Your Guide To Surviving Summer Saturdays

There are twelve entire Saturdays before Clemson plays, and we here at Shakin The Southland are going to help you find five things you can do with yourself on each one. You know, something besides being productive. With no further ado, allow me to introduce Surviving Saturdays: a countdown to college football.

We've got a long way to go (courtesy: calendar-365.com)

Option 1: Watch college football replays. If you live in Big Ten country there will be replays all summer, some of them may be Northwestern, but at this point we are all looking for something, literally anything. As an added bonus I guarantee you don’t know what the results of a Northwestern game were, so it’s almost just like new! I know the BYU network does the same thing, except BYU wins every game. I’m going to assume the SEC, PAC 12, and Longhorn Network all run replays during the summer. If you live anywhere that doesn’t have replays on TV there are so many games on YouTube. So many. Just start clicking around. Let yourself get weird. Do you know how WSU vs. Nevada last year went down? Do you want to?

Option 2: Baseball! I think college baseball is still on TV, but in all honesty I only ever catch college baseball out of the corner of my eye at the gym. I know there are some pretty good games going on this Saturday. Dodgers vs. Padres should be pretty entertaining in a relatively tight NL West. The Twins and the Rangers are both quality teams looking to make the playoffs. Also, the Brewers are going to play the Nationals, and that’s just going to be really funny. If you swap black for blue the Brewers are basically the American Leagues’ Wake Forest.

Hockey faces are the gift that keeps on giving (courtesy: Getty Images)

Option 3: The Stanley Cup. As a born and bred Chicagoan I am obligated to put on for this (also to take potshots at Milwaukee). You don’t have to have watched the regular season, lord knows I haven’t. The only obligations of watching playoff hockey are an ability to enjoy a tense, physical and incredibly quick game. As a bonus, Duncan Keith is playing as out of his mind as any athlete alive right now not named Lebron. He will likely continue raining hell while skating minutes which would literally kill lesser men. Playoff beards! Close scoring games! Anxiety destroying your sleep schedule!

Option 4: Download a free album. It’s 2015 and there is so much free good music on the internet. Go and poke around. My personal suggestion is either Run the Jewels Albums. El-P is what happens when Kanye and Trent Reznor have a love child and leave him to grow up in pre-gentrification Brooklyn. His beats are eerie, dissonant, somehow always a little jarring and incredible. His rapping is usually good and always weird, darting around and providing the strangeness. Killer Mike is a rapper from Atlanta, he’s been around long enough to have rapped with Outkast. He is not darting around nor pulling punches, he’s just rapping as much as possible. The two first met because of Adult Swim. It’s awesome. I do not know why it works so well but either of their albums could have been dubbed top ten albums of their respective year and they’re both free.

USA USA USA USA (courtesy: Getty Images)

Option 5: Football, er, soccer. But still, it’s football to most of the world. The world is in international play now. The USWNT is not throwing their middle fingers in the worlds face Saturday, but you should support them vs. Nigeria on Tuesday. If you want to watch a decent match Saturday you should turn your eyes to Scotland vs. Ireland. If you want to watch one of the greatest death machines in the world burn someones house down, well, Germany is playing Gibraltar. There will be blood and fire and screaming and this is a feature, not a bug. I’m not going to say there are ways to find either game online, but I won’t deny it either. I will say you have some sort of pathological sickness if you intend to watch Germany vs. Gibraltar, and I invite you to live tweet it with me.