I spend a lot of my time worrying. This is, I’m sure, a common refrain for the Meet at Midfield commentariat. It’s a great time for worrying, especially for Americans ages 18-49 – which I would imagine almost all of our subscribers are.
The things I worry about are, largely speaking, not worth worrying about. Things far beyond my control, structural things controlled by levers of power I will never see and have no ability to influence in any meaningful way. For as much time as I spend thinking about the rapid heating of the Earth or the people we’ve cast into the streets to suffer the brunt of that heating, you would think I could have solved it by now.
Really, I know worrying just serves to make me feel better. If I spend my precious time Being Very Concerned, I can cash in my good boy points for time spent watching football or playing video games or any other indulgences. It’s the lowest risk push-pull of all time – I sacrifice precious brain space on problems I know I cannot help, and in exchange, I get to drink a beer.
There’s one thing that has been really bothering me this week, though. Or, this month. Maybe the whole year? It doesn’t matter. I’ve been worried about this for a long time, and with each passing day, week, month and year, I really only become more worried about it.
We’re losing college football.
Not rapidly, and not in the way that you traditionally lose something. It isn’t going away, per see. College football is still here and will continue to be here. This is much too large a business to fold or alter significantly enough that Joe Six-Pack notices.
The conferences and TV networks now in control of the sport are a lot like animation showrunners because, for as many changes as they make, they never break the rules of their characters. Homer Simpson’s eyes can only be so big, and college football teams can only be so professional. There has to be a veil of mystique covering the machinery, one festooned with all of the pomp and circumstance of the sport that has come to define it over its first century and change of existence.
I’m worried not because I fear the removal of the sheet. Save for a few programs at the top of the sport, most teams can’t afford to risk alienating their fan bases by cutting loose the emotional bonds made to bloated or inefficient traditions.
Michigan does not win enough to drop the holier-than-thou act and transform into a football factory. Nor does Notre Dame. Virginia Tech may want to be a title contender, but it still needs to look a certain way in getting there, lest the locals become unruly. This applies to the sport’s huge swath of eternally optimistic movers and shakers.
The immutable powerhouses – teams like Alabama, Clemson, Georgia, Ohio State, Oklahoma and USC – don’t need to play to the base. Their base is national, and playing to it consists only of winning football games.
Take a minute and think to yourself about how you define these programs. What is the identity you associate with Alabama, Ohio State, or Oklahoma? Unless you attended the school or have formed a long-term connection to it through other means, I would wager one of the first things to come to mind had something to do with national title contention of NFL draft production.
The identities atop the sport are fundamentally identical because there is only one way to play the game they’re playing. If, under the cover of night, you were to swap out the rosters of the top five programs in America, they would have almost the exact same make-up as they did before. They have their strengths and weaknesses, predicated largely around coach preferences, but the differences are smaller with each passing year.
It’s college football for NFL fans, and it’s the only part of the sport pushed onto regular people by a huge chunk of the national media responsible for covering it.
Here’s the last day of ESPN’s college football coverage online: Notre Dame, Notre Dame again, Ohio State, Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State, Notre Dame and Ohio State again, Oregon, the College Football Playoff, the College Football Playoff again, the College Football Playoff a third time, a trailer for the season (Clemson as the lead image), gambling picks and more gambling picks.
Stories on Cincinnati’s quarterback battle, the results of any games played thus far and on Kansas head coach Lane Leipold’s contract exist, but they’ve all been relegated to a sidebar. Mixed in among them, of course, are stories about playoff expansion and Alabama’s title odds. Even in the nitty gritty section, there’s no escape from the most profitable parts of the sport.
You will think about the playoff, you will bet on games and you will watch the ABC primetime matchup. There’s no option not to if you have any interest in engaging with the sport beyond your team, so long as your team isn’t a perennial playoff contender.
This is the kind of thing I worry about. I worry that a generation of fans has been indoctrinated into this shit. That it’s only going to get louder and more intense. College football has never been more profitable. There’s no reason to change course for the sport’s power brokers. Why wouldn’t it get louder? Why wouldn’t you lean in further? The four-team playoff can generate hundreds of millions of dollars, so just imagine what we could make off of 12 teams! More programs are absorbed by the void, more fanbases are left only with the memory of their favorite team having traits or traditions or anything worth caring about.
Like the weather, homelessness, or any other ill this world has created, I’m helpless to fight this. It’s too big, and my involvement is not desired beyond any minor fan-service obligations of these industries that were established when the American populous had the ability to fight against things that are bad. The top of the sport is only getting worse, and there’s nothing I can do about it. So, I worry.
I’ve seen two things this week that have made me feel a little better about all of this existential dread around the sport I love. In the grand scheme of it all, they are tremendously minor things. But, that’s all the sport has ever been. In better times, it has been defined by its minor things – by its weird little details that differentiate games and teams and coaches and programs.
The first came on Thursday night. For the first time in more than a decade, Pittsburgh and West Virginia played the Backyard Brawl. Once fierce rivals in the Big East, they’ve been split over the last decade by conference realignment that shipped West Virginia to the Big 12 and Pitt to the ACC.
And, like it never left, it hit every mark in its return. It had a blocked punt, an interception returned for a touchdown that ultimately won the game for Pitt, a constant sense of underlying hatred, and the largest crowd in Pittsburgh sports history. It was electric.
Watching M.J. Devonshire return that interception and seeing the ensuing crowd reaction unlocked feelings in my brain that this sport can rarely provide anymore. I felt like a kid again. There was nostalgia, sure, but this was a moment unique to college football. This cannot exist anywhere else. And increasingly, it cannot exist in the parts of the sport that draw almost all of the national attention.
I’m not the only one who felt this. The media personalities responsible for the white-washing of the sport that allows its power brokers to act without recourse or backlash, as brazenly empty as they are, recognize too the mistakes they have made. Will they change their ways? Of course not. But they know just as well as you and I do: This is what the sport should be. Their bastardization is fundamentally wrong. We need college football to be college football.
The second came yesterday morning. SMU shared a video of former halfback Eric Dickerson driving a Gold Trans Am, the single most defining symbol of the sport’s decadence and separation. As a recruit, Dickerson was famously gifted this exact car by eager Texas A&M boosters – still not enough to outbid SMU, which was home to some of the finest cheating-ass boosters the sport will ever see.
It’s such a small thing. This video is 23 seconds long. It has no impact on the way SMU’s program is run, the things it does on the football field or its efforts on the recruiting trail. This is fan service for a fan base that has suffered a lot, but it’s also for people like me.
We need these programs to be distinct. I need them to be distinct. I need them to have regional rivals, histories that they embrace, traditions that they stick to, and immutable quirks that change the way they play the game.
I don’t want Wisconsin to learn how to pass. I don’t want Auburn to settle the hell down. I don’t want Ohio State – my childhood team, and one I’ve lost all connection to in the four years since Urban Meyer was retained after years spent covering up Zach Smith’s abuses – to be so committed to the passing game that it needs to move a home playoff game to Lucas Oil Stadium for its ideology to function.
There’s a specifically correct way for these programs to be built, a way the sport needs to feel like itself. Without that, college football is just a larger NFL – which seems to be the express goal of ESPN, FOX, and every major conference. And, for me to care about it – for me to enough out of this to justify the thousands of hours I have put into covering this sport – I need that not to be the outcome of all this. I need college football to be college football.