I might call it a "more predictable irrationality" though. The itch that is being scratched in Cleveland by rooting for the Browns is an emotional itch, not a logical one. It's a coping mechanism against the fear of staring out into the existentialist void and not finding meaning at all. Some go to church on Sundays. Others go hang out in a parking lot in Cleveland and drink beer and grill meat before going into the stadium with 60,000 of their closest "friends" to root for the Browns.
Ultimately the meaning is what we assign it to be. The point of my post is that it seems more and more that the structural changes of the sport are chipping away at the foundation and making it seem like we're trying to assign meaning to a cathedral in the process of collapsing.
For as much as I dislike the earthquake of recent changes to college football, I’m not quite as pessimistic toward college football losing its personal value and social highlight. But the nature of how I will relate to college football is and will change, for me. While college football is veering on becoming too difficult to have value as an entertainment escape, it can meet another human need I earlier left unmentioned:
fulfilling a yearning for our past.
A yearning for our past – is a yearning, to quote the novelist Philip Roth, for
“…the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of things.” When meaning was inherent everywhere. It’s why our favorite eras of college football are almost always the eras we grew up with. It’s why the different generations of Star Wars fans – Gen X, Millennials – defend the versions they grew up with – Original Trilogy, Clone Wars. It’s why you might see the elderly restlessly chase youthful urges through unwise romances or unrealistic purchases.
The changes college football is currently inflicting itself with is accelerating this sense of loss. On one hand, there’s community in remembering the good times, and the older among us will inevitably consult the past. Older Michigan and Ohio State fans fondly remembering the rivalry between Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler, for example.
Leveraging the past is everywhere now, and it plays out beyond its age-driven inevitability: Talk Radio airing archived 1990s rebroadcasts of Art Bell to fill Saturday night airtime. McDonald’s selling ‘adult Happy Meals.’ Harrison Ford getting dragged back into the Indiana Jones franchise. Nicole Kidman, Demi Moore, and Pamela Anderson unironically featured as sex symbols in very recently released movies (
good for them!?).
So why the yearning for the past? As we get older the past is where we find more of ourselves – or at least a growing sense of ourselves that’s heightened by a present that’s increasingly more difficult to keep up with. The past is where we’ve spent so much of ourselves, and will still see ourselves.
For as much as we’ve stated our dislike of college football’s abrupt changes – especially the transfer portal – there’s a viewer’s way through this mess by living for the moments when the more grounded, appreciable past days appear in the present. Watching Washington/Rutgers on a Friday night carries no sense of the game we accustomed ourselves to. But watching Tennessee/Kentucky on a Saturday night might relive the sport’s potential. That’s what I’ve learned to watch for these days. The recent Ohio State/Michigan game lived up to its history, pepper spray and all. As did Texas/Texas A&M and Iowa/Iowa St.
Growing a greater appreciation of your past in light of an increasingly uncertain present is a consolation of growing older that nobody mentions.
In a twist to this, it isn’t just college football fans going through similar dissatisfaction. After years of mindlessly formulating remakes, sequels, and live-action reimaginings, Hollywood has put itself in the less profitable position of competing against its past self, where mainstream viewership is starting to prefer more time with older shows like Gilmore Girls, to the point a few of the older shows are topping streaming ratings.
