“What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?”
No Country For Old Men
It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’m ready for the college football season to end.
That’s not necessarily a new feeling for me. It’s not necessarily a bad feeling, either. The college football season wears on you when you make it a job, and I don’t say that to complain. I understand that what I do is a dream for many, and I understand there’s nothing out there I’d enjoy more than what I’m already doing.
I can say in the same sentence that this sport’s three-month sprint is exhausting and that I’d gnaw off my own foot to join that sprint if I wasn’t in it already. I’m hardly a seasoned veteran, but I’ve done this work for long enough and I know enough people who have done it for longer to know there’s nothing wrong with being at least a little sick of it when the finish line is in sight.
What I’m worried about on this specific New Year’s Eve is that my fatigue with college football has nothing to do with me or my work. I’m comfortable. I’m eager, even, for the arrival of conference season in college basketball – which is a mad dash in its own right.
I don’t feel that about college football right now, even on the precipice of its grandest holiday. Jan. 1 has always belonged to this sport, at least for as long as I can remember and quite a ways beyond that. The proceedings of the day have shifted, but New Year’s Day is still the territory of college football. Tomorrow, Alabama and Michigan will meet in the Rose Bowl, and Texas and Washington will square off in the Sugar Bowl. There are other games, but those are the ones I’ve been told matter, because they’ll help us determine which team mattered this season in next week’s national championship.
There’s nothing wrong with those matchups. In fact, with this being the last iteration of the four-team College Football Playoff, a field with four teams that could legitimately win a championship is probably a better send-off than this era deserves, given how many blowouts this system has yielded in the last decade. And yet, I’m having a hard time getting excited about it, or anything college football has to offer. All I’m really feeling about the sport I’ve spent my entire adult life (and several years of my non-adult life) talking and writing about is dread. And I know I’m not the only one.
Bowl season has been bleak for several years now, but this one feels like an escalation. Players know it. Coaches know it. Fans certainly know it. You can pin it on any number of the groundbreaking changes this sport (and college athletics writ large) has experienced in recent years. You can try to find solutions for it, whether you’re a serious person or a staff writer for The Athletic.
This extends to the rest of the college football season, too. Rosters are seeing more turnover than ever before. The regionality of the sport is collapsing. Our pets’ heads are falling off. College football feels fundamentally different now than it did before, and you can cope with that however you want.
Some prefer to put their heads down and carry on with their favorite team. Some turn the sport into a factory of inane internet jokes. Others pick out a specific groundbreaking change they don’t like, and rail against it as the scourge of the sport. I’ve done my best to abandon the rotting head of college football for lower levels that still feel to me like this sport once did, though it’s still just about impossible to ignore the top of the sport entirely. I can’t really take issue with how anyone chooses to handle it.
My sense of dread comes from an unshakable fear that nothing can be said or done to reverse this tide. That the sport is in the hands of people – school and conference administrators, television executives and swarming venture capital vultures, to be specific – who fundamentally do not understand or care about it, and who never will. College football is an entity with immense financial value, and the goal for everyone at its helm is to pump that value as high as it can go before they raid it for parts and ride off to the next carcass they can pick dry.
There is no effort to obscure that. Those doing the work of framing the national conversation have successfully centered the College Football Playoff, be it in a four- or 12-team format, as The Thing That Matters. That’s the easiest way to print money, and it has permeated the entire sport.
I don’t know how to fix that. I don’t really think it would matter if I did know. I have no say in the direction of the sport, and I have no confidence in the people who do. What do you do about that? How do you muster up any interest in this, knowing that there’s no real way to stop its slow descent?
It’s New Year’s Eve, tomorrow is the biggest day of the college football season, and I have no good answer to those questions. I wish I did. I hope I will.