Rooting for Laundry
Thirty years after the quintessential Seinfeld joke, the rules of fandom are more confusing than ever.
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I.
In 1994, Jerry Seinfeld went on the David Letterman show and told a joke that I’ve thought about regularly ever since. The premise was classically Seinfeldian: Simple, observational, neatly groomed and well-phrased. When we watch sports in the modern age, Seinfeld said, we are not actually rooting for people; we are rooting for the clothes those people wear. We hate them, and then they change their shirt the next season, and we love them, which means that, ultimately, we are rooting for laundry.
The piece killed, and Seinfeld incorporated it into an opening of his eponymous television show the next year, an episode involving a re-gifted label maker and Super Bowl tickets and a self-absorbed dentist who would soon become New Mexico’s most infamous meth-cooker. The punchline has lingered over the years to the point that the idea of rooting for laundry has become part of the lexicon. And I swear I don’t mean to turn this into a stand-up comedy newsletter, but for the same reason George Carlin’s gentle mockery of the silliness of our varied national pastimes mocked the fundamental absurdity of sports themselves, so did Seinfeld expose the cultural absurdity of what it means to be a sports fan. This is not a joke about the way sports shifted in favor of constant player movement over the course of the 20 years before he wrote that joke; it is not even a joke about how sports have shifted even further in that direction in the three decades since. Ultimately, this is a joke about us, and how we are so captive to the games themselves that we have no choice but to go along, even when we know we’re being jerked around.
And that brings me, once more, back to the ethical morass known as college football.
II.
I realize it is the default state of middle age and beyond to grouse about societal change, and I strive rather hard not to allow this newsletter to get marooned in that kind of grumpy nostalgic rut. But I have never seen a sport change so suddenly and overwhelmingly as the way college football has over the past decade, and all of it seems reflective of a splintered culture that appears unwilling to come together and reckon with those changes. Last weekend, one of the most dysfunctional Senates in American history went home without passing a bill that would have regulated college sports, in part because politicians on both sides of the aisle decided to object to certain aspects of the bill, in part because the president himself has rendered any kind of agreement and compromise as a sign of weakness, in part because powerful constituents had whispered in certain Senators’ ears and made the case for further dissolution of a sport that abandoned common sense and logic years ago, and in part because…honestly, I don’t even know why anymore, except that literally no one is in charge of actually keeping this sport (or this country, for that matter) from eating itself alive.
And so we tumble into preseason practice devoid of any road map for the future, with confusion as the default state. Never before have I been this disoriented about the sport I grew up with; never before have I gone into season knowing virtually nothing about anything. I spent years of my life actively writing about this sport for a living, and yet so much has happened since then that I could not tell you with absolute certainty the makeup of certain conferences (this year’s running joke is apparently that Sacramento State is now a member of the Mid-American Conference, while Northern Illinois is now part the Mountain West). I could not tell you who the favorites for the Heisman Trophy are beyond a single Manning, and I’m sure I will turn on several games in the early season and ask myself how that dude who wore entirely different clothes last year is now wearing those clothes. The playoff also has a different format, though if you asked what exactly it was or when it will inevitably expand or what even the issues are at play, I could not tell you any of it, only that no one seems happy with the status quo of anything.
Meanwhile, my hometown team, Penn State, has a new coach, which is a thing in itself at a program that has employed a total of five full-time head coaches since the onset of the Eisenhower administration.
