Has College Football Dropped the Ball?

Photo by Dave Adamson on Unsplash

Every year, Labor Day weekend marks the beginning of an exciting new season.

If I’d written that sentence just a few years back, I’d have been referring to the start of the college football season.

That was then. This year, it means something different (I’ll talk about that in my next blog).

First, let’s back up a bit. Okay, let’s back up a lot—to when I was a kid.

I grew up in a region of West Virginia that was paradise for people who loved the outdoors. My hometown was close to a national forest that offered hiking trails, rustic campsites, picnic areas, and swimming holes.

Trout fishing was huge there. Deer season was as anticipated as Christmas (among many people, it was more anticipated). There were four ski resorts within an hour’s drive.

My parents, though, weren’t outdoors people. And if there was one thing they cared less about than the outdoors, it was sports.

“The batter didn’t swing”

That’s not to say my parents didn’t support my love of sports and my (modest) athletic endeavors. They always came to my youth baseball and basketball games and my high school tennis matches.

But most interactions with my father about sports sounded like the one we repeatedly had when he wandered through the living room while I was watching a baseball game.

“How is that a strike? The batter didn’t swing.”

“The umpire called it a strike, Dad.”

“That’s not right. It shouldn’t be a strike unless the batter swings at it.”

Then he was off to the kitchen to set up his coffeemaker for morning and wash dishes for the fourth time that day.

“I don’t understand”

Sports also perplexed my mother, who found the behavior of many sports fans appalling.

I vividly recall the broadcast of a 1979 American League Championship Series game from Anaheim between the Baltimore Orioles and the California Angels. They cut to a shot of an Angels fan in the crowd holding up a toilet seat. He lifted the lid to reveal a handwritten sign that read, “Orioles are #2.”

My mother was not amused—by the sign or by how hard I was laughing at it.

Many years later, on a Friday afternoon, I picked her up after a stay at Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown. In one of the oddest arrangements in college sports, the hospital and West Virginia University’s football stadium share the large parking lot separating the two facilities.

As we waited for her to be discharged, she looked out the window toward the stadium and was surprised to see several large RVs set up at one end of the lot.

I explained they were there for the football game, and that by morning the entire parking lot would be filled with raucous tailgating Mountaineer fans.

Her reaction was predictably disdainful: a headshake, a disgusted exhale, and a judgmental, “I don’t understand.”

She certainly didn’t think of it this way, but in her world, one in which every weekend should revolve around attending church on Sunday morning, tailgating was … #2.

That glorious season

In such a household, football never stood a chance.

So, imagine the fun I discovered when I started graduate school at West Virginia University (WVU) and rented an apartment within walking distance of the football stadium.

The fun was amplified because I had started dating Amy a few months before and had lucked into a family with season tickets and a multi-generational obsession with Mountaineer football.

It also happened to be 1993, one of the greatest seasons in WVU football history. The Mountaineers went 11-0, won a huge late-season home game against Miami, and went to the Sugar Bowl.

So did Amy’s family. I tagged along, as Amy’s father drove us to and from the Big Easy in a rented RV (You haven’t camped until you’ve camped in New Orleans! Take that however you’d like.).

It was all glorious. And for most of the next 30-plus years, I was hooked on college football.

There were so many big games, dramatic moments, great players to root for (Pat White, Steve Slaton, Tavon Austin) and against (Larry Fitzgerald, Patrick Mahomes, Baker Mayfield).

There was also a sense of belonging in a place (West Virginia) where, for most of my life, I felt like I didn’t quite fit in.

And those fall Saturday home games were preceded by fun, alcohol-and-food-fueled tailgates with family, and friends who became family.

For many of those years, we pre-gamed in the Blue Lot, the same parking lot between the stadium and the hospital that had baffled my mother. We arrived around 7 a.m., set up tents and folding tables, and broke out the coolers and began dissecting the season and making predictions about the game at hand.

While it was still early in the morning, my friend’s father would call out, “Steve, what time is it?” My brother-in-law would respond by pouring and distributing the first of the day’s many round of shots.

For six or seven Saturdays every fall, as I spent many enjoyable hours in that parking lot and then in the stadium, I became the person my mother held in such low esteem—a Mountaineer football fan.

No line for the bathroom

Over time, though, things began to change.

The Mountaineers stopped winning, and the games became less fun.

We lost Amy’s father, which made it harder to find the joy in any of it.

We also got older. Prepping for the tailgate late into Friday night, after having worked all week, and then rising before the sun on Saturday morning got tougher every year.

We also grew tired of loading up the tents, tables, and coolers, fighting game day traffic, and then having to unload everything when we returned home Saturday night.

Away games, when I could watch the action from my couch, eat the pepperoni rolls and buffalo chicken dip non-sleep-deprived Amy made for us, visit the bathroom without standing in line, and doze off at halftime, became especially enjoyable.

And to be honest, drinking and overeating in a parking lot became less appealing. The hangovers the next day really became less appealing.

1993 was a long time ago

But the game changed, too.

Perpetual conference realignment, the decimation of traditional geographic rivalries, and the slanting of all the power, prestige, and national title hopes to the Big Ten and SEC, made college football less fun and more about ESPN, ABC, CBS, and Fox having an endless succession of “big games” to broadcast.

Then came NIL and (legally) paying college athletes, which further divided the big money schools from the have-nots.

And the transfer portal, which, while giving players the same freedom to jump from school to school that coaches have always enjoyed, has increasingly meant players don’t stay at the same school for their entire collegiate careers. I half expect stores to start selling replica jerseys with Velcro on the back, so the player names can be easily swapped out.

For its part, WVU didn’t help matters with a series of questionable or objectionable (to me) coaching hires and a commitment to “finding new sources of revenue” to pay players. This meant, in part, prioritizing premium seating, “re-evaluating” seating options for long-time season ticket-holders, and making the game less affordable for rank-and-file fans.

Today, the exhilaration of 1993 feels like a long time ago. I guess that’s because it was.

Now, when this time of year rolls around, college football is no longer number one with me.

In many ways, it’s #2.