College Football Makes No Sense. But what Does Right Now?
America is in a weird place. But college football is a reminder that we've always been weird.
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I.
They are playing a college football game in Dublin, Ireland on Saturday, between Iowa State and Kansas State. Just typing that sentence feels like the end result of a mescaline-fueled Mad Lib, but add to this the fact that this is not just any game—this is the very first game of the college football season, a sport so nakedly lucrative that it can’t help but creep further and further onto the short side of Labor Day.
This whole Ireland kickoff thing has become a “tradition” over the course of the past several years. There doesn’t seem to be much of a spiritual or historical reason for it except that Americans love college football and they love Ireland, and Ireland loves taking in tourism money, even if it comes from Americans who consume too much Guinness and pass out in their alleys. In 1988, Boston College played Army in Dublin as part of the city’s millennium anniversary celebrations, and then Notre Dame made a few appearances, and then it turned out it didn’t matter if an Irish Catholic university was playing or not. As long as Aer Lingus made a few bucks off alumni groups from Topeka, it was a far cooler idea than kicking off the season in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
Over the course four decades, college football has forged a very strange alliance with Ireland, in which the Irish willfully accept our largesse while tolerating our strange preoccupation for “amateur” football, as long as we order enough shepherd’s pie. On Irish radio, talk-show hosts admit their vexation at the very of idea of college football; nobody in Ireland has caught on to college football over the course of these decades, and nobody seems very willing to try. They have their own things going on, and it is not up to them to try to understand America, as long as America opens its wallets to them.
There is especially no good reason for Iowa State and Kansas State to be playing in Dublin; this is the kind of longstanding and utterly anodyne rivalry whose Wikipedia page doesn’t even effort to give it a nickname. It’s as if the National Hurling League held their season-opening match at a rodeo arena in Dubuque. Next year, the game will feature North Carolina and TCU; the year after that, it will be Pittsburgh and Wisconsin.
These are matchups that appear to be randomly generated by ChatGPT. There is no rhyme or reason to any of it, except to market to varied alumni bases seeking an excuse to travel to Ireland in late August. It is not even disguised as an attempt to import American culture; it is merely an attempt to capitalize on an American mania that makes little sense to the rest of the world. And yet at a moment when America makes little sense to the rest of the world, maybe that says something in itself.
II.
If you follow the online dialogue about college football, after a while you begin to realize that it’s all become one very weird inside joke. If the NBA’s online presence is a running gossip column, and the NFL’s online presence is defined by the balance between random all-caps screaming about fantasy football kickers and genial Barnwellian nerddom, college football’s online presence is essentially an Insane Clown Posse concert. The Juggalos in this trickster evolution recognized that embracing the sport’s inherent weirdness was the best way to convey the emotion of a sport that was lucrative, exploitative, and often seemed to make up the rules as it went along.
There’s a reason why this online posture caught on, and I think it’s because it’s kind of embarrassing to love something that’s this inherently flawed. We all kind of know we shouldn’t fall for it, but we can’t help ourselves. We’re Americans who came of age in a certain time and place. Maybe we should be more questioning, more skeptical, but college football is in our blood. It’s dumb and it’s beautiful and at an emotional level, we embrace it at its own level.
And all of that eventually led us to this:
That is a video of a pair of Pop-Tart mascots cavorting through an airport, on their way to Ireland to watch the Iowa State-Kansas State game. At some point, Pop-Tarts began sponsoring a bowl game, and then they began to recognize that weirdness and randomness was part of college football’s brand, and Pop-Tarts—itself a nostalgic and nonsensical product—have effectively co-opted that weirdness and transformed it into an act of performative cannibalism. Now they are sponsoring a random college football game in Ireland. It makes no sense, but it doesn’t have to make sense, because college football makes no sense.
III.
“College football makes no sense,” wrote The Athletic’s David Ubben, in a short essay this week about how and why the Auburn football program has suddenly decided to claim seven additional historical national championships. As Ubben points out, nearly 150 years passed where college football literally made no sense, where the top teams couldn’t actually meet to play for a championship, where rankings were random and flawed and greatness was subjective and the Argument was the point. So if all of this history is weirdly elastic, why not shape your own reality? “For too long,” athletic director John Cohen actually said, “Auburn has chosen a humble approach to our program’s storied history.”
Now, I obviously don’t think the best approach to history is to bully it into submission. But as college football tends to reflect the ongoing evolution of American values (humility is so 2015), it is also a reminder of just how unique this country actually is.
This whole high-minded experiment—the precarious balance between rural agrarianism and urban industrialism, between crass commercialism and high-minded idealism—always felt like a long shot, and it’s being tested to its limits right now, and maybe that’s why a random college football game in Ireland actually feels like a reminder that eventually, we’ll be O.K. again. We are a country defined by random preoccupations and random events. We so completely glorified “amateur” football that we finally turned it into a semi-professional enterprise. We have come to embrace the forced consumption of ultra-processed mascots. We don’t do things the way other countries do, and sometimes that means we have to suffer through our own idiocy in order to get to a better place.
We are living through a nonsensical moment in history, but college football has always been nonsensical, and it will always be nonsensical. College football makes no sense because America makes no sense, and maybe that’s part of what made us exceptional in the first place, and maybe I’m being optimistic because the season is finally here, but maybe it means we’ve been through this before, and maybe it means we’ll make it through all of this just fine.
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I wish I shared your optimism about the future of a sport I devoted so much of my life to following. Games in college, 26 years of season tickets, road trips before we had children, and watching game with my sons.
Last night on a text thread with some of my old college friends, I was lamenting the fact that college football was almost unrecognizable. (As I texted with them, of course, I was watching the Netflix SEC football series). What has turned me off the most, I think, is conference realignment. It's nothing but a money grab and it's harmful to student athletes, especially in non-revenue sports, due to the excessive travel required of students who play for Big 10 schools and in other conferences, too.
We're headed for world where the SEC and Big 10 create their own league, and everyone else is on their own. Five or six teams in each division of three, like the NFC and AFC, and a Super Bowl. That's coming in the not too distant future.
In the meantime, I hope your Nittany Lions do it this year. That would be a great story.
There are more than 3000 colleges and universities. Few of them play D1 football where none other than JJ Watt called it a "student-athlete charade." It is. It would help if we referred to D1 football that is on national television and respected the true amateur play at DII and certainly DIII. At this level they are truly students who happen to play football, most without scholarships.