For sports fans, this weekend is Nirvana

From a sports fan's point of view, this just might be as good as it gets — the biggest, best sports smorgasbord weekend of the entire year.

That's especially true if you're one of those guys who likes to park his big back bumper (the one he's trying, in vain, to hide in those stretched-out sweat pants) on the couch or La-Z-Boy — wearing a salsa-stained sweatshirt, with the remote control in one hand and a bag of chips of his choice at his fingertips — spending hours wasting away in front of the TV, watching whatever sporting event happens to hit the airwaves next.

After all, like the bumper sticker tells us, time spent watching football cannot be subtracted from a person's life. Oh, wait, that was time spent fishing. Well, alrighty then, never mind.

But when it comes to one weekend that's chock full of virtually every sporting event on the planet, live or on TV, and all of them going on within one glorious 48-hour span, well, this is it.

Football? It started with the opening round of the Utah high school state playoffs on Friday, when the top teams from each classification throughout the state starting squaring off for that glorious goal — the chance to call themselves "state champions" — in a few weeks' time.

On Saturday, there was an almost-full plate of college football — Utes, Aggies, Wildcats, Thunderbirds, Badgers, Red Storm, everybody but the Cougars, who needed a week off to lick their wounds from last weekend's shellacking at the hands of TCU.

And today, of course, the National Football League kicks into high gear with some enticing Week 8 matchups highlighted by legendary quarterback Brett Favre's return to Lambeau Field, where The Man Who Would Not Quit leads the Minnesota Vikings against the Green Bay Packers — the franchise where Favre spent 16 seasons on his way to becoming a living legend. (One who has now retired almost as many times as Evander Holyfield).

But while we think of late-October/early November as being football season, there's a big group of great games, a plethora of people playing, a crowd of classic clashes, a bevy of beautiful battles, a ... well, you get the point ... in a wide variety of other sports as well.

Baseball? None other than Games 3 and 4 of the World Series between the defending champion Phillies and the geez-I-can't-believe-it's-been-nine-years-since-we-won-a-world-championship Yankees. You think that's a long title drought? Try being a Cubs fan.