An Elegy for College Football
And a Defense of Nostalgia
When you get older, it suddenly begins to dawn on you that your experiences are not universal. Certain things in life that seem commonplace and stable begin to change ever so slowly until one day, you look up and find them altered beyond recognition, if not vanished entirely. These days, I often tell my classes I feel ancient because I am old enough to have used a rotary phone (which I then have to explain to them what this was). Somethings that were crucial to my youth and the youth of many others, my students will never experience.
Among those is the experience of Saturday mornings as a kid. I am vaguely aware that television networks still show cartoons on Saturday mornings, but back then, there were only three(!) television channels, and no Cartoon Network; I don’t remember when we first experienced cable TV, but it must have been in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Before then, Saturday mornings were something special. It was the one time of the week when you could gorge yourself on animated TV for hours on end, or TV of any kind for that matter. It was a unique experience. Saturdays meant liberation from school, where you were trapped for six plus hours a day with people you mostly disliked, doing tedious things you mostly despised. I remember waking up one day on a Saturday morning (I think it was 1985), and realizing it was Saturday, and I didn’t have to go to school, hugging my brother out of joy (which he did not appreciate).
But the best part of the day was watching college football from noon until late at night. College football in the South is a very serious affair, if you are not familiar with it. Back then, very few football games were broadcast on national television and you mainly had to watch them on regional television networks like Ted Turner’s TBS or Jefferson Pilot. These local TV broadcasts were a staple of college football in the South, and I can remember the child-like glee I used to feel when a promo for the Southeastern Conference came on (the football league my team, the Florida Gators, still play in).
It is hard to remember now, when you can stream anything, any time, that a regularly scheduled broadcast was an event people would watch together, and football in the South was that kind of event.
My team, the University of Florida, were sort of underachievers for most of my childhood. They were also an “outlaw” program for a while. In 1984, the NCAA (the National College Athletics Association, the sports cartel I mean governing body of college football) charged the football program with a number of violations (mostly, paying players). This led to them being ineligible for postseason play and not being allowed to have their games televised. As a result, my earliest memories were of listening to Florida games rather than watching them, or only seeing the highlights later on. When I did finally get to see them play, starting in 1987, they weren’t very good. Only in 1990, with the hiring of Steve Spurrier, who turned the program into a national power, did things pick up.
There are so many memories that come to mind, but one in particular sticks out. Florida was just becoming nationally prominent, and they got into a close game with the University of Kentucky, a bottom dweller, a loss to whom would have ruined our season. Just to explain, major college football until a few years ago did not have a playoff system to decide its champion, only a ranking system based on journalists (the Associated Press Poll) and the college coaches themselves (the Coaches Poll). A loss to a perceived inferior team could end any chance to claim a title. Hence, when the Gators found themselves trailing late in the game against Kentucky, they needed a miracle to win. My dad and I were listening to the game on radio, because we could not get the TV broadcast (again, this is back way before every single game could be seen on TV). We were beside ourselves with dismay that Florida seemed on the verge of losing to a traditional doormat, when this happened:
As you can hear from the call, Mic Huber, the longtime radio announcer for Florida football games, was quite excited. I remember his reaction being so loud and unintelligible that it took me and my dad a few moments to realize what had happened. But it’s one of those things you don’t forget, especially because of Huber’s voice, so familiar after listening to so many of his calls. The same thing was true of TV, back when there were a limited number of games broadcast nationally. If you came to adolescence in the late 1980s and 1990s, you grew up on ABC broadcasts featuring Keith Jackson, whose voice became a staple of every young college football fan’s life and burned into the memory of anyone who ever listened to him call your team’s game.
I remember virtually every big game Jackson called for Florida, except when Florida won the national championship in 1996. That was because I was at the game with my family. They won during my first year of college, defeating our arch-rivals, the Florida State Seminoles, to claim the title. It is one of my great adolescent memories. It might have been the height of my college sports fandom in retrospect.
However, without being able to realize it, college football was already changing for the worse in the 1990s, mostly because of television. ESPN originally started in order broadcast hockey games in New England, but it was bought by ABC in 1984, began broadcasting college football games in 1987 and Disney bought ABC in 1996. When ESPN first started to broadcast college games, they were joy to watch. ESPN was founded by people with local ties and a love for sports and their broadcast teams exemplified this. By the end of the century these broadcasts had become unbearable. Announcers routinely talked over the game, cut away from action for sideline interviews and in general treated the broadcast as more important than the game. ESPN’s Saturday morning preview show, College Game Day, started out as a half-hour preview of the day’s games. Eventually, it became a four hour affair, though they figured out that no one wanted to watch four hours of talking about football and reduced it to two. But you get the picture. ESPN went from a network designed to provide coverage of regional niche sports at 2am to part of an international conglomerate whose main objective was to dominate large TV markets.
The effect on college football was instantaneous, though no one noticed it at the time. The recruiting analyst (that there are such things is due to ESPN’s insidious influence) Tom Luginbill made the point that before the 1990s, when there were hardly any nationally televised college football games, a few universities dominated the sport (Nebraska, Oklahoma, Notre Dame, Michigan, Ohio State and Alabama, mostly). But once you get on national TV, this opened things up. The 1990s were kind of the golden age of the sport in some respects. But the creation of a national TV market for college football was its doom. Almost immediately, the salaries of head coaches started to skyrocket as ad revenue became the driver of the sport. Steve Spurrier, the head coach of the University of Florida, became the first head coach to be paid one million dollars a year in 1995. Salaries for head coaches today regularly exceed five million dollars per year and a few make over ten million per annum. These coaches are often the highest paid public employees in their state and this increase in revenue naturally altered the nature of the sport itself.
Besides salaries for coaches, this also meant reshaping the nature of college football rivalries, which are inescapably regional in nature. There used to be only a few “major” conferences: the Pac-8 (West Coast), the Big Ten (Upper Midwest), the Southeastern Conference (Southeast), the Atlantic Coast Conference (East Coast) and the Big-8 (Lower Midwest) and the Southwest Conference (a bunch of Texas schools and Arkansas). There was always some movement of schools to and from conferences and additions over time, but these began to expand beyond these regions in the 1990s. The SEC first expanded from ten to twelve teams in 1992; the Big 8 became the Big 12 in 1996 and the Pac-10 became the Pac 12 in 2011. The goal was more eyeballs on TV screens and more ad revenue, more money for programs. Now there are basically two humongous conferences (the Big 10 and SEC) which dominate a bunch of smaller, less competitive conferences, and it is certain that we will have one big super-conference before all is said and done. Even now, you have teams on the West Coast in the same conference with teams from the East Coast, something that makes it very difficult for the parents of players to attend their games, but which unfortunately has little to do with what college football is anymore.
It wasn’t long before people began to complain about college players not being paid, and this has recently become the last shoe to drop. Players are paid millions of dollars now, sometimes before they have even set foot on campus, much less played a game. This will change with time, as the powers that be will almost certainly insist on a contract structure going forward. But I always found the arguments for paying them ludicrous, and the manner in which most people argued for it to be completely silly. Many such advocates act as if eighteen year old kids not getting millions of dollars is on par with chattel slavery. These people fail to understand that capitalism means those who own the capital get to keep the bulk of the profits, not their employees. And they know this in other contexts. Everyone loves Chik-Fil-A but nobody is clamoring for us to pay the people who cook the sandwiches a million dollars a year to do so.
Such people also refuse to understand that the university is one of those places that is supposed to be about something other than the market, that must be sheltered from it in order to perform its function. College football players are not professionals and cannot be; they are kids, not fully functioning adults. (Trust me, this is twenty plus years of college teaching experience speaking here.) That’s why it is idiotic to pay them as if they were, which only empowers greedy relatives, sleezy agents and scum bag corporate types. All of this can be traced back to the decline of university, with its addiction to federal money and abandonment of in loco parentis obligations. But that is a story for another time.
College football’s subjection to an economy of scale that favors the cheap and readily consumable over what is particular, unique and renewable, means that what passes for it today is a counterfeit. College fan bases exist because of institutions that are supposed to be about handing on wisdom from one generation to another, transmitting loyalties that transcend mere self-interest. Making college football a “national” game for a national market naturally bleeds it dry of the regional characteristics that made it such a joy to participate in as a fan. This naturally produces a homogenization of the college game not unlike what happens when Budweiser makes beer. I once went to the Anheuser-Busch plant in St. Louis and was stunned how good the beer tasted. I asked a friend of mine who is an engineer from that area why this was so. He told me the reason the beer sold in stores tastes so bland is that it must be altered chemically so it can be stored longer, so it can be shipped nationwide, which naturally alters its flavor. And of course, being more inoffensive in taste means more of it can be sold in more places. But the price is that it becomes bland and tasteless. This is what is happening to college football. I call it the McDonaldization of everything, and this is why what passes for “amateur athletics” today, at least with regard to revenue producing sports (the term itself is revealing), is just really advanced AI slop.
All of this was more or less inevitable, given the popularity of college football and the way American society actually works in practice. Anything that popular is going to be colonized by big business and turned into a crappy product at some point.
But it is not my purpose to lament its passing. I still watch Florida games, though for how much longer I am not sure. Mostly, they are an excuse to gather with family, which I don’t do as much as I would like otherwise. Especially when—and I hope it does not come quickly—my father eventually passes, I just don’t know how much interest I will have in the game anymore. I have been watching games with my father since I was a child, and it just won’t be the same without him. I suppose if I had children of my own, then I could watch with them. But I think I would just find other ways to bond with them.
One might criticize all this as nostalgia, that all the changes are not that big of a deal, and that I should just move on with the times, that change is good, blah blah blah. This is just whistling past the graveyard. Deep down, we know (or should know) that things in this life do not last, even the best things. What is good is apt to be fleeting and be replaced by things of inferior quality. Decay is our natural state, no matter how much we idolize progress.
In the past few years, I have lost several of my older relatives, most recently and painfully my mother. One thing I have learned as I grow older is that one must feel the pain of loss, to admit that some things—some people—are irreplaceable in this life. One must face the reality that what is good is fleeting and that we cannot enjoy its presence but for a brief time in this world. But I have also learned to cherish the memories I have of the good in my life, without imagining that it will always remain. Feelings of sadness naturally accompany this realization, but also those of gratitude, that my life knew such sweetness, such innocent goodness, while it lasted. And that includes the college football of my youth, which, no matter how inconsequential it may have been in the grand scheme of things, is still worthy of “the passing tribute of a sigh.”