My Darkest Secret....
spoiler alert: it's that I don't really watch much college football
(This is about sports. This warning serves to let my wife know that she doesn’t have to try and read it.)
I have a terrible, horrible, shameful secret that I’ve kept for years. When I say I “kept” it, I mean that I’ve shared it with literally anyone who asks the right questions. It’s basically the opposite of a well-kept secret, it’s just that most of the time people don’t ask me the right question, and I make it a point to express opinions as rarely as possible. In fact, one of the strange quirks I’ve developed after years of battling anxiety and depression is that I’ll truthfully answer essentially any question that is asked of me, but I don’t like freely offering information. So now that I think of it, it might not have anything to do with my past struggles, I might just be a jerk.
At this time of year, I feel most vulnerable about this dirty secret. Despite living in something called the Bible Belt, we are defined by our love of football. Starting in December, folks around me will ask the most poignant of seasonal queries: “Who do you think will win the college football championship game?” and on cue I will say something like, “No clue!” or “Could go either way!”. At this point, the other person will share their opinion, because most human beings use conversations as opinion shovels anyway, uncaring as to whether I would have had more to say because they want to tell me why they think one team has the advantage.
And you know what? I love when they do that. I love listening to their analysis, I really do. As somebody who does play-by-play for high school football games, a lot of times I will pick up on some new knowledge. Sometimes that knowledge is “this other person doesn’t understand football” but even that can be valuable because in the future I’ll know to shift the conversation to a much less volatile topic, like politics.
The truth, of course, is that I don’t have an opinion about who will win the college football championship because I haven’t watched a college football championship game in my entire post-college life. There. The secret is out.
It’s sacrilegious to say such a thing in the deep south, where the Belt in “Bible Belt” most often wears a giant buckle of their favorite team’s logo. It’s surely strange for somebody who genuinely loves sports to make such a statement, because championship day is typically a day where people gather together and host watch parties with all their friends. Even if it’s not anything they care about, the social aspect is enough to draw people together. That, and typically there are good chips.
Many years ago, before the 2000s had turned into the 2010s, I wouldn’t have thought about missing such a game. When the regular season ended, regardless of how my team of choice fared, I would ingest every single bowl game until they all blurred together in my mind. Who won the Pringles XBox 360 Gator Mower Fiesta Bowl presented by Lockheed Martin in 2009? I don’t recall but I know it was a doozy.
But one year something happened. A man named Cam Newton was the talk of the town, and this was in the days where he dressed like somebody who was raised on planet earth. And yes, somebody could say that I’m mentioning him for no other reason than I’m bitter all these years later that he didn’t choose to attend my preferred school, and to that I would say, “Sure, at least a little, I’m a sports fan, we’re the worst, lowest, most bitter and irrational people on the planet” and then I’d try to change the topic to something more noble, respectful, and rational, like politics.
In fact, during the course of that football season, Chad Gibbs’ book God and Football had released, where he explored the strangely unique relationship between college football and church in the deep south. I bought it on the recommendation of a friend, and then Auburn and Cam Newton won the college football championship game. Chad is an Auburn fan, so being bitter and irrational, I didn’t read the book. When I met Chad a couple of years later, I told him this story and he said, “I don’t care if you read it, I still got your money” and we still text all the time.
By the way, when I got around to reading God and Football I breezed through it in one afternoon. It’s old now, but it’s still a solid read.
In the middle of that season, though, word got out that there might have been money exchanged to make sure Cam played football at Auburn. The ruling body of college football, the NCAA, exists to protect their student athletes from benefiting from their own skills and hard work and training, so accepting money was a big time no-no. Cam was suspended and an investigation began.
For about 24 hours, that is. See, by then, he had established himself as the best player in the country and it was must-watch TV anytime he was on. Also, on a totally unrelated note, TV deals for covering college football had grown so large in the 1990s that entire conferences started to change memberships in order to maximize the broadcast money. By 2010, there was a LOT of money to go around. As you can guess, a lot of people benefited from making sure the best player in the country was on TV, so somebody else took the fall for this money changing hands, and it cleared the way for much more money to change hands from very rich people far away from Auburn to more rich people also far away from Auburn.
I hope this entire post doesn’t come across as a rant against Cam or Auburn or Chad Gibbs, because they’re not the villains in my story or in real life (except for Chad, he knows what he did). This post is merely me, a sports fanatic and part-time broadcaster, coming clean about some opinions that nobody asked me to share. In 2010, I started to realize that the people who ran the whole thing only had one thing on their minds. The NCAA, an organization established initially to protect athletes who weren’t getting paid for what they did, eventually became a billion dollar industry with the man in charge making a reported $3 million as the nation was trying to recover from a pandemic and economic struggles.
The joy I found in the sport died that year. It had a brief return a few years ago when my favorite coach, Mike Leach, was hired to coach my favorite team. Sadly, Mike passed away unexpectedly and with it, my joy once again. And there’s much more behind my frustrations, this love/hate relationship with football that I’ve developed, and it was all superficial things. Things like recruiting stars and the strange decision that unless a team wins 90% of their games, the season is a failure. How does that make sense? Mathematically, not everyone can win every time. We fell in love with sports because of the modern day folk heroes that we watched on the field and court, and as we got older we cared too much about the numbers and results. It’s killing us as fans when the depth of our conversations boils down to “this team sucks, but this other team doesn’t suck”.
See, in my post-college years, I’ve worked to become the Marie Kondo of sports watching. If it doesn’t spark joy, if it doesn’t entertain me, I’ve come to the bizarre realization that it’s perfectly fine for me to not watch it. The world continues to spin if I don’t tune in to every single game that is played. I enjoy basketball a lot more, and if basketball is on and I watch it instead, I’m not a worse person for that.
It sounds silly, of course, to “confess” all of this. Because of course it’s not that big of a deal if I don’t watch every game that is played. But for somebody like me who spent years and years soaking it all in and becoming known as a “sports guy”, it has been strangely difficult to become okay with this. Over the years, though, it’s been worth it, because it means that I’ve come to appreciate and enjoy what I enjoy about sports, and the things I enjoy rarely have to do with telling somebody else that one team sucks more than another. Turns out, all teams are good! Sometimes they don’t win, though.
The trend football and its fandom is following is far from over, of course. Conferences have collapsed in recent years as teams chase the dollars elsewhere. Football fans will come up to you and offer their opinions about these players being compensated for playing and whether they should be able to transfer or opt out of meaningless cash grab bowl games, and you know what? I will listen to every single opinion.
And who knows? There’s a chance that I might actually watch the college football championship game this year. It seems like it might be entertaining, and that’s all I can ask for. Wasn’t that always supposed to be the point behind sports? To be a form of entertainment?
Anyway, I’m sorry for writing so many words in this, Craven’s Confessions. To answer your question, I don’t know who might win the championship. Could go either way!