Are you a football fan not yet invested in the magical world of college football? Let Gridiron enlighten you on what makes the Saturday game so special…

The largest stadium in the western world doesn’t belong to a football club; it wasn’t built to host the Olympic Games; and it is not home to an NFL team. The largest stadium in the western world is Michigan Stadium, Ann Arbor, where 115,109 people saw the University of Michigan Wolverines beat the Notre Dame Fighting Irish 35-31 in 2013.

The population of Clemson, South Carolina is a little over 13,000 permanent residents, plus around 17,000 students. Except on Saturdays in the Fall, when 85,000 pack into Memorial Stadium to cheer on the Tigers. And the highest-paid public employee in the state of Alabama isn’t the Governor, the chief medical officer or the chief of police. It’s Alabama Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban, who pulls over $11million a year.

It’s hard to explain to the uninitiated just how BIG college football is in the United States, but these numbers might be a start.

This is not just big business; it’s colossal business, where multi-billion dollar TV deals pay for multi-million dollar coaching contracts and stadiums that tower over towns and cities. Seventeen of the 20 biggest stadiums in the United States are on college campuses.

It’s a world dominated by traditions – fight songs, real live mascots and tailgates that make NFL parking lots look like a packed lunch on a park bench – but also a world of change, where innovative playbooks introduce new ideas long before they reach the pro game. If you’ve never spent a Saturday watching wall-to-wall college football from morning til night, you have a whole world of delights ahead of you.

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Character. Tradition. Community. Ask most college football fans why their version is better than the pro game, and these might be the first words they think of.

The sport was invented in college – Rutgers and Princeton contested the first recognised game back in 1869 – and this remains its spiritual home, with a history the pros cannot compete with. Every school has its own unique set of rituals – and with 128 competing at the Division 1-A level alone – there are so many stories to enjoy. From Ohio State’s world famous-marching band – which famously appeared at Wembley – to Mike, the real-life Tiger employed to scare opposing teams witless at LSU, to the honour and pageantry of Army v Navy to the Auburn War Eagle. There are no cookie-cutter marketing strategies employed to sell this version of the game.

Fanbases are huge and rabid. In a country the size of America, all sports are local. Your nearest NFL team might be two states away but you never have to go far to find a college with a football team. It’s not just current and former students in the stands – these schools represent entire communities, and inspire a loyalty rarely attached to mere “franchises”.

Add to this the regional identities which shape the character of the game in each corner of the country, from the proud defensive philosophies of the SEC to the hard-nosed football of the north east to the offensive powerhouses that operate out on the west coast in the Pac-12; there is a form of the game to suit all tastes.

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The notion that the game at college level remains a bastion of amateurism is largely dead, eroded as coaches on huge salaries steward squads of teenagers. And even if half of those seem more concerned with their NFL prospects than the Olympian spirit, that original romanticism refuses to die.

Players retain a lifelong affinity with their school of choice in a way that few pros will ever feel for a given franchise – and you don’t have to worry about these guys signing for your rivals in free agency come the end of the season.

But don’t think the game is stuck in the past. Where the NFL uses the draft and its sophisticated scheduling system to create a level playing field, the college game has its powerhouses and it has its paupers, and bridging the divide is tough.

That might seem like a bad thing, but it’s not quite so simple. Sometimes monolithic powers are good; you can’t have upsets if you don’t have perennial favourites to bring down.

And the restrictions facing those smaller schools inspire innovation. If you can’t beat the opposing team for talent, you must outthink them, which explains why the college game serves as football’s laboratory, stocked full of exotic playbooks and endless trick plays. You never know what you might see next.

With such disparities between the top and bottom schools there are plenty of ‘cup cakes’ on the schedules early in the season before conference play begins… gimmes with only one possible outcome (barring the sort of über-upset which saw tiny Appalachian State down Michigan in 2007).

But there is a drama to college football’s regular season that the NFL doesn’t begin to replicate until the playoffs. For those eyeing a conference or a national championship, there are no Saturdays off. One single loss on your record can end a season; such are the fine margins of college football. There is no ticket to the playoffs on a .500 record here.

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The drama is not restricted to the season, either. This is an year-round business, with the recruiting battles between head coaches seeking the best talent legendary, and filling hours of talk radio and television coverage every single day.

It’s a 365-day-a-year sales pitch, and it’s fought on every front by coaches who live and die not only by win-loss record but also their characters and ability to connect with teenagers. Legends have been formed by the zany, from the ‘Mad Hatter’ Les Miles, or the ‘Head Ball Coach’ himself Steve Spurrier; these are not personalities who can be contained in an NFL straightjacket (although Spurrier tried it with Washington in 2002) but who thrived when put in charge of college empires built in their image.

It all adds up to a sporting landscape like no other, so learn yourself a fight song. The new semester starts now.