This column is coming to you for zero dollars. Free ninety-nine. Subscribe to Meet at Midfield for all sorts of college football analysis, commentary, and podcasts. Plus, the boards are unreal right now; you won’t find a better place to post.
Last week, I wrote about Michigan at this critical midseason juncture, in which the program is sparkling on the field but marred with controversy off of it. I remain as I was before: I know the longterm realities of SignGate and whatever may come, but won’t let them bother me in the short term. I’m still living in the moment, even if the Big Ten suspended Harbaugh for the rest of the season as the plane left Detroit.
A few hours before this news broke, Biff Poggi broke his silence over the sign-stealing scandal, writing on Twitter:
I have been quiet on the Michigan situation BUT [no] longer. I was closer to Jim Harbaugh over the last three years than anyone except his wife and kids. [If] Jim knew I would have known. I didn’t know and neither did he. I stake my reputation on it. Stop whining and get a better team[.]
(Note: since I wrote this initially, the players, other teams, and even the university President have also chimed in on Harbaugh’s suspension, simply tweeting out, “Bet.” They’re on their Michigan-against-the-world shit again.)
In a conversation over Poggi’s comment, and in remembering drama across the sport this week, friend of the site Kyron Samuels and I made some apt comparisons: college football has drama incomparable to anything else in sport. Some see it as wrestling, but I see it as reality television.
What kind of reality television it is, though, makes a huge difference.
Every sport has drama. Duh. But, much like there are different reality shows that give our rat brains different highs, each league has its differentiator and what makes their brand of off-field intrigue special.
Staying within football, the NFL has its fair share of dramatics. As a Buffalo Bills fan, I’ve lived it — Stefon Diggs and Sean McDermott were at very public odds during mandatory minicamp. Josh Allen’s breakup was the subject of blind items. And yes, the coaches have beef of their own; the ice-cold handshake between McDermott and his former offensive coordinator, Brian Daboll, got more than a few suspicious eyes.
Beyond my own team, look at whatever the fuck Aaron Rodgers is doing with his manufactured beef with “Mister Pfizer,” aka Travis Kelce (who has his own celebrity drama dating Taylor Swift). You could even get into some of the ownership debacles, particularly with the Washington Commanders. I’m not discounting the drama that we get from the pros, and I thank the NFL scriptwriters for it all.
The NFL’s drama feels like The Bachelor — a show that is less about “finding love” as it is big personalities packed in one house, not only competing to win love, but decidedly against one another. Some of the personalities make it onto future spinoffs or hit it big in the economy of Bachelor Nation, but their cycles of drama come and go a lot quicker. Each season, the cycle begins anew; so, too, does a professional sports league, when blockbuster trades or free agency deals reset the calculus. I get my fix of drama here, but not quite exactly what I need.
Then, it hit me. College football is The Real Housewives.
For those uninitiated into the world of Housewives, each series centers on older women, often with families, who “share their lives” as glamorous elder stateswomen of their city’s elite scene. They have a great deal of simmering interpersonal drama that’s lasted years, sometimes before the housewife is even cast on the show. The Housewives film for months doing everything together — group trips, dinner, shopping, you name it. An unearthing of those long-simmering beefs often follows. Friendship is fleeting — women that start on the show as friends often leave it as sincere, real-world enemies. Some even strained relationships with relatives, borne largely from the show.
But, unlike The Bachelor or season-long competitions, this drama lasts. You’re following these women’s lives. They mean something to you, and you connect with them, and thus, you take sides far deeper than you do with competition shows. You may even flip-flop as your favorite housewife turns heel — but it’s all developed over years. Drama comes to a head like a volcano, lying dormant or rumbling quietly before ultimately exploding.
Older rich folks with random, often trivial personal vendettas that last lifetimes? Where have I heard that before?
To return to Kyron’s observations on recent events: guys like Harbaugh, Kiffin, Saban, and Sanders are The Real Housewives of College Football. Each are older dudes with interminable beef, giving incredible one-liners or taking potshots at other coaches whenever they can, to stay relevant.
Each coach, and each Housewife, strives to make themselves/their team look good, everyone else be damned. That process will take seasons, if you let them. These coaches will build empires and cults of personality, much like the Housewives do. None of them are good. You respect that they’re all chaotic neutrals with a borderline delusional sense of self.
As the Housewives do, these coaches form strategic and unholy alliances — hardly friendships, but convenient relationships where they share feigned morality over the drama in question. Going back to Harbaugh for a second, we know guys like James Franklin and Ryan Day are certainly not real friends. Rather, they’re united in a similar, shared mission to bring the hammer down on a rival they perceive as wrong. This, in itself, is the shaky foundation of most Housewife friendships.
Teams, university leaders and the conference also factor into this metaphor, as “friends of the Housewives” — recurring guests who’ll often stir the pot in favor of the clique they’ve latched onto. If Jim Harbaugh is a Housewife, Santa Ono and the team are aligned with him, like a nosy husband or beta best friend on the show. Tony Petitti plays friend to a different clique of our Coach Housewives, and his retribution on Jim Harbaugh is a plot twist, a “to be continued” before the next episodes of Housewives airs.
All of this brings the drama in the sport, led far more by coaches than players, to a slow boil. But like, imagine that you’ve been boiling water in a dam, and the dam breaks. That’s college football beef. SignGate is an elaborate, Bravo-sponsored dinner that gets so ugly, you cannot look away.
Often, we try to sell college football on its uniqueness. Aside from appeals to pathos, us ardent supporters of the game often fail. It’s hard to explain tradition to people who don’t care about it.
It is, however, easier to explain the sport for its specific brand of off-field drama. College football is an institution; so, too, is Real Housewives. Coaches and Housewives come and go, but this type of drama they create for us endures.
Ryan Walters defending his SignGate comments after getting beat 41-13? Knowing that his team lost that badly without Michigan’s sign-stealing villainy? Housewife mentality — they’re never wrong. Deion Sanders saying a team could mail out their signs and it wouldn’t matter? A Housewife making a tacit alliance. Coaches urging Petitti to act? The Housewives are at a dinner, airing their grievances. All that’s missing is a reunion at the end of the college football season, where all the coaches have to sit and answer for their in-season storylines (ideally hosted by Andy Cohen).
In other words? Jim Harbaugh, you’re a pig. You’re a slut pig.
