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When did you fall in love with college football? When did it really grab you and never let go?
Maybe it was when you were a kid, something you inherited from a parent or absorbed from friends. In central Illinois, where I grew up, the only sports team within two hours was Illinois, and all the games were shown live on the local CBS affiliate. They might as well have been the New York Yankees.
Maybe you were entranced by a specific player. Down here in Georgia, I sure do know a whole bunch of 40-something dudes named either “Herschel” or “Walker.” Or maybe you just turned on a game one day, decided the Oregon Duck was handsome and never looked back. We all have our things.
But I bet a lot of you had your breakthrough moment with college football for a much simpler reason: You went to school there.
Obviously, not everyone who cheers for a college football team did so. My father, an electrician who didn’t attend Illinois but worked enough overtime hours to send his wife and both his children there, could name you every Illini player from Dick Butkus to Luke Butkus. But when people talk about the difference between college sports and professional sports, the physical act of attending a specific college is always a little underappreciated. People have a palpable, tangible connection to their college that they just don’t have to their local professional team. Your college isn’t merely something you cheer for; it’s a living, breathing part of your life.
Of the major eras in life — childhood, college, adulthood, parenthood, retirement, death — college is perhaps the most formative one, if just because it is the most narcissistic one. It is the one age in which you are most focused on yourself, have the most control over your life and start to figure out who you really are. It’s when the clay that makes up who you are begins to harden.
Sports are often inextricable from that. When you’re in college, a football game isn’t something you watch on television; it’s an event, the orb around which everything happening on campus — which might as well be everything happening in the world — revolves. And these form core memories.
I remember watching my Illini blow a 21-point lead to undefeated Penn State in 1994 more than anything from class. We care more about sports in college because we care more about everything in college. It’s when everything seems to belong solely to us — before the real world and all its stressors and its obligations and its mounting bills and its polarizing political environments slowly eat away at all that. It’s why alumni always want to return to campus. It’s a time to remember who you once were, and maybe, deep down, you might even still be a little bit. College is a piece of your soul.
Because of that, people are unusually emotional about their college in a way that they’ll never truly distance themselves from. When your pro team loses, it hurts; when your college team loses, it’s a personal affront that becomes a part of your history. Not for nothing, but I believe this is an underappreciated backdrop to the explosion of popularity in college football. College enrollment exploded over the past several decades, which is going to mint you a heckuva lot more college football fans.
But as college football has marketed itself more to TV in recent years, it has become less connected to, you know, actual college, and the students who this is all supposed to be about and who are the future middle-aged fans who are supposed to keep this train running.
I was in Durham, N.C., last week to watch my Illini play (and beat) Duke, and I spent most of Friday and Saturday wandering around campus. It was my first trip to the Duke campus, and it’s as gorgeous as I’d been told. It’s sort of what I’d imagine attending Hogwarts must be like, except with everybody wearing chinos instead of robes. Now, I understand that Duke is not a football powerhouse — though that’s a good team, and Darian Mensah is gonna break some ACC hearts this year — but I could not help but notice how disconnected the football experience was from the campus experience. Or more to the point: The game was clearly not an event built with the students’ interest in mind at all.
Attendance was 23,893 for Illinois’ 45-19 win at Duke on Saturday. (Lance King/Getty Images)
First off, it was a noon start, on an extremely hot day in the South, because that was the preferred TV time slot. The best seats were for donors, alumni and deep-pocketed visiting fans rather than students. (It should be said there were plenty available either way.) My phone could barely get any service at all in the stadium. The game was against a team with no real geographic connection to the school, though, to be fair, Champaign is still closer to Durham than ACC opponents in Berkeley, Palo Alto or Dallas. It felt like we all spent more time waiting for the game — which took nearly four hours — to come back from commercial than actually watching it. The game felt at times like an endurance test, one that you can’t blame busy students for not always being willing to take.
This is not specific to Durham: Games are focused even less on students in Athens, where I’m a season-ticket holder for Georgia football and where I swear the most commonly played musical artists on the video board are Jason Aldean (who is 48), Garth Brooks (who is 63) and Neil Diamond (who is 146, I think). But it goes beyond what my middle-schooler sons would tell me is “Unc Music.” I think it’s that college itself has changed.
For Sports Illustrated before the pandemic, Charlotte Wilder (current co-host of The Athletic’s “The Sports Gossip Show”), wrote a smart piece chronicling the precipitous decline in student attendance at college football games, a trend that has been a college football worry for a decade. Wilder brought up a point that’s often forgotten in this discussion: College isn’t as much fun as it used to be because now that colleges have become such competitive academic environments and have become so exorbitantly expensive, students (and their parents) are treating it less as a stage in life than a family investment that must be nurtured and protected. Students want to have fun. They will find time to party. But five hours in the stands at a game isn’t always the most efficient use of one’s party time. The game is, after all, on TV at the bar too.
I’m not saying that students have stopped going to games or caring about them. But the experience is different. And the major difference is that the sport is just not oriented around them anymore. Students are just atmosphere, funny GIFs to pass around, extras in the TV show.
College football is organized around TV, at the whim of the executives who choose the matchups and the game times (and the conferences, of course), and it is thus created with the home viewer and consumer at the forefront of the mind. Which can’t help but disconnect it that much more from the college experience itself — the very college experience that is the reason people who love it treat this level of football often more passionately than fans of the NFL do of their teams. This is a sport in which police officers used pepper spray while breaking up a postgame brawl, and most college football fans shrugged and thought, “Yep, that’s the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry for ya.” (Suffice it to say that wasn’t a danger at the Jacksonville Jaguars-Carolina Panthers game on Sunday.) People lose their minds about college football, and thank goodness for that.
But it all had to start somewhere. And in many cases, it started as a student in college, a collective experience that we end up individually carrying around with us the rest of our lives. We love college football because it is football, but also, perhaps mostly, because it is college. We get grouchy about college football because we remember what it was like when we first experienced it, when we were young, when it felt made for us, when it was everything.
Do you think today’s college students feel like this is made for them? Will they look back at this era of college football and think of it as its glory days, the sport at its very best? Or, worst of all, will they not look back at it at all?
College football is about tradition, and nostalgia, and wanting to revisit the person you once were, if just for a Saturday. You have to make that connection first. You have to fuse the bond. And I am not sure that bond — between game and school, between player and student, between “college” and “football” — has ever been quite as tenuous as it is right now.
(Photo: Brett Davis / Imagn Images)
