And what is "it," you wonder? It's the point when the doldrums of late July start washing over me and I realize that it's time to start thinking about college football again. Every time the traveling hands of time swing in that direction, I start talking myself into just one more year. Just one more year of writing about a sport I love and hate at the same time. I love it because it's college football, a love that needs no justification. And I hate it because sport in general and college football in particular keeps acquiring unwelcome cultural baggage.
I could quit writing a Big Ten predictions column at any time. Some might say I already have, considering I focus on only 27.5% of the conference's teams. I am also well aware that this is a labor of love for me. My most-read post of all time on this blog has, as of this writing, all of seventy-four views. I used to get more accidental clicks than that when I worked at FanHouse. This means, in all likelihood, that the number of actual readers I have is somewhere between twelve and twenty.
Do you understand now why my writing isn't paywalled on Substack?
I'm not complaining. If there's only, say, twelve of you who read most of what I write, that's fine with me because I'm sure you're the right twelve.
But the world around college football keeps changing. The usual culprit is the growth of NIL and the granting of sovereignty to student-athletes, who are less strictly bound to their programs than back in the olden days when coaches actually had to develop their players. Clutching one's pearls over the fact that the players get paid now and are free to transfer if they want to marks a person as a throwback to ... I don't know, the feudal era or something.
Now, of course players were getting paid before NIL became permitted. If that weren't true, then the SEC's run of national titles wouldn't have dried up about the time NIL came along. But I digress. It bothers me not one little bit that the players get paid now. That should have been the case forty years ago. 1986 being shortly after the NCAA's stranglehold on TV appearances was broken, of course.
The rise of televised college football has, unfortunately, empowered the sport's ultimate villain: ESPN.
The World Wide Leader doesn't just broadcast college football, it is attempting to own it. You can't blame it. Live sports are the most valuable properties in the television portfolio because people will actually sit down and watch them live. That's good news for advertisers, who are increasingly finding it difficult to reach the likes of you and I. ESPN wants to own as much of the thing called "college football" as it can, largely because it will never own very much of what it really wants (the NFL). The network uses its bully pulpit to push for playoff expansion (it'll reach 32 teams in a couple seasons, I'm sure) and to push the narrative that the playoff is the only part of college football that really matters anymore. For the good teams, there's a playoff, for everyone else, enjoy Birmingham in the week between Christmas and New Year's.
I'm being a bit unfair, of course. Just like everybody else who remembers The Days of Yore, I wouldn't want to go back to only two games per week on live television, or having to try to avoid hearing the Hawkeyes' score so I could watch the game on Iowa Public Broadcasting at 10:30 on Saturday night. ESPN helped push for more of us to have more of what we wanted, and now no matter which Power 4 team you follow, you can watch all of its games.
You might need six streaming subscriptions to make that happen, but hey, at least it's possible.
Still, there are two things that I can't forgive ESPN for. The first is Pat McAfee; he annoys me to no end, because everything he does winds up being about him rather than what he's ostensibly talking about. I went through this with Jim Rome back in the day. I gave him two weeks, like he asked, then I gave him another two weeks, like he asked everyone to do after the first two weeks. After four weeks I still thought he sucked, but I will admit his callers sucked even more. If he'd stopped taking phone calls maybe I would have become a listener. Except he would probably still talk about himself and his show all the time.
The other thing is gambling. ESPN didn't create it and I'm sure they would say they're just responding to what the audience wants, but honestly, it doesn't have to do that. Gambling is no bloody good. It's the addiction you don't want because it's the only addiction you can get out of (theoretically) just by leaning into it harder.
Okay, you can get out of drug addiction with an overdose, I suppose, but you know what I mean. The worst part of gambling isn't that you lose; it's that sometimes you win, and that's what causes all the problems.
The effect that gambling is having on young men in particular is distressing, and even if the NCAA and NFL did the right thing by putting Brendan Sorsby's head on a pike as a warning to student-athletes that they'd better not bet on their own teams, that's not much help to the thousands of young men who don't play college sports but are sliding deeper and deeper into debt, convinced that just one good parlay will get them out of it. And the worst part of that ... is that they're right, at least from a financial point of view. But breaking the addiction is much harder.
That's why I don't like seeing gambling content as part of the broadcasts, even just as advertisements. I thought it was funny back in the day when Brent Musburger would subtly imply that a late-game field goal attempt might be of particular interest to some viewers, meaning he was aware of the point spread. That was subversive, because sports gambling was illegal in almost all of the country. (That law wasn't particularly well enforced, of course.)
Now any wink-wink, nudge-nudge reference to gambling comes across like watching an old Cheech and Chong movie does since pot is legal in so much of the US. Wow. So edgy.
Anyway, fear not: season two of The Sweep and The Drop are coming. Soon.
Photo credit: “Groggy” by Jon-Eric Melsæter, CC BY 2.0
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