small or medium sized shirt. The dude in front of me might have been my size when he was 4. The biggest sized shirt they had was 3XL and he could not button it all the way. When I saw him again at the stadium, it was billowing in the wind like a sail, but it actually looked more like the tarp that they use in rain delays when they play baseball here.

Thank goodness that they had some snacks there for the media, or else we could have had an incident on our hands.

Being a veteran of both Super Bowl and BCS Championship Media Days, the ladder is much more tame. There is nobody from MTV asking Tim Tebow who is the hotter roommate on the Real World, or someone from Nickelodeon dressed in some costume asking Urban Meyer if his kids watch Dora the Explorer. You get some silly questions, but on the whole you can actually get some work done without burying your head in your hands and praying for it to end.

I will say this, as silly as the concept of Media Day is; it's valuable in the respect that you can see how loose or tight the team is. Two years ago in Arizona when the Gators played Ohio State, I knew that Florida was going to win right after I saw the 2 teams at Media Day. The Buckeyes were first and they all had a tired, annoyed, and uncomfortable look about them. They all walked into the stadium in military-like precision, even wearing their warm-ups in the exact same way. When the Gators came into the stadium, almost every single player was loose, taking video and pictures of everything, and posed with the Sears Trophy. I called all of my degenerate gambling friends and told them to take the Gators and I was right.

This year though, I am a bit worried.

Oklahoma came into Dolphins stadium very loose and confident. They only thing that they looked annoyed with was the oppressive heat that was beating us down in the middle of the afternoon.

The Gators entered in their usual fashion; 10 minutes late.

But when they did it was just like 2006, very happy, smiling, and seemingly in great spirits.

At these Media Days, you have the star players and the Head Coach on podiums so both writers and photographers have room to operate. The second tier players usually sit in the front row of the stands and the scrubs find a seat a bit higher up.

I love going up and talking to the clipboard holders and bench warmers because they never get any attention. I decided earlier that I was going to get one of them to be my reporter for the afternoon and interview his teammates for me. That is always great TV and this year was no exception.

I hadn't made it halfway up the stadium steps when someone yelled out "I'm right here, come interview me!" Just like that I had my reporter and a new favorite Gator. Freshman fullback Steven Wilks had no idea that that little comment would make my day, because not only was he great at interviewing his boys, but he really seemed to enjoy it.

After we interviewed just about every 3rd string offensive lineman they had, he told me that this was fun and he might give it a try after he was done with school.

The stuff was so good that Kevin booked a satellite window so I could feed him some of it for today instead of holding it for tomorrow or Wednesday. I just told him to make it quick; I gotta make it home in time for dinner.