I don’t really watch college football any more. I think the disaster of 2013-14 beat it out of me, to be honest. Cal gets a new coach who takes them to 1-11, proving once and for all that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the Air Raid to win meaningful games. Vanderbilt has a horror show incident in the offseason, somehow matches its best win total with eight plus a bowl victory. And then the coach, who spoke endlessly about how great the program was and how recruits should build a tradition instead of renting one, took many of them to do just that and provide life to a program whose “punishment” was to have the same record as our highest. And then we got our most desired candidate, who proved to be in over his head, and we crashed right back down to 3-9 and a poor 3-9 at that. By rights we should have been 1-11 as well in 2014, and the world was quick to proclaim that things were back to normal.
College football is the worst sort of mirror of the real world, because it’s just like the real world. Them that has, gets. Them that’s on top, stays on top. What you do, what you achieve at any given time, is unimportant relative to everyone else’s perception of what you are. If you can sustain excellent for maybe a decade, you can alter perception. Maybe quicker with a compliant media and a personal megaphone. But unless you can get immediately better, hold that for five years and crown it with a national title, the first slip means you’re going right back to the basement irrespective of the merits.
At least the Pac-12 is kinda sorta trying. There are a lot of well-regarded schools there, not least the #1 public university in the world. There are a lot of things they do beyond just football (they basically run the Olympic sports, not to put too fine a point on it) and as we were recently reminded, they gave the world Jackie Robinson (for which UCLA has gained a lot of karma over the years). In the Pac-12, football is not the entirety of your university’s identity unless you pull a USC and make it so, and even then, people will always bring up the film school. There’s balance, there’s rounding, there’s a smidgen of actual perspective.
And then there’s the SEC. 13 football teams surrounded by varying degrees of college. 13 organizations driven and supported by people who never set foot on campus except for gameday. 13 teams who have no problem with the notion that the only thing that matters in evaluating a program is how good you were in your parents’ era. Never mind academics, never mind other sports, never mind simple matters like not breaking the law – thirteen autumn Saturdays are the sum and substance of what you are as a university.
And then there’s Vanderbilt.
People are up in arms at the thought we might move off campus, and I agree with that – college football ought to be played on campus, always, that’s why it’s called college football. But the early returns suggest that to rebuild and repurpose our stadium would cost somewhere in the high eight figures. And at the end of it, we’d accommodate somewhere between thirty and forty thousand people, in a conference where four of our thirteen “peers” can hold over 100,000 in their gladiatorial arenas. When the day comes for the Great Powers of College Football to break the chains of the NCAA that hold them to the barest lip-service of student-athletics, at least ten of those schools will make the jump, and all thirteen will want to.
And then there’s us.
This is why I can’t follow college football anymore. I wish nothing but well to Vanderbilt and Cal, I wish nothing but ill to Stanfurd and Tennessee and Auburn and Texas and a host of others, but my favorite sport from earliest memory for forty years is not something I can engage with any longer. It means overlooking lawbreaking, overlooking exploitation, overlooking an activity that we can no longer pretend doesn’t have serious long term health consequences. It means emotional investment in the most rigged game in the casino. It means being the bull in every bullfight, in a world of outrage at your temerity to maybe try to use your horns before your inevitable demise. It means knowing that every Saturday there’s a 2-out-of-3 chance that it will end badly, in a sport and a world that gives you no credit whatsoever for doing your best or doing things “the right way.”
Maybe it would be different if we really had “peer” institutions. If Alexander Heard’s Magnolia League had come to pass, maybe we’d be playing Duke and UNC and Tulane and SMU and Rice and hell, maybe Navy and Wake Forest and Georgia Tech. Maybe if we’d decamped from the SEC with the Yellow Jackets and the Green Wave in the 1960s we’d be in the ACC and facing down a slightly less trying road in a conference with several private schools already present. Maybe when the football teams break off we’ll be left behind in the SEC for all other sports and can play our football in the Southern Conference or whatever you want to call it. Maybe this ends with the Commodores as the bully of the Southern Athletic Association, pushing around a bunch of religious colleges with enrollments under two thousand in non-scholarship Division III.
But in 2017, the last thing I need in my life is another losing cause, something else where you have to put your face to the grindstone over and over for no apparent reward other than the nebulous promise that someday things will be better. There’s enough of that going on now without inviting more of it into your life. Once, college football was a joy and a delight. Now it’s just a different flavor of misery. And unlike most of the others, it’s one I can choose to do without. So I’m gonna. Sorry, guys. Best of luck. Anchor Down. Go Bears. Maybe someday.