This one is going to be a little bit different, in that I have no film to study. We’ll get back to that on Wednesday. It feels like there are probably bigger fish to fry today. This one is also free, so Wednesday’s will be paid. If you’d like to be able to read that (and more!), I would greatly appreciate you pressing on this little button here, which will set you up with a free trial.
Dec. 20 was not a banner day for college football. In fact, I would argue - and I think I’d be correct to do so - that Dec. 20 was one of the worst days that college football has had in a very long time. For those of you not glued to your phones, let’s get a quick rundown of some of the happenings in college football as it announced a playoff field, rankings and bowl games:
Included a team in the playoff that lost to another playoff team by 24 points the day prior.
Moved two-loss Oklahoma ahead of undefeated Cincinnati.
Kept three-loss Florida in the No. 7 spot, also ahead of Cincinnati.
Kept three-loss Iowa State ahead of Indiana and Coastal Carolina.
Slotted an unbeaten Mountain West champion into the No. 22 position, behind Oklahoma State and Texas.
Placed a 2-8 South Carolina team in a bowl game against a conference champion while leaving a 9-2 Army team out of the bowls entirely.
Assigned one-loss Indiana a trip to the Outback bowl to take on a team with a losing record.
Decided that three three-loss teams deserve an NY6 bowl more than the Hoosiers or Coastal Carolina, the latter of which will now be squaring off against a team that exists entirely as marketing for a super-church.
As this was happening, I was reminded of a quote from SBNation’s Fighting in the Age of Loneliness documentary that came out a few years ago. It comes in the final episode of the five-part series, after a lengthy breakdown of what could loosely be described as the collapse of MMA. Not in the sense that it ceased to exist, but in the sense that it was corporatized and placed into a ghoulish machine designed to wring as money as it possibly can from the sport until it becomes too much of a husk for even the most dedicated fans to tune in.
“I hope you take one thing away from all of this. This will happen to everything that you love. Nothing you like will remain untouched, and it will get further and further monetized into meaninglessness. This isn’t just a problem in our idiotic blood sport. You’re fucked too.”
That quote always stuck with me, even months after my initial watch-through of the series. It’s not necessarily groundbreaking to point out that anything fun or interesting will be immediately absorbed into the American culture blob that instantly cleanses it of anything that made it fun or interesting. We see it everywhere.
You used to be made fun of if you said that you liked something “before it went mainstream,” but it’s becoming more difficult to make a case against that being the most devastating fate for any form of culture. When something enters the void, be it music, television, movies or, in our case, a sport, it just goes into that money machine. Everything is maximized for peak efficiency, the power brokers search for copper wires to strip, and we’re left watching a three-loss Florida team in the goddamn Cotton Bowl, while one of the only unique teams in the nation is stuck playing fucking Hugh Freeze in Orlando during a time that has rendered Orlando’s only attraction completely toxic unless you want to contract every disease. It’s a husk. We’re fucked too.
Even with all the misfires, the repeated kicking of G5 teams followed by Kirk Herbstreit going on TV to tell those G5 teams to shut up and take it, the thing that I’m more upset about than anything else from this weekend is that college football has managed to ruin the Rose Bowl. The one truly transcendent thing in this sport, for decades, was that at the end of every season the best team from the Big Ten and the best team from the Pac-12 would square off in the most beautiful stadium in America. They would do so after a parade, with kickoff designed perfectly to line up the end of the game up with the California sunset.
It’s become a shell of itself since the advent of the BCS National Championship, a meaningless consolation for whoever doesn’t get to play in the title game. We don’t even get to see it played this season, at least not in Pasadena. No, we get the Rose Bowl, presented by an insurance company, played in an NFL stadium named after a trust-fund billionaire that made his money stripping resources from the Earth. Now he gets to do it with college football.
Thank God the corporate overlords came in and fixed college football for us. It’s so much better now that every team runs the exact same offense, every recruit is covered from the day that he enters middle school, and every season ends in essentially the exact same result, even down to the teams that get to be in the four-team field. Where would we be were it not for the media machine that has spent every waking moment since 2014 talking about how [X] event will impact the playoff, or why [X] team deserves to get in over [Y] team.
This is supposed to be a newsletter that celebrates the beauty of college football, and while I know that the first section certainly wasn’t a celebration, I haven’t taken Herbstreit’s advice yet, and I certainly didn’t plan to start with the “sit down and shut up” gambit. Dec. 20 was a disastrous, monstrous day in college football, and I think that it’s more than fair to do a little bit of thinly-veiled anti-capitalist moping.
Somehow, despite all of this, I don’t feel as though college football is lost forever. I don’t think that this is just a barren wasteland, the hallowed out corpse of a sport that used to mean something. It’s certainly that at the top of the sport, and unfortunately I don’t think there’s a fix for that - I’m even starting to worry that my Champions League idea would just be absorbed into the void, because of course it would.
However, there’s still something special about college football: you just have to look a little harder for it. There are still great stories, interesting teams and fan bases that haven’t been corrupted by the playoff or national title discourse.
Coastal Carolina-BYU; San Jose State winning the MWC title and then posting a video of its players singing an OMC song; Army-Navy; Tom Allen turning Indiana into a winning program. These things exist, and they’re going to continue to exist, it’s just going to get harder and harder to find them. But that doesn’t mean they’re gone forever.
There’s still something worth caring about here, you just have to work a little harder for it, and if possible, ignore anyone and everyone that will try to tell you that these things don’t matter. That you should should just sit down, shut up, and watch the playoff. That narrative is only going to grow louder as college football looks to wring more and more money out of itself. There’s no fix for that, no playoff expansion or systematic change that will make the top of the sport feel like it once did.
That college football is gone, replaced by a makeshift NFL for the top of the sport that everyone has to pretend includes every team. The feeling that you’re looking for, the one that college football used to produce at all levels - that’s still available in places like Boone, N.C., Conway, S.C., San Jose, Calif., and Tulsa, OK. Those programs are still special and still worth caring about, even if the college football apparatus has completely cast them aside. In fact, they’re special in large part because the college football apparatus has completely cast them aside.
Take those miserable days, those Dec. 20’s, where the top of the sport reminds you that it will never let anyone new into the club. Get upset online about them. I know that I sure did. But remember this: these fun stories staying as far away as they possibly can from the inner machinations of the top of college football is a good thing. The top of this sport ruins everything it touches, and for as long as it doesn’t touch the Sun Belt or the MAC or any of our G5 darlings, we’re going to have a really cool secret that can’t be ruined or tainted. It won’t last forever. Dig deep to find them, and then cherish these teams and these stories for as long you can.