Has the Soul of College Football Been Sucked?

The oracles of the cornfields have spoken.  College Football season is a mere 6 weeks away (brandon picture) and I find myself RAVENOUS.  Devouring every magazine I can find, thinking about strength of schedules and tricky combinations, pouring over the portal trying to remember who’s under center where.  In all of this fact finding, there are times in which I find myself exhausted and overwhelmed.  Players abscond for arch rivals, move crosstown, and seek their fortunes in foreign lands.  To be CRYSTAL CLEAR, I want players to get paid as much as the market is willing to pay.  I enjoy the fact that the balance of power now seems to be tipped in favor of labor as for too long they were kept artificially underfoot while others reaped the rewards. DESPITE THIS, I can’t help but ask whether or not this constant rate of change has started to suck the soul out of College Football? 

Gone are the days of falling in love with a high school hard bodied teen who looks like he’s 30 at just 16.  Reading articles every week about whether or not he will choose the school that defines your existence.  Finally, SUCCESS! The freshman class is set, and you pour over the new crop of boys wondering who will boom and who will bust.  Over the years you watch these names grow and mature into ultra powerful upperclassmen.  Their success is your school’s success and your school’s success is yours.  By the time your favorite recruit graduates you may have spent 6 to 7 YEARS watching him evolve from hard bodied boy, to hard bodied MAN.  Was this weird behavior? Absolutely.  But did it matter? ABSOLUTELY NOT.  

But alas, that was then, and this is NOW.  Where the recruiting classes are decided by who has the most disposable income.  The portal directs the sport.  Mercenary talents pledging their loyalty to the highest bidders regardless of hometown allegiances.  Still, from time to time you may stumble across a young freshman that warms your loins, BUT DON’T YOU DARE get too attached.  For in the cruel irony that currently defines this age, the better he plays, the better the chance he leaves.

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Now, there are positives to the portal.  Any one of us who performs well at our jobs wishes to have the ability to move upwards.  To get raises.  These are good and natural capitalistic core tenets.  However, as the common college football fan has sat and watched the parking lots in front of their football ops transform from used Toyota Tacomas to fresh off the lot G-Wagons, one can’t help but feel these are now men of a different caste, alien from the common folk they used to represent.

But where does it end? Is it ever too much? When I look around all I see in every facet of life is the insatiable human appetite for MORE.  For thousands of years we wandered the wilderness hunting and gathering, trying to find enough to survive.  Now we joyfully eat our way to obesity to then take a shot to make us skinny.  The rise of prediction markets, the rocket fuel ascension of AI, the whirlpool of conference realignment.  Everywhere you look our world mutates and playoffs expand as we feel the voice in the back of our head calling for more, more, MORE!  You may notice a whisper in the back of your mind calling for guidelines, guardrails and best practices.  HOWEVER, that voice is smothered by the financial perpetual motion machine known as GROWTH.  For growth, is a merciless master that demands risk be be cast aside. Embrace the pace and fly FASTER you fools.  After all, profits are up and there’s gold in these here hills, proverbial monkeys’ paws be damned.  

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Alas, dear reader, this is where you might expect me to take a stand and to say that my ethics demand I boycott the game I loved; in the naive hope that it might be forced to change or slow down.  But the truth is, I STILL love this game and my appetite knows no end.  I vibrate with excitement as I think about gorging myself on the week 2 CFB slate. The wagon travelin Sooners of Oklahoma riding to the Big House to slay the Wolverines.  The Wildcats will march out of the deserts of Arizona to the mountains of Utah to make battle with the religious zealots of Provo.  White collar Blue Devils make their way to Champagne to take on blue collar white guys. Finally, the midwest monolithic behemoth of Ohio St will move to invade the lands of Prince Arch of House Manning and pillage the Longhorns’ holdings.  

So, guardrails are damned, players’ loyalties are forgotten, rivalries a thing of the past, I know I should be sick of it, but I fear I am a slave to my most base desires, and I desire football above all.  Specifically the wart filled, roughshod and uneven nature of the version played on Saturdays.  A game in which professionals square off with accountants, lawyers, medical device salesmen and insurance agents.  

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So go ahead humans, make the AI, unlock the markets, shred the regulations and let us hurtle towards our glorious and inevitable doom.  For I do not wish to end our spectacular lives half steppin into the hole; rather, let us throw ourselves headlong into the breach, as we always have, with reckless abandon and insatiable avarice.  For who cares if we should burn out in our chase for immortality as long as we get to debate whether Arkansas’ Ryan Silverfield or Kentucky’s Will Stein was a better hire. (I believe it’s probably Stein).