College football is my favorite sport, a specific kind of brain-sickness that I have copped to repeatedly and without shame on this blog. I have loved it in its every off-kilter iteration since I can remember,
from the BCS Championship into its shambolic and piecemeal step into the modern era with the implementation of the playoff and the expansion of the transfer portal. It would be an odd thing to choose, had I chosen it; to so breathlessly love such a brutal game that even at it’s lower levels had taken a lot from me personally, and to hone in on a level at which the teams I root for have never reached the proverbial mountaintop and have no reasonable hope of ever doing so. A stupid, violent, beloved, futile game.
It is occasionally hard to remember that football is a game, and not only because of the head injuries that I drag around as anti-reminders of my time spent playing it at the lowest possible levels. The NFL would prefer that we see it as life-and-death, as if the score of a game played on Sunday has any kind of meaningful impact on our lives Monday-Saturday outside of that which we give it. ESPN and the various conferences with their hands on the college football scale would prefer the same; the SEC would like you to know that it just means more, for example, but more than what? More than other conferences, or more than a game? Both?
There is an indescribable energy that swirls through college football at its most potent, and I have spent countless words trying in vain to describe it. It’s a crackle of electricity that you can almost taste on the first cool breeze of the fall; a throb from somewhere deep in your chest when the drumline begins to play before kickoff. Not your heart, not quite, but probably close enough that it makes no difference. It’s wordless exaltations and breathless bargaining with any higher power that will listen, unaimed prayers fired into a universe already full to bursting with more important concerns than whether or not your team will pick up those seven yards. In those moments, though, when that Big Magic sweeps through a stadium, it’s all too easy to forget that it’s a game at all.
It should be fun. Endless dollars have been, are being, and will continue to be poured into football programs across the country in the interest of creating as fun a gameday experience as possible. The powers that be at Carolina, flawed though they certainly are, do seem to be pursuing that goal. From everything I saw, the Ludacris concert prior to the Clemson game appeared to be a genuinely good time. Unfortunately, though, the game still happened afterwards.
Even laughing about bad football can be a good time. I’ve never been one to let an outcome of a football game dictate my mood for longer than it takes to walk back to the car or reach the next commercial break on whatever game I flip to after the clock hits zeroes on the Tar Heels. Sometimes, the fun is in marvelling at the way things fell apart, and in that vein there are a lot of parts of this Hindenberg-level immolation of an NFL coaching legend’s legacy that are objectively hilarious, and will continue to be. I refuse to let a horrendous on-field product kill my joy for the sport as a whole.
At some point, though, it stops being fun. There are diminishing returns on the same old jokes about the same old mistakes being made by this coaching staff, and even the more hardhearted laugh-so-we-don’t-cry nihilists among us have to face the music (of Ludacris, at 9am before a meaningless conference game). When even the gallows humor has stopped kicking, what are we left with? And if this isn’t fun, what the hell is the point of any of it?
