One of the truly cool parts of doing what I do for a living is attempting to gauge and relate to the various sporting interests of my fellow Collier County residents.

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but we live in a particular part of the world that is unique in this regard: Almost everyone is from somewhere else. That means the teams we root for are also spread across the map. That isn’t to say the rooting interests for more local teams aren’t prevalent, but the combination of our unique geographical location and the far-flung origins of most of our neighbors means we see football fans from all over the place every weekend.

Where else in the country could you find a packed-out Chicago Bears bar right down the street from a packed-out Green Bay Packers bar? Not in either upstate New York or the frozen tundra of Wisconsin, that’s for sure. But here? It is quite possible that you could bar crawl through the entire NFC North on a given Sunday afternoon.

This phenomenon isn’t limited strictly to the northernmost throes of the NFL, either. We have Saints fan clubs and Raiders fan clubs and more than a healthy handful of Falcons fans assembling anywhere they can. Collier County is truly an NFL melting pot, the United Nations of pro football.

If anything, our unique demographics make our home (whether permanent or seasonal) a more challenging asset for the state’s pro football organizations to crack. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Miami Dolphins have more of a stronghold in these parts than do the upstart Jacksonville Jaguars, but the three teams essentially split an already diluted pie three ways when it comes to fans and viewership.

The mixture makes for unique in-stadium adventures in Tampa and Miami, too. Visiting fanbases often have a difficult time securing tickets in NFL stadiums, but the varying degrees of success and failure of the Buccaneers and Dolphins over the years means that Raymond James Stadium and Hard Rock Stadium can often feel like a second home for distant teams like the Bears and Lions when their faithful are rollicking in the seats.

College football has the exact same dilemma. Where else can Notre Dame fanatics kibitz with Wisconsin faithful at the same slice of mahogany? Or Michigan fans (mostly) co-exist with Ohio State fans? Yes, the younger subset of residents ship their college age kids off to Florida State or Florida or Central Florida, but we also have just about as many Miami Hurricanes fans as we do for Miami of Ohio.

It makes for a heckuva melting pot, a cornucopia of flags and bumper stickers and fight songs all over the area on fall weekends. And because the vast majority of us are past the friskier times of our youth, precious few friendly disagreements at local establishments end up being “Pier Sixers” like they might in other communities.

Without one pro team or one college team to exclusively call our own, the spread-out nature of fandom in Collier County could easily be misidentified as apathy. But TV and sports talk radio ratings tell a different story: Sports are gigantic down here, just as much as any market our size and maybe even a tick more, though the objects of our fandom are clearly more a bucket brimming with pebbles than a single rock of the same volume.

Make no mistake, those pebbles are weighty when viewed in their correct form. Our allegiances here in our (mostly) adopted hometowns may be scattered, but the collective weight of football fandom is intense. Put another way, Collier County is like a Baskin-Robbins for college football, 31 flavors (and then some) to entice and excite and enjoy every weekend in the fall and winter.

No matter what your team and rooting interest, odds are you can easily find more like-minded souls to root with you here in town. Football is our national sport, after all, and it is the one thing almost all of us enjoy—regardless of our colors or fight songs or brightly flying flags.

So enjoy the unique nature of our community, because football season is finally here.

Gulfshore Sports with David Wasson airs weekdays from 3-5 p.m. on Southwest Florida’s Fox Sports Radio (105.9 FM in Collier County) and streaming on Fox-SportsFM.com.