There are few things in Podworld, or any other world for that matter, that will erode your faith in the value of a pastime quite like people claiming that said pastime plays a salutary role in the world as a whole. Silly things, sports very much included, can do a person good; arguing that your sport of choice is an affirmative social good requires a much bigger reach. Sometimes Week Zero of the college football season is just Week Zero of the college football season, especially if you're watching the UC Davis-Mercer rainout.
This brings us to the writer Jane Coaston's pod What A Game Day, which is a less manic and therefore much more tolerable examination of the social benefits, such as they are, of college football. Coaston knows ball and has clear and discernible game; the presentation is not at fault here. The guest on the episode in question is the former NBC politics anchor Chuck Todd, who like Coaston is that most worrisome of messengers: a true believer. Coaston is in the tank for Michigan, Todd for Miami of Florida, the distinction between which provides the episode with a brief dissertation on the difference between UM and U Of M, a megaton eyeroll that nevertheless takes us not quite all the way to the industry-leading sanctimony of "THE Ohio State University." On the podcast, both Coaston and Todd seem like perfectly pleasant people who would not only drink with you but buy a round without getting side-eyed. And what else could you want from a gameday companion but that?
This episode of the show, which you should watch, bears the worrisome title "How College Football Can Depolarize America." The idea here is that, in gathering together in a stadium near you, you will find people of all stripes, kinds, political affiliations, and cultural leanings overcoming all those differences by getting stuck into third-and-7 at the opponents' 37. In that space, all of those disparate individuals will learn that we are all one people with a basic commonality—as opposed to those miserable bastards on the other side of the stadium, who worship Satan and eat puppies at their tailgates.
Present company aside, the premise is every bit as daft as it sounds. As the college game races headlong toward an ideal world in which it is half NFL and half Premier League, the last thing it's going to do is depolarize anything. In fact, it is well into its master plan of polarizing America into two camps: the Southeastern Conference/Big Ten Conference Pangaea formation and Everyone Else, Who Can Fuck Right Off.
The most powerful enemies of polarization are reason and solidarity, and one especially persistent enemy of reason and solidarity is tribalism. College football, as it happens, is almost entirely in the tribalism business. Just to leech onto Coaston and Todd's bailiwicks, rooting for Michigan goes hand in hand with hating Ohio State, and rooting for Miami marches lockstep with blind envy that the Hurricanes can't get an invitation to join the SEC. The idea that an Alabama fan would root for Auburn under any circumstances is preposterous. Maybe if there was a mine collapse involved. Maybe.
But what makes this part of this podcast’s analysis more loopy is the notion that college football fans want to be depolarized. Todd in particular equates the experience of watching Alabama with watching Maine Maritime Academy, as if all football experiences are equal in value and emotional investment. Experience tells us that they are not, and not just because you won't see Pat McAfee letting science majors kick field goals for tuition at Maine Maritime. The money is in Big Time Sports, and college football has the Big Time bug, which is why the SEC/Big Ten conglomoblob is pretending to be the NFL For People Who Don't Have The NFL, or just live too close to the Falcons or Panthers. College football in its present state is designed to decontextualize and either consume or erase everything that isn't SEC/Big Ten branded. Read this on Stanford's desperate-and-maybe-last-ditch attempt to survive in the brave new world, and then insert your school where it says "Stanford." Ours is a culture that worships XXL World and disdains anything smaller; college football has taken the hint.
Todd in particular heads boldly into the woods when he says that "college football is the most accessible sport there is." Leaving aside the numerous sports that have more games, the comparison works only in comparison to the NFL, and would in any event be news to the commissioners of the SEC and Big Ten, Greg Sankey and Tony Petitti, both of whom have worked along similar tracks to dominate the sport by shoving anyone and everyone else away from its center. They not only have flipped the bird to the NCAA—proof that a broken sundial is still right once a day—but have fragmentation-grenaded other conferences in hope of becoming the only shows in the sport. And for anyone who doesn't happen to live near College Station or the greater Champaign-Urbana metropolitan area, well, let 'em eat the highlight show on Hulu.
Even if you want to make the tortured argument that the Big Ten now runs from sea to shining sea after savaging the Pacific 10 Conference, what actually happened is that Seattle, Eugene, and Los Angeles now get to pretend they have a commodious new home in the Midwest, when in fact they were merely a means to an end, the end being two more media markets. The SEC has done the same thing by absorbing big-money schools from the Big 12, albeit in more methodical fashion. The goal, for both, is creating a super league with 40-some-odd teams that renders every other school and town irrelevant in that most American of ways—snob appeal.
Indeed, the only real difference between them is that Petitti wants a 24-team/28-team playoff system, which essentially takes care of the upper three-quarters of the SEC and Big Ten and a few hardy stragglers, while Sankey just expanded his schools to a nine-game conference schedule that seems to work against the expanded tournament idea, while still preferring the semi-exclusivity of an SEC-dominated world. Another great rivalry: Tomato versus To-mah-to.
This, too, is a business decision. Americans watch the best leagues in the world and, because of their otherwise limited bandwidth and bone-deep provincialism, nothing else. Sankey and Petitti realized that it is better to be one of two entities slicing up a pie full of Bitcoin than one of eleven. This is the same logic that European fans rejected when the notion of the European Super League was first ramrodded down their larynxes, and the same logic that they will confront again when that idea is re-proposed in a year or three or five.
It is also the logic of exclusion. The SEC and Big Ten have taken only the fattest of outworlder cats and let the rest of the litter fend for itself in whatever low-rent bowl games are left; eventually those conferences will start looking inward toward their own smaller earners when it comes to redivide the money. There is no longer the safety of tradition or geography to save the Mississippi States and Northwesterns of the world if their brethren and sistren need to do what athletic directors do exclusively: find more money to populate all their weight rooms with hot oil massages provided by unicorns. Football games are where the money comes from in all of this, and the business is what it is. From one week to the next, the business is leveraged tribalism; at the macro level, it is a plan for deforestation.
Coaston and Todd can be forgiven their joint world view here, in that their teams are among the 40-odd haves still in the game. Coaston and Michigan will be gold-listed for as long as college football is a thing; Todd's position becomes more precarious if Miami cannot escape the Atlantic Coast Conference. Clemson and Florida State have already sued to try and escape that conference in a fight over money—they settled for a better deal and relaxed escape clauses—but Miami was not part of that gambit, and as such is not guaranteed to survive the next membership culling. The ACC already had to take on California and Stanford in a bit of absurdist theater to keep its membership up, but as media money keeps getting shoved upward, and in the direction of those two mega-conferences, the ACC is in an odd place. Remember that nothing is unthinkable in college football. The Pac-12 was going to live forever, too, and now Stanford is conference rivals with Wake Forest and Virginia Tech. And Oregon State, another proud Pac-12 member? They’re reconstituting the Big Sky just to stay alive.
So: Would Todd find his arguments for college sports as a great unifying force as persuasive from the perspective of a have-not? We're guessing no. And even if the Hurricanes survive and advance, to steal a college basketball catch-all, their inclusion into the superduperleague does Wake Forest, Virginia Tech, Duke, and North Carolina no material good. There is a tactical long-term reason why UNC hired Jordon Hudson’s boytoy, and that is to make the Tar Heels more relevant as a football program in the short run, just in case the SEC and Big Ten get a hankering for more realignment—or as we like to call it, pillage.
And Todd fully loses his cerebral cortex when he says, "What brings a MAGA supporter and a blue progressive together in Ann Arbor? Michigan football." That unity lasts only as long as the game itself, which means something like three hours and forty minutes of temporary camaraderie; the other 164 hours of each week will remain reserved for mutual contempt, spit-soaked curses, and profane gestures, regardless of how well the season goes because, and you heard this here first, games end. Those other 164 hours are just what we are now: the Balkans on supermarket gin and rec-room crank. That doesn’t make the countervailing four or so hours of escape less valuable, but it doesn’t really make them easy to scale, either.
It is all well and fine for Coaston and Todd to extol the virtues of the game they love so much on the basis that, well, they love it so much. But there are limits to even sport's power to unite, the most obvious of which is that the direct corollary to "Go my team" is always "Go to hell your team, and while I'm at it, you too." College football is not only no different there, it is exceptionally adept at it. Should the Wolverines and Hurricanes meet at some point this year, Coaston and Todd will be warmed by mutual admiration, familiarity, and reasoned good will. They are not Harvey Updyke, the Alabama fan who poisoned Auburn's iconic oak trees after the Tigers won the 2010 Iron Bowl. But their existence does not meaningfully counter the sport’s swelling ranks of Harveys. Hell, the Week Zero highlight was Kansas State's opening-week loss to Iowa State, punctuated by the father of KSU quarterback Avery Johnson getting into a fistfight outside the stadium with the brother of KSU quarterback Avery Johnson. Now that family will have to figure out a way to depolarize Thanksgiving.
In sum, Coaston and Todd miss the elephant in the room, and not just because they mistook it for the Alabama mascot. They are correct in thinking that reasonable people can disagree reasonably, but this assumes that reason, or even comity, is still the coin of the realm, and further assumes that there is some silent majority of reasonable college football fans out there. In fact, as we know more acutely than ever, there are fewer reasonable people per capita than at any time since, oh, let's say 1866. When and where a wedge can be driven, there is never a shortage of hammers. College football provides an organic excuse to swing that hammer, and has made a nice business out of it for the few schools blessed enough to make it profitable. Everyone else goes broke in slow motion. That's a nice enough way to kill a Saturday if you are so inclined, but it's not designed to be anything but that. And at the end of the weekend, everyone goes back to work to make enough money to do it again in two weeks against Vanderbilt.
