Republished with permission from Florida Phoenix, by Diane Roberts
Retailers tell us Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year.
Please.
We barbarians, defenders of the indefensible, rationalizers of blown knees and brain damage, know college football season is the most wonderful time of the year, four months when it’s perfectly OK to make animal noises and behave like 7th graders on meth, display irrational hatreds, eat appalling food, and shout at people on television to whom we have not been introduced.
I am a victim of this madness.
Or perhaps I’m a perpetrator.
I can tell you every single thing that’s wrong with college football: its celebration of brutality, its fetishization of the hyper-masculine, its gleeful embrace of tribalism.
Look at the injuries: shredded ligaments, broken spines, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) from hundreds upon hundreds of sub-concussive hits.
Look at the money: For all you anti-education dolts out there whining that college professors get paid too much, the average faculty salary in Florida is around $75,000 a year, which sounds pretty good until you compare it to what football players at UF, FSU, or USF are paid: anywhere from $100,000 (for a pretty good freshman) to $1 million-plus for a hot QB.
And the coaches? The University of Florida’s Billy Napier makes $7.4 million a year.
However, the poor bugger may soon be sacked. His Gators have now lost two in a row, first to USF, then to LSU. But don’t feel too bad for Napier. If the Bull Gators, sufficiently incensed by USF’s upset of his team, fire him, he’ll get even richer: he’ll get $22 million if UF has to buy out his contract.
Ain’t capitalism grand?
Look at the retrograde gender roles: gigantic armor-clad men beating hell out of each other on the field while tiny women in short skirts with little girl bows on their heads cheer them on.
Addiction, Hypocrisy
Look at the team mascots: Notre Dame’s pugilistic Leprechaun with his dubious facial hair, representing an Irishman who, as we all know, wants nothing more than to get in a fight; or the University of North Carolina’s Ramses, an angry sheep in a sweater; or Florida State’s Osceola, a white frat boy impersonating a multiracial Seminole war leader who was betrayed by the United States and died in a South Carolina prison.
Look at the confusion of football with war: the military flyovers, the presentation of colors, calling the quarterback (who throws “bombs”) a “field general.”
Given the game is all about invading your enemy’s territory, I guess it makes sense.
Certainly made sense to the South’s historically white universities which, until the 1970s, saw college football games (especially against Yankee teams) as a Johnny Reb do-over of the Civil War, complete with battle flags, bands playing “Dixie,” and comparisons to Gettysburg.
People, this stuff is flat-out weird.
Nevertheless, I am a lifer, an addict, and a hopeless hypocrite.
Culture is a tough old bird and college football has sunk roots as deep as a live oak into my culture.
I was raised in Tallahassee; “FSU” is tattooed on the inside of my brain; I’ve been going to games since I was nine years old.
I know all the words to the FSU “Fight Song,” the “Alma Mater,” and “Hymn to the Garnet and Gold.”
I watched (or attended) every single FSU game last year—that would be the Seminoles’ 2-10 season.
Painful. But then, to love college football (especially FSU football) is to learn to suffer.
(Listen: There’s nothing you can say to me I haven’t already said to myself).
Pick a Team!
It used to be said baseball was America’s Game. As the great George Carlin pointed out, baseball is played in a park by people in caps, not helmets, and in baseball, the “object is to go home.”
If that was ever true, it ain’t anymore. Football, unrepentantly violent, irrationally angry, hopelessly parochial—that’s 21st Century America.
It’s who we are.
From the White House on down, the country has finally caught up with college football’s 150 years of tribalism: You are Red or Blue, you are one of us or you are the enemy.
If you are the enemy, you must be crushed.
The South is the beating heart of college football and Florida—no matter how many Ohioans move here—is a Southern state.
College football matters here, so much so the governor grouses about it when teams that used to be good are not good anymore.
Last year, he criticized the transfer portal and declared a Florida team should always be playing for the national championship like in the good old days when the Seminoles, the Gators, and the Hurricanes bestrode the gridiron like shoulder-padded gods.
College football, however, is one of the long list of things DeSantis does not understand.
He thinks he should be for whatever Florida team is playing against whatever non-Florida team, so he shows up at last year’s FSU-Georgia Tech game in Ireland and says he’ll attend this year’s UF-Texas match this October.
This is not how you do it.
You pick a team. You are loyal to that team.
Former Gov. Jeb Bush was a Hurricane; former Governor Lawton Chiles was a Gator; former Speaker of the House T.K. Wetherell was a Seminole.
They did not pander.
Bread and Circuses
At this moment, college football programs still need colleges to attach themselves to. The university is a kind of beard, lending cover, a facade of “student-athlete” respectability.
UM, USF, FSU, and UF are pretty much pro teams now, but no one wants to admit this, least of all the universities.
University presidents and trustees know winning football teams mean higher alumni donations and higher enrollments.
How long can this charade go on?
DeSantis has made it clear he thinks Florida universities—the non-sports parts—are his enemies, bastions of wokery, and means to whip them into line with his shiny new, as-yet-unpeopled accreditation body.
The “Commission for Public Higher Education” is supposed to replace the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) which, DeSantis claims, tried to force Florida universities to “do DEI.”
Those of us out here in the reality-based community can tell you SACS never demanded anybody “do DEI.”
The accreditor did express disapproval of DeSantis’s attempt to stop three UF professors from testifying as expert witnesses in a voting-rights case—it’s called academic freedom—but since when does truth stop a gubernatorial temper tantrum? And people wonder why a third of faculty in Florida are looking for jobs outside of Florida.
OK, back to the important stuff, i.e. football. How can a progressive justify loving the game?
I can’t. Not really.
The world is particularly bleak right now: The president of the United States is enabling (if passively) Putin’s invasion of Ukraine; the people of Gaza are starving; the people of Sudan are starving; the planet is choking on greenhouse gases.
Here in America, free expression is under attack, we’re shooting each other on the regular, and masked goons are rounding up brown folks and throwing them into gulags.
You can grant all the criticisms, the heartfelt and rational objections, but seeing FSU whip Alabama was a moment of sheer joy.
Even watching third- and fourth-string Seminoles beat the tar out of the unfortunate Lions of East Texas A&M (I know: cupcake) was a feast of elegant passes, beautiful runs, and actual (rare for FSU) blocking.
It won’t last. The Miami game is coming.
Yes, football is bread and circuses, a distraction, inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
But sometimes a little bread and a gridiron circus is just what a body needs.
Florida Phoenix
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