Though Brett Favre has long since been canonized, at least within the Church of Madden and at several Wisconsin-based bastions of modern theocracy, I'll bet the Packers' quarterback never figured to see his name mentioned in the paragraphs adjacent to St. Norbert.

But here we are entering the downslope of summer, and again Favre and St. Norbert are neighbors in print, as are Willis McGahee and St. John Fisher, as are Hines Ward and St. Vincent.

For reasons becoming less and less clear in an era when NFL teams own and operate their own sinfully over-equipped training and practice installations, pro football season still starts, with some exceptions, at small, out of the way colleges not exactly steeped in the traditions of mayhem.

Ever wonder about these places -- St. Norbert College in DePere, Wis., McDaniel College in Westminster, Md., Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss.?

Me neither.

But I need a column, and there's gotta be something interesting or at least mildly ironic about the settings that launch every NFL season. You make the call.

McDaniel College is the preseason home of the Baltimore Ravens. The tiny liberal arts school is only 50 miles from Baltimore and only 30 from the team's base facility in Owings Mills, so it would hardly seem worth the shipping to tote the Ravens evermore distant from civilization were it not for the view of the Cotoctin Mountains. So calming and welcoming of spiritual introspection is this vista, it is said, that Ray Lewis once threatened to kill anyone who even suggested the Ravens start the season anywhere else.

Your Cincinnati Bengals pitch training camp in Georgetown, Ky., at Georgetown College, the first Baptist college west of the Alleghenies. The slogan on the college's crest -- "Live, Learn, Believe," was, in honor of the Bengals, recently altered to "Live, Learn, Plea-Bargain."

The Indianapolis Colts, whom Joey Porter in January accused of trying to out-think the Steelers ("They want to make you think; they want it to be a thinking game instead of a football game"), start their seasons at something called the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana. The Rose-Hulman Institute is a highly selective engineering and mathematics den, often as not rated the No. 1 engineering school in the nation.

Could it be that Peyton Manning and his phalanx of offensive geniuses including former Steelers assistant Tom Moore, their pores open in the August heat near an atmosphere where a more traditional objective is to obtain an estimation of the thickness and velocities in the viscous boundary layer assuming that the fluid is incompressible and isothermal and no external pressure gradients are applied, come away with superior strategical aptitudes?

Possibly.

Funny, they had no solution for Joey Porter Jan. 15.

The New York Jets train at Hofstra, a stop on the Long Island Railroad and a private non-sectarian school whose own football history includes the immortal line by former Temple footballer Bill Cosby (this was when Temple had football), "Hofstra beat us in their street clothes."

There being no apparent small liberal arts college interested in the Oakland Raiders, the Napa Valley Marriott and Spa is the setting for Raiders training camp. According to the Marriott Web site, a $20 million expansion has transformed the facility into extraordinary therapy for the soul with amenity-filled guest rooms and a full host of indulgent services. The place is crawling with "estheticians," having some connection to the spa.

This might be just the kind of thing that would cause a club to lose 35 of the past 48.

Far more Spartan are the facilities in Latrobe, although the Steelers will do their absolute best in the coming five weeks to transform St. Vincent into the perfect blend of personal devotion to contemporary opulence (Hummers and plasma TVs) with the college's heritage of Benedictine monasticism. Winning the Super Bowl is nothing after this.

At Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., psychology professor David Pittman and student researchers have undertaken a study of the way rats process fat as a taste in a manner similar to people's perception of fat, hoping this line of research might one day lead to innovations in the food industry that could help curb obesity. One wonders if Prof. Pittman will cross paths with any of the 19 300-pounders the Carolina Panthers are bringing to Wofford this week, including 6-6, 355-pound Albert Toeaina.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Bears will convene at Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbannais, Ill., a service of the Church of the Nazarene. On its own philosophical depth chart, the university lists eight beliefs, including, at No. 3, "humans are born with a fallen nature and are, therefore, continually inclined to evil," and, at No. 8, "our Lord will return, the dead will be raised, the final judgment will take place, and the Bears will develop a franchise quarterback."