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 in the country that perfected them. It’s been called every cliche — 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 imaginations of the casual sports fan. It’s Lee Corso charming a packed College GameDay crowd at a university even your uncle knows, with fans begging him to don their mascot’s headgear 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, worn by players whose names dotted ESPN’s front page long before putting on their school’s colors and some of which we’ll hear called on Sundays. These players, these people, these corporations moonlighting as educational institutions, occupy the blessed realm. They’re the fans who can find their team’s merchandise in the far recesses of a Walmart thousands of miles from campus, who can see their team play every Saturday as long as they’ve got cable TV.
The other college football, the one I grew up loving, resides in the sport’s forgotten underbelly. In the dusty caldera of Las Cruces, New Mexico, or within the dappled prairie of Acadiana, Louisiana, this type of college football is 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 hoping but failing to moonlight as corporations — they are the pigskin proletariat. 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 devouring the second. Conference realignment is a phrase that gives most college football fans PTSD, but it was on display again this summer when Texas and Oklahoma, the two top programs in the Big 12, blindsided 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. What most of us fail to realize, though, is that it is the second tier of college football that will soon be growing faster than the first. The middling Power Five programs that occupy the sport’s lower middle class, the Mississippi States and Wake Forests of the world, will soon be out on the street with the bums they now look down upon.
As megaconferences expand, they’re likely to start looking sideways at the stragglers who can’t pull their weight. Once Texas and Oklahoma join, the SEC will contain an unwieldy 14 schools. If Oklahoma is willing to knife Oklahoma State for a quick buck, what’s to prevent the SEC and its aristocracy from looking to trim the fat? Kentucky, Vanderbilt, Mississippi State — all occupy the equivalent of crumbling McMansions on the edge of a nice subdivision. Wouldn’t the neighborhood be nicer without them?
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 the most some teams and their fans can hope for is holding up a trophy of a broken chair or an egg or a skillet, instead of one that says “national champions.” This innate understanding holds together a 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 child. And that’s what’s in danger of vanishing.
College football was never as bucolic as we pretend it was in commercials and New York Times bestsellers. It’s always been a con of sorts — a way for schools to attract tuition dollars and alumni donations, an accepted, because it’s mostly harmless, form of fraud. It works because it’s also beautiful. What hard heart couldn’t love brassy notes rising above a sunset as the smell of smoked pork wafts over a stadium of people dressed in the same red and black?
As the major conferences evolve into a tiny handful of superconferences, the first type of college football, the one that is slick, profitable, and professional, will win out in the struggle to define the sport. The second type of college football will grow, too — but not in a healthy way. As teams are flung from the moving car, the money will dry up. Fans will slowly stop paying attention as small-school rivalries die in favor of consolidated superconference schedules. As premium-tier college football becomes a minor league for the NFL, the second type will become nothing more than a unique church field trip.
The moneyed interests will have their playoffs 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 within the looming mountains of Boone, will expand — more chaff separated from the wheat.
But grow it will.
It’s the true believers who best spread the gospel best, anyway.
Cory Gunkel is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
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Tags: Sports, College Football, Football, Life
Original Author: Cory Gunkel
Original Location: The pigskin proletariat