Month: August 2023

This blog turns 17 on Friday, which means I have officially chronicled the last third of my life on here. And the sad thing is, the more I think about it, it’s hard not to think of the early days of this blog as a high-water mark. I was 34, everyone around us was alive and in reasonably good health. A lot of bad things hadn’t happened yet. I wasn’t years removed from DC, the 4Ps was still open and alive, we had plenty of local friends, we were moved into our new house. I was still happy to be at Apple (and with an office of my own!), and while the government was still a Republican trifecta, it was obvious to everyone that it was taking on water and the pleasant surprise of flipping both houses in November would mean a spike in hope for the future.

Sure, 2007 would be a bad one, made worse by bad decisions, and then…well, time would happen. It’s not that it’s been unending misery since 2006, because it hasn’t, and I’ve achieved things and found things that would have been inconceivable back then (iPhones? The MCU? An electric car parked in the driveway of our house with a yard that’s walking distance to the local beer-and-burger spot? Three weeks in London and adding two new continents to my resume?) – but we are also hitting the age where life starts taking away things it gave you. And when one of those things is democracy…that’s unsettling.

I can’t really think about this post for next year. I think there’s a real chance I will be on meds, curled into a ball and unable to function for the last two months of the campaign, unless Biden is healthy and sitting on about a 10 point lead. I need a 1996-style “outcome never in doubt” situation, and I don’t even know if that’s possible any more. As soon as Trump won at all, even with fewer votes and a loophole, the minute it was possible for him to lose fewer than 49 states is the moment at which you could stop pretending things would ever be OK again without constant vigilance.

Because the Adversary is so big, so amorphous. There’s all the traditional backbone of private-business-owners who want to be lords of the manor in their podunk Midwestern towns, all the realtors and car dealers who managed not to be arrested on January 6. There’s all the Wallace voters who swear they vote for the man (always a man), not the party – but always the same party somehow. There’s the libertarian tech-holes of Silly Con Valley, the bros who don’t think the government should be able to do anything that interferes with their self-actualization or ability to remain fourteen years old forever. And of course there’s the stochastic terrorists, the message board warriors who go out with an AR-15 to shoot up the gays and the colored and anyone who committed the horrific indecency of being different from them.

My biggest fear is that Biden will drop dead, because there’s no way America will put itself behind a woman of color at the top of the ticket when there’s a white man on the other side. My second biggest fear is that Trump will drop dead, and be elevated as a martyr while someone just as bad takes his spot and the media falls about themselves to say “Trump is dead, why you bringing up old shit” while someone with the identical positions coasts to victory. I know worry means you suffer twice, and fear is just another way of dying before your time, but we live on the edge of a cliff, and it is very difficult to go about your business with a blithe whistle while the cliff crumbles a little every day out of the corner of your eye.

There are fixes, and reasonable ones. We have gotten so hung up on how things used to be and the idea that our ways are set in stone that we won’t even adjust to other people. Are they breaking the unwritten rules that the President should be the person who gets the most votes? How about we expand the House of Representatives for the first time in a century? There’s no reason we couldn’t have an elected legislative body of 3600 Representatives, each one representing only 100,000 people and thus closer to the people they represent. Gerrymandering becomes impractical, the prospect of multi-ethnic representation goes way up, we have the technology to make it work in ways we didn’t in the First World Way era, and it would basically destroy any possibility of the Electoral College being an issue again once the population advantage of small states was shattered. Hell, start allocating EC votes by individual district like Nebraska or Maine, and you’ve probably guaranteed it.

The old ways are broken. You can’t go back. You have to make the best of what you have in front of you, and make the changes necessary to continue to survive and thrive going forward rather than being tethered and drowning under the weight of trying to keep things the way they used to be.

Year 18. Onward.

So a couple months ago I was down the pub, minding my business, and suddenly I hear a loud guffaw in an accent I know all too well. Sure enough, there’s a couple of guys down at the other end of the bar and one of them is braying away in The Accent. You know the one. The hard-R Southern accent. Not the Foghorn Leghorn-Howell Heflin accent, the “economically anxious” one.

I have a big problem hearing my native accent out here. I shouldn’t. God knows I sound like a bowl of grits drenched in Jack Daniel’s, especially on third down, so it is a Hell of a thing to say for me to say that the Southern accent is like nails on a chalkboard and makes me think a stranger is immediately suspect.

But when you think about it, that’s the shibboleth. The South has become an affirmative indicator in red land, a signifier that you are on Their Side. Just look at the guy who whipped up a quick bigoted ditty and got propped up on Twitter overnight – just paint yourself as a pore ol’ rural white man being oppressed by the existence of all them Others and there’s gold in them thar downloads. Hell, the entire sport of college football is currently being reduced to basically the SEC and Ohio State because that’s what ESPN and Fox are willing to pay to broadcast, and if you’re west of the Rockies you’re gonna have to hitch a ride with the rednecks.

I’ve said it before and I stand by it: the only place I’ve ever experienced people making assumptions about my racial and political attitudes as a white guy with a trace Alabama accent is in…the South. Because in my experience, the rural white South assumes anyone who sounds like them is like them. Which, writ large, is how a Queens property hustler who cites things like “Two Corinthians” gets to be held up as God’s miracle plan for America. He thinks a wishbone is something you get out of a turkey and couldn’t distinguish sweet potato pie from sweet potato casserole, but he’s right about What Really Matters, and that is that he hates the same people they do.

And so, I turned my earbuds up as loud as they would go without damaging anything and tried to lose myself in SomaFM Thistle Radio. But there it was, an annoying buzz underneath all night. Finally, after hearing the mention of Arkansas, I stopped by on the way out the door with a “Woo Pig” and passed a small amount of conversation. He was an electrician, out on a job with his buddy from Colorado. And, sure enough and sadly enough, he was exactly as his accent pegged him.

It’s all the fault of Texas, really. Once the Big 12 insisted on treating them as the most special boys with the biggest share of money and their own cable TV network, everyone else began looking for a way out. For Texas A&M and Missouri, it was the SEC. For Nebraska, it was the Big 10. And for Colorado, it was the PAC-12, where they finished above .500 in football twice before choosing last week to flee back to a Big 12 that had the dual advantages of no more Texas and a TV deal in hand to the tune of $31 million a year.

Because Texas decamped for the SEC. Which then gave the B1G room to do a deal with U$C and UCLA to keep up with the 16-team standard, and made the Big 12 more attractive to Colorado – and now the Big 12 is at 13 and eyeing Utah and both Arizonas to reach that new magic number of 16. And all of sudden, the PAC-12 is the PAC-9 and the wolves are at the door, and the commissioner doesn’t have a better TV offer than a streaming deal with Apple.

The problem now is that the ESPN-Fox duopoly already has everybody. They are already paying for all the football, and there’s not something out there that will compel them to offer more money (witness the foolishness of Florida State, trying to get the ACC to give them a Texas free-roll when their media rights are tied up through 2036 and all the places they’d go are already ESPN leagues – why would ESPN pay out an extra $40 million a year for the same thing they already have?) – right now, the peril is that the PAC-9 has no TV deal and no obvious dance partner, and a lot of schools that are leveraged to the hilt.

I’m obviously most concerned for Cal, whose best days in football are a decade behind them and who can’t seem to crack the 8-win plateau after wasting years in the cul-de-sac of a Sonny Dykes Air Raid pastiche. How Golden Bears fans don’t climb Sather Tower with a high-powered rifle I’ll never know – first the burden of $300 million to stay on campus in their own stadium, then two years’ delays by filthy hippies, then economic collapse, then footballing futility and a decade of not getting over on Furd, then the pandemic and its aftershocks, and now, to add insult to injury, the warrior poets of the B1G extend the life raft to the SoCal schools and then Oregon and Washington.

But it’s not just the sturdy golden bear in a pinch here. Stanfurd’s longtime sugar daddy is deceased, and the Arillaga money every year may or may not be replaced by a young donor base more consumed with crypto and NFTs and AI startups than the fate of the Axe. And spare a thought for Oregon State and Washington State, which basically everyone has consigned not to the Big 12, but to the WAC or Mountain West alongside the Boise States and Colorado States of the world. And now if you go through and do the math, we are getting perilously close to the 64 teams-and-pull-the-ladder-up for the Super League – or worse yet, a weird mutant relegation system with the SEC and B1G as the Super League and the ACC and Big 12 one step below as a sort of second division, then everyone else scrambling, and promotion and relegation determined every five years by what kind of TV deal you can do.

Spencer Hall famously made it clear in “God’s Away On Business”: there is no one in charge in college football and there likely never will be. That’s why we have the professionalization of NIL and wide-open transfer without any sort of salary cap, salary floor, cost controls or (most important) player unionization, just free market narcocapitalism. Vanderbilt played for decades as the one stripper actually putting herself through college, only to find out that suddenly the club is twice as big and there’s a price list on the wall and they’re bringing in donkeys and if you don’t like it, the Sun Belt is over there. Geography is meaningless in a league where UCLA will play Maryland. Tradition is meaningless in a league that somehow combines Boston College, Pitt, Miami and Louisville. A third of the “original” Big 12, including the one no one wanted to be around, has been inexplicably grafted onto the SEC, because somehow Texas and Oklahoma are valuable brands to draw eyeballs and not because they are materially better at football than programs like TCU or (spit) Stanford that have turned out superior results in the same interval.

And now, because of a decade of chasing some kind of golden goose of casual fan eyeballs, the wheels are coming off. Now your options as a college football program are basically 1) be Alabama, 2) be willing to pay the money and make the compromises to pursue Alabama, even at the expense of other sports or the mission of your institution, or 3) go play intramurals. And if you are not a member of a conference that is shelling out $60 million a year in TV revenue, 2) may not be open to you no matter what you’re willing to do. Nothing that happened before has any value any longer. And that is toxic, because the value of what happened before is what separates college football from the XFL. It’s the tradition, it’s the rivalries, it’s the family connections, it’s Eli Gold on the radio or Keith Jackson on the game of the week, it’s names that don’t mean anything to anyone else but can take you back decades, and the play flashes before your eyes at the mention of “Van Tiffin” or “Thomas Rayam” or “George Teague” or “Patton Robinette”.

College football was the original and greatest form of the sport because of all the things you couldn’t put a price on. It will die, and die badly, and die ugly, because someone tried to put a price on them anyway.