You think about difficult things when you're stranded: dark thoughts of vanishing horizons, daunting ifs and thens, promises made to yourself on sleepless nights. And so it was for me last week, when a blizzard delayed our return home from a vacation long enough for me to miss recording the podcast. "If I ever make it home to my podcasting setup again," I swore to myself from the extremely comfortable hotel room that my wife and I wound up staying in for two delightful nights longer than expected, "I pledge that we'll have Spencer Hall on the podcast."
These are the sorts of promises you make when you don't know if you're good for it, at moments when you don't know what a promise is worth. But look:
I talked very briefly about my somewhat annoying but not at all traumatic experience of being stranded, but there was plenty else to talk about, which means that I had to save my meal-by-meal breakdown of the Savannah experience for my food podcast Davey's Shrimp Boat, which is currently unavailable wherever you get your podcasts. After speaking briefly about the BBC show Connections and the importance of unhealthy lifestyles in molding elite sportscasters—this included the delightful tidbit from Spencer that Verne Lundquist shares an email account with his wife—we got to the issue that Spencer knows better than most anyone: college sports fuckery.
Our jumping-off point was a dire white paper published by three administrators at the University of Louisville about how manifestly untenable and economically punitive the current state of college sports is, even for elite programs. The report is indeed very dire, and accurate insofar as it assesses that, whatever the future of college sports is, it's probably won't involve the NCAA and is also unlikely to get easier for non-elite institutions in an increasingly consolidating national business. Spencer ventured a prediction for the future along the lines of a super league that works like the multi-tiered English soccer system, but mostly we talked about how this all works and doesn't work in the present—how Indiana's national championship season happened in a practical and contextual sense, how difficult it is to know just how much money is being spent and where, the tragedy of booster fatigue, and why college sports keeps recreating the same systems and the same workarounds.
After the break, we considered and dismissed the federal government's involvement in a solution to this particular problem, considered Spencer's vision for a college sports industry that evolves beyond the schools, and what that does for the NFL. We also talked about which SEC towns are most committed to the Barefoot Is Legal lifestyle. The Funbag continued in that vein with a question about where we would go to college if we had the opportunity again. I took the question maybe more seriously than necessary, and in the process talked about how my 18-year-old self was kind of scared of college-style partying, and how unready I was for how nice things are in Southern California. This was the podcast I was dreaming about during those two-and-a-half actually very pleasant days. It's nice to be back.
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