The Ouroboros
There are two college footballs.
I guess that’s always been the case, really, since this sport was mangled and molded into one of the most popular pyramid schemes of a country that perfected them. It’s been called every cliched name in the book—a religion, a grift, a cult—but as long as it’s never called off for good, college football will be as enmeshed in America’s cultural fabric as Yankee pinstripes and a banjo-playing green frog.
The first type of college football is the one that dreamily subsumes the imagination of the casual sports fan. It’s Lee Corso charming a packed College GameDay crowd at a university even your uncle knows, its fans begging him to choose their specific costumed headgear to adorn so that he looks like an animal stuffed by the world’s worst taxidermist. It’s the sleek uniforms recognizable to any sports bar patron in the country, white numbers shining on a maroon helmet, worn by players whose names dotted ESPN’s front page long before putting on the colors they become connected with for the best years of their lives. These players, these people, these corporations moonlighting as educational institutions, occupy the blessed realm. They’re the fans who can find merchandise in the far recesses of a county’s only Walmart thousands of miles away. If you have cable TV, you’ll be able to see your team every Saturday for a few hours without fail, your own virtual stepchild.
The other type, the one I grew up loving, resides in the sport’s largely forgotten underbelly. In the dusty caldera of Las Cruces, or within the dappled prairie of Acadiana, this type of college football plays out for the true believers. These aren’t back row Baptists coming to see what all the fuss is about, nor are they megachurch attendees who need something to do before the buffet opens. These people, these players, these educational institutions desperately hoping to moonlight as corporations, provide college football with its sometimes beloved but often forgotten underclass. They beg for a grainy Facebook stream of their game, a tiny morsel of content from the town’s lone beat writer while he’s on vacation because it’s fall camp and dammit who’s playing right guard?
The first type of college football is enveloping the second, and it will soon be an ouroboros that devours itself entirely. Conference realignment is a word that gives most college football fans PTSD, but its gears rapidly wound again this summer when Texas and Oklahoma decided to blindside the country by announcing their intentions of joining the big, bad SEC. The rest of the Power Five conferences, so named for their vast amount of pull and nearly limitless resources, scrambled to make sense of it all while those Southeastern sons sneered. What most of us fail to realize, though, is that it is the *second tier* of college football which will soon begin growing faster than the first. The haves who occupy this sport’s lower middle class, the Mississippi States and Wake Forests who might snidely mock those begging for a Facebook stream, will soon become the downtrodden person they walk past with headphones in and eyes locked on the ground.
As the SEC expands for the almighty dollar, its own personal God that powers our version on Saturdays, it will once again slice away more outstretched arms in the process. One day sooner than we’d like, Kentucky and Iowa State will realize they were the ones who invested with Bernie Madoff from the start while laughing at the poor saps who missed out on the gravy train. If Oklahoma is willing to knife its own Oklahoma State brother for a quick buck, the new superconference it helped formulate will have no problem doing the same to those who currently occupy the McMansions on the edge of the subdivision.
This is a sport that necessarily forces 90% of its participants to accept that they will never reach the highest pinnacle before the season even begins. It is understood and accepted that your most treasured memory may be holding up a trophy of a broken chair, or an egg, or a skillet, instead of one that says “national champions.” It’s what holds together this patchwork bureaucracy that fills stadiums from Washington state to Wisconsin on Saturday nights when a slight breeze cuts through a crisp autumn air and makes you feel truly alive for the first time since you were a kid.
It will never be the same again.
College football was never the picturesque sublimation of America’s thirst for war and greatness. It was never as bucolic or nostalgic as we pretend it was in commercials and New York Times best-sellers. It’s always been a con of sorts, an accepted fraud by masses of people who pretend not to see its injustices just like we do for all the things we love and treasure.
It’s also over as we know it. With the ever-churning conference configurations consolidating more and more, the first type of college football has won out for good.
But it’s the second type of college football that will grow in its wake. Not in a healthy way, or a way that will continue its viability. Like kudzu suffocating a bombed out warehouse from a time when we used to make things, real things, in this country, the second type of college football will continue to wrap around the country.
The monied interests will have their playoff and their mega TV contracts and their luxury suites. The second college football, the one you can see under the towering pines in Hattiesburg or the lofty mountains of Boone, will expand with more of the chaff separated from the wheat.
But grow it will.
It’s the true believers who best spread the gospel best anyway.