In landscape and football, Colorado is not Iowa and vice versa

We spent five days in Colorado last week, and it wasn't home.

At home, they care about college football. Deeply. At home, you don't see people dressed like this:

We spent a day in Boulder. Loved it. Great town. Great places to eat. Like The Sink. Pizza and burgers that are sublime. The restaurant will be featured soon on that Food Channel show with the guy with the spiked blonde hair.

Boulder has a nice farmers' market, though not any better than the ones Cedar Rapids stages. It's at the foot of some enticing mountains. It has interesting people to observe, even those who aren't made of metal.

University town, Boulder. The University of Colorado. They call it CU. I don't get that. The University of Kansas is KU and the University of Oklahoma is OU. It's an old Big 8 thing, I guess.

They don't seem too hopped up about the upcoming football season at CU. Maybe that's because the Buffaloes have had five straight losing seasons. Maybe it's because it's been 21 years since Colorado's national championship. Hard to believe it's been that long.

You'd think the entrance into the Pac-12 would be rejuvenating to Colorado. I saw a billboard off a highway touting CU's home schedule. Oregon and USC come to Folsom Field. That's a pretty good pair. Washington State and Arizona and California? Maybe not so much. Colorado has seven road games, and six home games (a game at Hawaii allows CU a 13th regular-season game), and one of the home games is in Denver against Colorado State.

There wasn't much on the Pearl Street Mall to tout Buffaloes football. It wasn't Iowa City. There were a lot fewer bars downtown and a lot more shops. In a few of them, you can get equipment to help you use the medicinal marijuana that you can get in Colorado with a prescription.

I didn't need a reminder of this, but I got one anyway. America may have a whole lot of main drags that look the same with their Walgreen's and Wendy's and Whatnot, but there's plenty of attitudinal difference.

We stopped in Lincoln, Neb., for lunch on the way to Colorado. You go to the Haymarket district in downtown Lincoln, which is pretty nice itself, and you'd know college football was king in that town even if you hadn't seen the colossus called Memorial Stadium on the drive into town. Which would have been hard to do from I-80.

You go to downtown Iowa City, and you don't have to look hither and yon to see something yellow and black that says "Hawkeyes."

But in Colorado, football means the Broncos, not the Buffaloes. Football means the NFL. Just like it does everywhere an NFL team is in the area.

We stayed in a tiny town 95 miles west of Denver called Hot Sulphur Springs. Its main attraction -- its only attraction -- are (ta da) hot sulphur springs. Last Thursday night we were in the town's sole roadhouse. The bartender, a likable woman of at least 80, was a Broncos fan. Her vehicle was Bronco blue with an orange Bronco stripe. At our roadside motel, on a perfectly good night to sit outside, just about every room that was occupied had people (with their drapes open and, in some cases, their doors, too) watching the telecast of the Broncos' preseason game at Dallas.

Where you don't have the NFL and you have a major-college football team or two, you have college football passion. Some would call it hysteria. Nebraska. Alabama. Oklahoma. Iowa. Not that the college game isn't big in a lot of pro regions, like Florida and Texas and Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania. But there's something a little different in a place where the college game is all they have. They need this!

In Colorado, they don't need the Buffaloes. They have the Broncos. And not far away, they have this, which is probably best enjoyed when the ground is snow-covered: