From the KU Library Digital Collections

I will be only a voice, and a very, very minor voice at that, as a part of the chorus of lamentations from writers surrounding college football at the moment, but what the hell — people keep asking me about it and I have feelings about it: 

There’s a real sadness under-girding the buildup to this year’s college football season. It’s both a personal sadness, which is a pretentious way of saying that I’m sad about the state of college football, and more interestingly there’s a generally negative emotional fog hovering over everything as all of the minor cracks and shake-ups of the past decade and a half or so are starting to actually come to fruition. The whole paradigm is set to truly, completely shift in 2024. That’s when we’ll see the biggest dominoes fall – Oklahoma and Texas will be SEC-bound, a third of the Pac-12 will be Big Ten-bound, a third of the Pac-12 will be Big XII-bound, and the other third will probably learn their fate in the interim. It’s going to be a completely different world in 2024, with a century-old conference basically demolished and its former partner conference in the sport’s most storied tradition stretching across both coasts. 

What does that make of 2023? This is not the year of the deluge nor the chasm, but it is the year in which BYU and UCF will share a league and the Pac-12 will play out something of a lame duck year. I feel some sense of intrigue, but it’s primarily an intrigue borne of novelty and mostly-voyeuristic curiosity. It feels perverted, in a way, and not in the ‘Sickos Committee’ sense, where the ‘sickness’ is knowingly self-effacing, developed out of a deeply-set love for the sport misaligned with that which gets the prime-time slots on ESPN and FOX. This is a more genuine sickness, an uncinematic, almost ugly type that I don’t care to recognize but still absolutely do recognize within myself. I don’t feel good about a lot of what’s interesting about this season to me. I feel as proud of my interest in the 2023 season as I feel about my interest in those multi-part, hours-long “The Most Craziest Conspiracy Theories Iceberg: EXPLAINED” videos on YouTube. There are, though, some cracks from which intrigue will spring.

Take, for example, the rivalries. The round of conference realignment that started at the beginning of the last decade split up The Border War, the rivalry series that mattered the most to me, so I empathize with the articles eulogizing the deaths of so many traditional series after this season – The Apple Cup, the Civil War, Bedlam, UCLA/Cal, USC/Stanford, Everybody Else in Texas/Texas. However, I will say that the bitter atmospheres which surrounded the Kansas/Missouri games of 2011 and 12 were tragically fascinating, and we’ll see that bitterness play out on a practically weekly basis this year. Add to that the uncertainty surrounding the four orphaned Pac-12 teams (as well as, in the case of the two rivalries of the Pacific Northwest, how swiftly the standing changed) and there’s a degree of jiltedness normally reserved for an uneven divorce. The hatred that an Oregon State had for an Oregon in the past was borne of fairly benign things like proximity, athletic history, and light cultural differences, but now Oregon’s getting the house, the car, and custody of the kids while Oregon State might have to move into a dilapidated apartment complex and share a wall with Fresno State. That is a unique, unreplicable sort of venom and bitterness we’re staring down in Eugene on November 24th as well as in Seattle on November 25th and particularly intriguingly in Stillwater on November 5th. That will be interesting, but only because of the limited shelf life and the sadness hanging over it all.

Everyone in the Big XII will get their last shots at Texas and Oklahoma, everyone in the Pac-12 will get their last shots at one another, and a few of us will get our first shots at new foes. I’m excited about seeing my team’s new foes, but, again, it’s primarily out of novelty. We’re going to host BYU and UCF for the first time! That’ll be something different, at the very least, but it will only be different this year. Next year, we’ll probably host Arizona and Houston for the first time, or Cincinnati for the first time and Colorado for the thirty-fourth time. Who even knows for how long this iteration of the conference intends to hold on? It could be the last time that we host some of those teams, too, we might play BYU this year, get sorted into the Big XII North Pod with Kansas State, Oklahoma State, and Colorado next year (East is ISU/UCF/Cincinnati/West Virginia, South is TCU/Tech/Houston/Baylor, West is Utah/Arizona/ASU/BYU), not see BYU for three years, by which point the ACC has collapsed and the Big XII either stands to absorb some grouping of other castoffs or Kansas gets swept up into the Big Ten or SEC or some other league for a tax writeoff and all of a sudden we’re hosting Maryland and Penn State or Ole Miss and South Carolina or Al-Ittihad and the Detroit Tigers for the first time. Who knows? 

I miss the less-cynical mindset I used to feel around this time of year. When, if asked about how I feel about the upcoming year, I could write out a list of exciting players, teams, and matchups, rather than couching everything in “Wouldn’t that be weird?” and “You might see some bitter Oklahomans get into a fight in one of these.” My interests at the moment are locally bound, in that my schools’ teams will be playing out their seasons, and the national-level interest is mostly that sort of cynical perverse gawking. That’s really all that’s there for me, aside from the emptiness and the sadness, or maybe more specifically the sadness regarding the emptiness. To take a line from Boston College (potential future conference foe of the Kansas Jayhawks) alumnus Craig Finn – “Your [current situation surrounding the sport that is deeply meaningful to me and yet I see changing into something I don’t care for] makes me sick, but after I get sick, I just get sad.” 

I’m not threatening to check out here, I don’t intend to do the common internet user move of overstating my perceived value as a person who watches a sport on TV, but I am stating that I’ve noticed that I care less about the immediate future. The auxiliary stuff is still interesting to me – I was listening to Split Zone Duo’s Dead Letters series all throughout last week and just two or three days ago, I started reading a book of compiled diaries of the football coach at Harvard in 1905 – but I just haven’t had the same itch to look up the opening weekend slates and read the preseason polls and the Heisman watch list or any of that stuff. Maybe I’ll be fully engulfed again this weekend when the season kicks off for real, and all of this will be revealed as a kind of smoke screen, performed jiltedness to mask a love creeping closer to an addiction than anything else by this point. I’ll watch my beloved undergraduate school try to improve on a phenomenally exciting bowl-qualifying year and I’ll watch my beloved graduate school win games on clutch punting and fumble recoveries, and I’ll feel silly about having written this whole thing. At the moment, though, it’s just kind of a drag to think about it. 

This used to be one of the most exciting, hopeful times of the year for me. All of the other factors that have always been there there – I’m making preparations for the fall school semester (though from the staff side rather than the student side), I can feel the heat and humidity of August weighing on my skin like a shirt, the Royals are not mathematically but are emotionally eliminated from postseason contention, Sporting’s on pace to just barely edge their way into the playoffs, I can hear the cadences of various high school and collegiate drumlines in the morning when I step out of my house, there’s preseason NFL on TV – all of those things signal that it’s time to start getting excited for the college season, but I’m not.

If I really pick at the scab, I’ll recognize that things have always been in some sort of flux. I used to buy the EA Sports video game around now, I used to read the EDSBS season previews around now, I used to be at band camp around now, but life has moved on. I’ve moved on, I’ve always moved on. I’m not surprised that there’s such deeply-set pain around this, the parallels are very obvious: This period of such constant fluctuation began when I was about fifteen years old. I learned that Nebraska and Colorado were leaving the conference when I was just starting high school. The purest childhood nostalgia I ever feel, the type that I think other people get for Disney movies or The Legend of Zelda, is connected to college football. It was playing the video game each year, asking my grandfather about schools I’d learned about from the video game, watching old games and documentaries about the sport on ESPN Classic, getting up early to watch Gameday on ESPN, riding in the back seat on the trip up K-10 to see KU play on Saturday mornings in the fall, that’s my childhood halcyonia, that’s the sort of thing that would get the wistful piano track accompaniment and the old film grain filter in a movie about my life, and right as I hit the era of life in which the harsh truths nip at the scaffolding of the old innocence. Everything I thought was so certain in the sport started to shake just as well, and it’s only become shakier and shakier. 

It hurts more deeply than the losses of other things I used to care about, because at some level, every change is a reminder of the necessary complication of life as one progresses into adulthood. I feel remnants of the pure, childish pain that came from the repeated gut-punches that taught me that life was not as I once believed with every new wrinkle. Somewhere within, I still feel the confused angst of the fifteen year-old version of me, learning that a centuries-old rival like Nebraska can just up and leave right alongside learning that he’s not as smart, attractive, charismatic, nor capable as he thought he was. The same impotent cries of “I don’t get it” and “it’s not fair” echo now, as true now as they were then. Maybe it’s not as hot-blooded as it was, maybe I don’t feel the tears encroaching like I did in my bedroom in the fall of 2011, listening to We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed and lamenting my newly-understood inadequacies, that year both academic and romantic, as the Border War game slipped away from us on the TV downstairs, but the vestiges of that feeling of betrayal and confusion still tickle nerves within me in a way that I’m kind of happy to say I haven’t fully lost. I’d rather still be hurt a bit, in a manageable way, than to have completely given up over it, to take the simpler road of performing self-righteous cynical disaffectedness over it, to pretend like I was a moron for ever getting romantic about it, a dupe for letting myself care, a cog in an ultimately unethical machine only ever good for getting advertising money from GEICO and Dr. Pepper to ESPN and FOX, and the fact that I don’t care for it anymore rules, actually, lol, lmao.

It’s one of the few things I’ve held onto since childhood, one of the only parts of life that has stayed about as important to me from elementary school to full-time employment, and in a way, that’s made the change worse. Everything else that changed for the worse as I grew up either got worse because I grew up, became ignorable, or outright stopped existing. I don’t feel any sense of betrayal from the diminished quality of Paper Mario games or Cracked.com articles or Weezer albums, but my time with each of those stopped years ago. I’m still connected to college football, I still care, and that makes the unwelcome changes at least hit a little harder.

As much as I may lament the end of childhood innocence in retrospect, I vastly prefer the complex reality in which I’ve grown to thrive. Nostalgic pangs are fleeting, and I do not truly desire to return to the simplicity of youth. I would not sacrifice the complex joys of adulthood for that, and truly, I haven’t sacrificed them. I wish that I could be experiencing those complex joys with opponents in a reasonable traveling distance, but I don’t have any yearning to go back and be ten years old again, nor twenty years old again. I still find joy in this as an adult, even with the changes.

I will go to the BYU and UCF games, and I will sit on the bleachers upon which I met my best friends, in the stadium in which my parents met each other, looking towards the field upon which my great-grandfather and namesake played, where I felt those saccharine joys of childhood, and I will be able to appreciate all of them as much as I understand and appreciate the novelty and absurdity of BYU and UCF being our opponents as well as the nuances of the unique offensive play-styles that both will bring along. It’s not what I remember, and it’s not necessarily something that I think I like (I’d pick a reformation of the original Big 8 over this 100% of the time), but it’s still Kansas football. I was out there when we played Nebraska and Mizzou, I was out there when we played Texas A&M and Texas, I was out there when we played West Virginia and TCU, I’ll be out there when we play this year’s new teams, I’ll be there when we play next year’s new teams, et cetera, et cetera. I have a deeper loyalty to this team than I do to my approval of the newest changes to the conference. I may miss the simplicity of childhood, but I don’t yearn for it. I certainly don’t yearn for this, in a broad sense, though.

The whole thing (the realignment, particularly) is absolutely baffling. Even if I take the most cynically capitalistic eye to it, I don’t understand how this whole thing is sustainable. Even if I take the smarmy Reddit user route and just post the word “Money” as if that wasn’t something we all understood to be the driving factor anyway, the concept of how this chimeric, stapled-together structure is supposed to even bring profits down the line, let alone in the immediate future, is difficult to really grasp. The consolidation will bring about more ‘helmet games’ between ‘big brands’ to bring in casual fans – A yearly Georgia/Texas game will get higher ratings than Georgia/South Carolina or Texas/Iowa State – but those helmets and brands were not made big by the hand of god, they are not intrinsically meaningful. We’re staring down a potentially yearly Nebraska/Washington game, too, which would’ve done numbers in 1991 when those were two of the top programs in the country, but who’s feigning excitement for that now? That’ll get kicked to FS1. BYU/Houston would’ve been a must-see clash of national powers in the late-1980s, but they both have to be happy settling for a place in the Big XII now. These brands can, and do, falter. It happens whenever a team drops into mediocrity, which can happen faster than ever in this era of the transfer portal and NIL contracts. The twisted logic of it relies basically on certain things (the staying power of certain brands, the interest of the fans, the quality of the football, the continued impact of the football) staying the same in perpetuity, which contradicts the central fact underlying college football over the past decade and a half: Nothing stays the same in perpetuity! 

I wonder if this is what it felt like to watch Jeff Skilling announce that Enron was going to start trading the weather, or to watch your aunt stow away five mint-condition new-with-Ty-tag Snort the Bull dolls to build equity for your cousin’s college fund, or to watch your co-workers show you one of the ape images they bought while discussing how much better it’ll allow them to live in the future. I just don’t understand it, and even though I feel like I have a pretty keen understanding of the logic behind the consolidation and changes, it doesn’t strike me as necessarily airtight, or even load-bearing at the least. College football needs good college football teams to keep drawing viewers during this time in which the process of holding on to good players is more volatile than ever before. It needs big television companies and streaming services to continue growing even now that the exact big television companies and streaming services have stopped growing. It needs the southeast not to become even more unbearably hot in the late summers in decades to come. It needs air travel to not increase in price. It needs major college enrollment to stay steady.

It’s unbearably stupid, and if I’d never cared about the sport, I’d find it genuinely fascinating, the way that I do the various attempts that NASCAR has made at having a navigable playoff structure, or the lists of hoax Wikipedia articles that fooled editors for some stretch of time, or the special features included on DVDs of forgotten movies, rather than morbidly and somewhat shamefully fascinating as I do now. It’s astounding, it’s genuinely farcical, what this has become, and I have no sense what to expect of it all. It’s all become so much more ridiculous than I thought it could become at a speed far steeper than I expected, I have to believe anything. I could fully believe that non-football sports split off into DI Ice Hockey-style regional subconferences by the end of the 2020s just as easily as I can believe that everything other than football will be cut by the end of the 2020s. 

In a sense, this is almost comforting. I’ve lost basically everything here – I don’t like the new conferences, I don’t like the playoff, I don’t like most of the changes that have happened with the sport (and I don’t think that I only hate change because it reminds me that I’m getting older, I genuinely dislike most of the changes. There are a few changes that I don’t dislike. I enjoy smaller games getting national audiences through streaming platforms, for example), so I’m sort of off the hook for anything on the national level outside of the teams that I already cared about. I suppose that I should appreciate this simplicity, then. It’ll be much easier to only feel naturally compelled to watch two games each weekend and keep up with two conference races than it was when I was naturally compelled to watch every game that I could from KU’s 11am kickoff to the conclusion of Pac-12 After Dark and on some weeks The Hawai’i Test, follow every conference championship race as well as the chase for the four playoff spots, and find time to do normal, non-football human activities. I’m not one who normally will force myself to follow or care about a sport (I think I’ve declared myself a fan of something like ten unique English soccer clubs and a third of the NHL since high school and it’s never stuck) and, at least to this point, the joys of this season have yet to outweigh the personal bitterness. The sport will continue with my diminished presence and I will continue with diminished interest.

I find myself mourning it, though. I would rather not feel so hurt, so bitter, but the feeling is there. I am sad about this. There’s a painfully juvenile feeling of impotence to it all. This all means so much to me, and it means so much to so many others, but since those with the influence and power over the sport had differing priorities, we’re left here. It is not for a lack of love or care on our part that this is all so different now, in fact, it’s in spite of that love and care, and in a perverse sense because of our love and care, that we’re left here. I’m left asking these questions that reflect a purer sort of teenage angst than those I deal with in much of my day-to-day as a boring grown-up: Why couldn’t they leave it alone? Why wasn’t that love and effort enough? Shouldn’t it have been enough? How perfect, how bitter to feel myself arriving at such a painfully simple conclusion: it’s not fair. It’s not right – and though I understand all of the little machinations behind why love was just not enough, I’m still left feeling like I won’t get a sensible answer, or at least an answer that I like enough to consider it sensible, to those questions beyond that. It isn’t fair, it isn’t right, it doesn’t make sense, and there’s nothing I can do about it. 

I will be at the stadium in Lawrence on Friday night, I will do all of the things that I typically do, and I will appreciate what I have while it’s still there.