Image via Jennifer Shannon/Twitter
Jameson Draper is almost 27 years old and has never eaten a fig, but that will change soon.
I don’t remember who the Spartans played against and I don’t remember the outcome. But I remember the smell of stale beer on my dad’s friends’ clothes, the smoke from thousands of bratwursts and burgers, and everyone in green and white. Before I learned the rules of football, there was the sound of the East Lansing crowd and the chants rippling across the stadium.
Over the next decade, my dad worked tirelessly to indoctrinate me into Michigan State football culture despite their long history as a middling Big Ten program. Eventually, the Spartans became great, stringing together multiple Big Ten championships during the later years of my childhood. Around this time, my dad convinced my mom to let us get season tickets and we spent almost every fall Saturday under the burgundy maples in this college town. We traveled to conference title games in Indianapolis and cried over a Rose Bowl win in Pasadena. When the time came to apply to college, I applied to one place. I was never going to go anywhere else.
I remained dedicated to the football team despite their inevitable downfall. I always had MSU’s elite basketball program to fall back on, but it never hit the same way. I live on the East Coast now and nobody would blame me for putting aside my dedication to MSU to pursue other pleasures. But I don’t. I still travel home at least once a year for a tailgate. I watch every week, no matter how dire things become. I attend whenever the Spartans visit Maryland, the closest program to where I currently live. In late August, when temperatures drop below 80 degrees, there’s a change within me. I can smell it. I can feel my body adjusting and preparing itself for a long autumn of football, atoning for the eight months of sinning, eight months of no football.
I grew up in a family of nonbelievers; this is the closest thing we have to religion. If Europe has soccer, the United States has college football. They’re different animals of the same beast, but there’s something uniquely American about college football, they reflect each other, for better or worse. Sometimes both.
College football is big government. Under late capitalism, wealth concentrates, as it does in the NCAA. There was a time when we believed you could come from humble beginnings and make something of your program. The early days of college football were ruled by coastal elites; the Ivy League and the service academies reigned supreme. Schools outside of the East Coast were considered inferior, and powerful teams wouldn’t come to middle America to play the little guys. In 1913, a small Catholic school in South Bend, Indiana traveled to New York and defeated Army in their territory. It put Notre Dame on the map, endearing the working class to that random midwestern school. They were essential to the rise of college football. It democratized the sport.
This led to an explosion in popularity throughout the country. But like any source of revenue that crosses a certain threshold in America, greed and exploitation found its way in. Generational dynasties were built in mid-century America (Notre Dame, Alabama, USC, Michigan, etc.), and they used their exponentially expanding profits and power to take advantage of the athletes who generated the revenue. Up several years ago, the players weren’t given a taste of the hundreds of millions of dollars they raised for their schools each year. We were subjected to the same charades and flimsy excuses from the administrators of these universities: the full ride scholarships were payment enough, these are students not workers, tk, tk.
Players are now finally able to sign sponsorship deals and receive cuts of some revenue streams, but this didn’t happen before the biggest schools in the country leveraged their power to push out college football’s little guys. There are 134 schools currently playing in the FBS, college football’s top division. A liberal estimate would place about 30 schools capable of ever winning a national title. The outsiders simply lack the television revenue, ticket sales, and wealthy alumni/boosters donating massive sums to the football program.
Up until this year, only five of the ten conferences were considered good enough to produce championship-caliber teams. Then, in a spiritual “fuck you” to the idea of the Sherman Antitrust Act, one of those five power conferences folded because so many universities left for even bigger conferences (rest in peace, Pac-12) College football has become an oligarchical realm where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. As it stands today, only two of four “power” conferences are truly considered elite ( the SEC and the Big Ten). Eventually, we might just have one super conference, while the mid-major programs are further excommunicated from any shot at glory. Worse, annual regional rivalries – cherished for generations (think the Pitt-West Virginia Backyard Brawl or Oklahoma and Oklahoma State’s Bedlam series – are in danger of becoming irregular occurrences or gone forever.
College football is our rigged judicial system. The most powerful schools – the ones who need to be held the most accountable – don’t get in much trouble for breaking the rules. Last year’s champions, the University of Michigan, got a slap on the wrist for stealing other teams’ signs. When they were in danger of getting in trouble for this scandal, state lawmakers penned notes to the Big Ten to urge them not to take “premature measures” for the football team’s transgressions. Alabama, the greatest dynasty in college football history, rarely gets in trouble for its many violations. In the rare occasions that actual punishments are handed down, the people who get in trouble tend to be the players, not the institutions. When the news broke that Reggie Bush, USC superstar and Heisman winner, took money and gifts from agents, Bush was forced to return his Heisman trophy. Almost two full decades later, he got it back. The program avoided sanctions.
The power of college football is so close to American politics that sometimes the two even bleed into each other. Public university staff members are considered state employees, which includes football coaches. As of 2019, 40 of 50 states’ highest-paid employees were football or basketball coaches. Of the ten states whose highest paid employees weren’t, seven of them don’t have FBS programs. In some cases, former coaches and stars have turned to political careers themselves (Tommy Tuberville, Tom Osborne, Herschel Walker.)
Fall Saturdays in quaint college towns often exhibit shocking human excess, tragedy, and joy. Grown men binge drink to levels unheard of in regular life. It’s an indulgent excuse to return to their youth at the same time that actual youth are doing the same thing in the student section. When their teams win, post-adolescents rush the field, uprooting goal posts, and throwing them into the nearby river. When teams lose, riots break out, trees are poisoned, radio show phone lines are set ablaze. There’s something macabre about the unhinged behavior that college football brings out in people. Hunter S. Thompson was a big fan, and famously found common ground in college football with his political nemesis, Richard Nixon. We dedicate our lives and checkbooks to these monoliths of profit, watching child gladiators put their bodies on the line for our entertainment. 99% of what we get for our fandom is pain and suffering, but we can’t shake our addiction to that one percent.
These days, college football no longer belongs to the coastal elites. The strongest programs are in America’s heartland— Ohio, Michigan, South Carolina, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma— where religion still reigns supreme. Many of these places don’t have professional football teams, where most football is played on the Christian Sabbath. The separation of church and state in football is less a consistent rule and more a mere suggestion. As a big program in middle America, you need a coach who represents the fan base. Will boosters financially support a program run by a godless head coach? It’s how you end up with Jesus freaks like Dabo Swinney running the highest level programs in the country. These rich heartland alumni groups pay their tithes to the church of college football, and when they donate a stained glass window, they expect a program that reflects their beliefs.
The rivalries between big schools cause rifts and tension between fanbases. We ruin family dinners and get in trouble on social media. Lore and propaganda about powerful college football programs’ inherent greatness are passed down through families for generations. That indoctrination is how small private schools like Notre Dame or Miami can stay relevant despite a small alumni base and enrollment, while giant schools like University of Central Florida or Fresno State are decades too late to dream of catching up.
But it’s also a powerful force of good. Communities are brought together by the game; the relationships we fans and alumni build with our teams become a source of pride and love. Some of my best friends met their soulmates at football tailgates. Every weekend in the fall for my entire childhood I got to spend the day with my dad bonding over a shared love and passion. Life is about the people around us and the memories we make with them, and college football is a machine that manufactures companionship and shared glory (or trauma.)
It’s a revenue driver in the heartland. Instead of institutions in New York, Washington DC, or Los Angeles, hundreds of millions of dollars go to public schools in America’s upcountry. This is important for cultural representation in places which have been victimized for generations. This cultural importance causes quirks that make college football even better: frigid winter matchups in the midwest, suit-wearing student sections in the south, or friendships built over six decades of season ticket companionship (shameless self-plug.)
Lifelong pain gives way to unprecedented glory; I’ll never forget the confetti falling from the rafters at the Rose Bowl in 2014 after Michigan State defeated Stanford and looking around to see grown men among me bawling, embracing their loved ones, sealing memories that will last a lifetime.
Beyond its singular regionality, the pride in college football hits different because of the intrinsic personal ties. As alumni, we may not be the financial force that drives the programs to greatness on an individual level, but we feel a deeper personal connection because we went there. We spent four (or more) years of our lives on that campus, in those facilities, among those athletes. It means something more to us because we were, in a way, a tangible part of the culture. Collectively, we are these schools. We can look at our wardrobe of gear, the degrees that adorn our home offices, and believe when the team wins, we win. There’s nothing else in our lives that can replicate that sort of pride. And despite its status as a massive revenue generator, college football is uniquely accessible. Ultimately, the star players that become legends on campus are just kids, students at the school just like us. We see them in the dining halls, our kids have classes with them; they’re enmeshed in the community.
While head coaches don’t deserve to be the highest-paid state employees, they have a different role than coaches of any professional sport. Instead of being a boss to (very rich) adult employees, these are leaders of young men, responsible not only for winning games but molding the character of the players they coach. To get these star athletes to come play for their schools, they grind on the recruiting trail, spending time in the living rooms of families who are entrusting their child’s lives with the university they choose. There’s a bond built between players and coaches at the college level that, at its best, creates a familial relationship, one built on love and trust that changes the course of the lives of everyone involved. As fans, we enjoy unprecedented access to these coaches. We see them in grocery stores and community events, and some coaches still do weekly radio shows at local establishments, fielding calls from fans. No other American sport could produce the Tylers from Spartanburg or the Pee Wees from Green Bay.
Sometimes I get the feeling that by now I should’ve let college football go. I was born three years before the new millennium with the leftist politics to boot. The average American is increasingly unable to afford to send their kids to good universities. It would be an objective social good to make these higher education institutions free, as they are in many other countries. While lucky to be in one of the big boy conferences with rich alumni boosters, Michigan State will never reach heights of the Texases, USCs, and Oklahomas of the world; they will remain one caste from the top in perpetuity.
The guilt has led me to attempt to step away a few times. I even tried to replace college football with the NFL, but it just doesn’t scratch the same itch. Pro football has a better talent pool and is less exploitative. The players are grown men, more concerned with their future. But I’ve never understood how NFL fandom could be as intense as college fandom. The NFL is simply unable to replicate the innate sense of pride that comes with having attended the university that you’re rooting for. So, inevitably, college football pulls me back in, and I’m not sure I’ll ever fully shed this deep-seated fandom.
But I don’t feel bad about it. In a country so fractured and spiraling, rapidly losing its sense of community, America ultimately needs college football. The sport and its subsequent zealous fandom provide a cessation from the pain and suffering of real life. The sport may be emblematic of the most abhorrent aspects of late-stage capitalism, but it also provides a community for those so desperately searching for one in a country where it is becoming increasingly hard to find, a haven for love and relationships and camaraderie in a cultural landscape that needs it. That first autumn weekend when I wake up to the smell of dying leaves and the chill of 60-degree weather, I forget all my misgivings, and often I head to campus, where the magic— the feeling that I’m a part of something bigger than myself— makes me forget why I ever dreamt of letting it go.
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
