This post is sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

And now, as they say, a word from our sponsor.

When you go to a particular school or grow up around college football, you are more than just a fan. It’s who you are. We thought we could leverage this pride in your roots and show that "where you come from" is more than just a statement about geography. By positioning NCAA Football 11 as a game that understands this pride and is authentic to these traditions, the takeaway should be that anything that is in college football is in NCAA Football 11.

And this doesn’t just include game play (though that’s a huge part of it). It’s rivals and mascots; it’s legends and stories. It’s those things that are at the very fabric of the game itself. Of course the game is great this year as well. With authentic entrances, mascots and specific offenses for each team, the term "where I come from" takes on a much larger meaning. While playing NCAA Football 11 is ultimately a great sports sim, it should also give you a sense of the pride and emotion one has for being a fan of a team they will never not be a part of.

We hope you enjoyed the series, and would like to thank EA Sports for sponsoring it. And good luck playing the game.

This is the fifth of a week-long series of posts sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

Everyone is undefeated early in the season, and everyone has expectations for how their teams are going to do. Some of those expectations will end up having been unrealistic. Some of them might end up being not as big a dream as fans could dream; the real world might be even better. But those expectations are a key part of being a fan. Here are a few of ours.

Year2: Seeing as how we haven't gotten to Florida's preview week, I'm not going to unload everything I've got into this one. I've got a couple things to say for right now though.

I think if you gave a lot of Gator fans truth serum, they'd tell you they're really looking forward to the offense that John Brantley will be running. Of course everyone will always love Tim Tebow and he'll be in the pantheon of Gator greats forever. If you look at history though, passing is in Florida's DNA. From Steve Spurrier winning the Heisman in the '60s, to the Florida Flop allowing John Reaves to set the NCAA passing mark in the '70s, to Kerwin Bell's heroics in the '80s, to the Fun n' Gun in the '90s, passing-oriented offense is what Florida has generally done.

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This is the third of a week-long series of posts sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

cocknfire: I'm going to admit something: I have a piece of history from a game I never attended.

It was 2000, and you have to understand that South Carolina had not just been bad throughout my college career at that point; they had been epically bad. It had only been a week since the Gamecocks had broken the nation's longest losing streak, then 21 games.

So there was no reason to believe that the game against Georgia was going to be different than the 18 SEC games that were its immediate predecessor: A loss.

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This is the third of a week-long series of posts sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

We all have them -- players that helped shape our fandom either through the way they played or the people they were or both. Here are a few of ours, and we welcome yours in the comments.

Year2:

QB: Despite what you might guess, my favorite Gator quarterback is not Tim Tebow. It is, and might always end up being, Danny Wuerffel. I enjoy the spread option as much or more than the next guy, but nothing for me beats the beauty of Steve Spurrier's offense with Wuerffel at the helm. Give me him tossing a fade route over an option run any day.

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This is the third of a week-long series of posts sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

cocknfire: The first half of my senior year in college is a little bit of a blur. I was working on The Gamecock -- the student newspaper -- and the Garnet and Black -- the quarterly magazine -- as well as the journalism school's lab paper, The Carolina Reporter, and another publication called the Carolina Spectator.

The Spectator -- which apparently shared a name with an earlier, un-p.c. magazine of an earlier era -- was a sports-centric newspaper started up by a former Gamecock editor ousted by the administration ahead of our senior year. (Long story.) It was published for each home football game. And it had the sort of irreverent, laid-back style that was typical of the Gamecock during the editor's time there; I remember creating an ad for people to order back issues and having the words "limited supply" -- or was it "sold out"? -- stamped on the cover for the Bowling Green issue, which was the Sept. 11 edition and was actually (this being 2001) never distributed. We had more of them than any other issue.

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This is the second of a week-long series of posts sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

Of course, the teams form the heart of any sport, particularly in college football. Players only remain for four years or so and move on; but the team is always there. And there are always those years when a few of the truly great players -- or the right combination of good players -- create a special season.

Year2: Being a Florida fan born in 1985, I have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to picking a favorite team. The 1996 team will always have special standing with me, being the first national championship squad. I also have great affection for the 2001 outfit that finally brought Florida back up to its Wuerffel-era effectiveness. The way the 2006 squad kept battling and winning in improbable ways before unloading on Ohio State is unforgettable.

Ultimately, I have to go with a recent one. So far, the 2008 Gator football team is my favorite.

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This post is sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

It's not always easy to highlight the moment when you "became" fan of a certain team or a certain league. But there's always that moment or series of moments when we go from being "a fan" to being a fan -- to truly caring about what happens to a team, to living and dying with each win and loss -- heck, each first down or incomplete pass.

Here, as best as we can figure out, are ours.

cocknfire: I was an SEC fan -- of a sort -- long before I was a South Carolina fan. I considered myself an Auburn fan through high school; the only Auburn fan in an Alabama family no less. (It was either a strange sort of childhood rebellion or, more likely, the fact that I really liked Tigers when I was younger and if I remember the story correctly a friend of the family bought me an Auburn shirt early in childhood.)

Most of the games I watched, though, were the Iron Bowls. That's because it was impossible, no matter your age, to not watch the Iron Bowl if you lived in Alabama. There are plenty of jokes about states where one of the first questions someone asks you after meeting you is which team you cheer for -- in Alabama, it's absolutely true. You choose sides because you have to.

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This post is sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

There are two widely anticipated days in the offseason that I can think of for a lot of college football fans: One is the day your favorite annual comes out (Phil Steele here, of course); the other is the day that EA Sports' NCAA Football game is released.

And to mark the release next week of NCAA Football 2011, EA Sports asked to sponsor a series of posts here and at other SB Nation blogs around our network. They don't have editorial control over what we write -- that's our call -- other than asking us to write about college football fans and fandom. Which is what we write about directly or indirectly most of the time at Team Speed Kills anyway, so it's not that much of a stretch.

Year2 and I will each share our thoughts each day on some of those fan topics from now until the release of the game a week from tomorrow. (Makes the game and the season sound so close, doesn't it?) We'll look both at fans of particular teams and something I've been wanting to write about for a while now: being a fan of the SEC, a concept that seems foreign to folks north of the Mason-Dixon line and some of them south of it.

Tuesday: All-Time Favorite Team
Wednesday: Tailgating Traditions
Thursday: All-Time Favorite Players
Friday: Most Memorable Moments
Monday: Expectations for the 2010 Season
Tuesday: The Game

At the same time, we encourage everyone to let us know each day what you think about the topics -- how you can be be a fan of your team (today's topic, more on that in a few moments) and every other day's subject.

And of course we'll have all the usual content this week -- which is Auburn week, by the way.