"College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture."
- Elbert Hubbard
My earliest memories of college football place me in the predawn glow of the television when I was five or so. The local TV station would rebroadcast the prior Saturday's Notre Dame game on Sunday mornings, and I'd cheer on the Fighting Irish wearing the ND sweatshirt my Uncle Pat had sent one Christmas, happily working through a bowl of Cocoa Crispies and wondering at the images of far-off lands like Lafayette, Indiana, or nearby South Bend with its Touchdown Jesus.
Maybe this was where I first absorbed the toxic premise that these games constituted a battle between Good and Evil; I mean, Jesus hisownself was right there in the endzone, hands raised as he exhorted his Chosen Team to gridiron glory. Is it any surprise that a kindergartener would assume a moral lesson here?
Two years later, the Irish traveled to Baton Rouge to play under the lights against LSU in a nationally televised game. Dad had no great love for the Bayou Bengals, seeing as how he grew up in the shadow of the Ole Miss campus, but his disdain for his Irish Catholic in-laws was even greater. LSU routed Notre Dame that night, 28-7, behind the efforts of Tommy Casanova, LSU's star defensive back who'd recently returned to the lineup after an injury.
Dad being Dad, the ribbing started not long after it became apparent that LSU would get the better of the evening. I was seven, and started to cry at the horror of watching the Irish go down in humiliation before a national audience. Dad still being Dad, the ribbing continued until finally he gave up and went to bed, calling me a "little p*ssy" and suggesting I needed to develop a thicker skin as he headed up the stairs. The latter advice was well-taken; I spent the next few decades trying to prove the label was inapposite.
Later, as we wandered the country following Dad's promotions at work, I developed an emotional affiliation with the Georgia Bulldogs, the team of my adopted home's flagship university. They were never great back then, but provided something with which to identify when we decamped in Tustin and Orange, Corpus Christi, Richardson, Plano, and Hemet. I recall being invited by the family of a nice Hemet girl who'd taken an interest in the Southerner with the exotic accent to watch the Georgia-UCLA game at their house. There was chip and dip, plenty of sodas, and an absolute trouncing by the Dawgs. These people were all Bruins, and didn't exactly cotton to my exuberance as the Silver Britches made mincemeat of UCLA in their wimpy powder blue uniforms. I wasn't invited back.
Following the family script, I left Hemet to go ninety miles up the road and attend USC in 1982. My grandfather, Mom's dad, lived and died by the Trojans, projecting a soft amnesia about the time he, as a UCLA undergrad, had thrown blue and gold paint all over Tommy Trojan before the SC-UCLA game in 1941. In the late 1970s, going to my grandparents' house meant being subjected to Grandpa's worn videotape of the 1974 USC-Notre Dame game, when Anthony Davis led the Trojans back from a 24-6 halftime deficit to a defining 55-24 win enroute to a national championship.
Alas, during my time on campus, the Trojans mostly stunk on ice, with a revolving door of disappointing head coaches. Hell, they lost to the lowly Kansas Jayhawks in 1983! By the time I graduated, I spent a lot of time sporting two garishly clashing color schemes in my wardrobe: the red and black of UGA, and the cardinal and gold of USC.
As luck would have it, eight years later I arrived in Athens for law school during a downtime for the Dawgs. They were just dreadful for the most part, with the low ebb coming when the Florida Gators came to town in 1995 and, as that villain Steve Spurrier put it, hung "half a hundred" on Georgia in a 52-17 drubbing. I left at halftime.
In my early days with P, the Dawgs were decidedly back, and I convinced her to attend with me not only a Georgia-Tennessee game between the hedges, but also a Georgia Law homecoming and two SEC Championship games. Peg's view of the college game was and is a little more clear-eyed than mine; she'd developed a disdain for the campus gladiators during a stint tutoring them while she was an undergrad in Knoxville. But as for our football adventures together, the white tablecloth gathering of lawyers on a beautiful fall Athens afternoon, the crazy pregame scene at Dantanna's across from the MB Stadium in Atlanta before those SEC Championship spectacles,--all of it comprises some of my happiest memories of our courtship and early days as a couple.
But now, I have to say I've lost that passion (as to college football, that is), and the community that went with it. What happened?
Maybe it stared with the CTE scandal exposing something we've known for years, that these young men running into one another for our entertainment would carry with them for the rest of their lives injuries, seen and unseen, that often led to a ruined, demented senescence at far too young an age.
Maybe it was an evolving sense that there was something wrong with a scene in which paunchy white sons and daughters of privilege cheered on these unpaid athletes they were calling by the "N" word during the drunken tailgate an hour before. I still marvel that a talented young black man would ever choose to play his college ball in the old Confederacy when there are other opportunities in Los Angeles and, surprisingly this year, Seattle and Ann Arbor.
I can't say I was off-put when the players started getting paid--god knows everyone else seemed to be making a buck off the spectacle. But I've heard anecdotally from folks who know kids playing at big name schools that the NIL thing has made the whole experience even more remote from actual college. These folks' lives are now spent not only being trundled from practice field to study hall to cameo in the classroom, but also to forced photo-ops for some pizza chain or line of sneaker. Any semblance to actual student athletics is purely coincidental.
But money is in fact part of what ruined it for me. The old conference structure has imploded as teams search out more lucrative television deals, leading to the absurdity of USC playing in the Big Ten next year.
Florida State recently learned the hard way that there's a price associated with playing in what's perceived as a second-tier conference, finding itself shut out of the national championship hunt and a wheelbarrow full of TV revenue despite an undefeated season. What happened next sort of embodies why I've quit watching with more than a fleeting interest: many of FSU's best players decided it wasn't worth risking their hoped-for NFL careers in a meaningless exhibition game--the storied Orange Bowl--and simply told coach they planned to sit this one out. The Dawgs mostly showed up, and the 63-3 whooping they put on the hapless Noles served as an embarrassing reminder of what this new era has brought us.
That, and the fact that most games feature players who are wearing their second or third different uniform in as many years, shopping themselves through the transfer portal to the highest bidder giving them the best chance of playing football for a living on Sundays. It used to be that these teams featured the most talented ballplayers in their home state or region. I still recall Herschel Walker, the pride of Johnson County, Georgia, who won a Heisman despite coming from a high school program that couldn't afford a weight room. Legend has it he got that big doing push-ups and sit-ups. These days it seems the average big-name team features twenty-four-year-old undergrads from somewhere else, who've gamed the red shirt system to stay eligible for the better part of a decade as they wander from team-to-team in search of a better deal. They're nothing more than hired guns now.
So college football and I find ourselves sitting across the kitchen table, older and flabbier and more mercenary than we used to be, neither wanting to tell the other that the thrill is gone, and we should just be grateful for the memories as we build new lives without each other. It hurts a little, this loss of tribe and sense of belonging, especially in an era when pandemics and loony politics have created sort of a lonely space for most of us.
But there are always the Bills. Sunday they play the Dolphins for the AFC East championship. And Peg looks good in their red, white, and blue. Okay, let's be honest: P looks good in pretty much anything.
This morning, four days into the new year, a dusting of snow finally arrives, with more on the way.
Which means, of course, that the time to head back to Florida until the summer is fast approaching. At least I won't have to hear about the Gators while I'm there, what with their 5-7 2023 campaign.
Selah.
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