Wake Up, It's Earthquake Season

On College and Chaos 2024

Holy crap we’re back again so soon? When did that happen*? Like with many of the questions that have come up in the last year and the many questions still to come through this season of American College Football, my position is clear: I am drawing a blank. I’ve got enough to do, and it’s not my job to figure this stuff out, so I will skip the journalistic detective work (I am neither a journalist nor a detective) and just direct my mental energy into willing my team to victory through the TV. Does anyone else have a better idea?

*A side note over here in the weeds: as of August 2024, I haven’t even filled in the gaps and fleshed out the details to duct-tape together last year’s thing into something approaching “complete.” And who am I kidding, it’s just going to have to stay a half-mangled pile in the back yard.

There’s a lot of catch-up work if you tuned out of the football world in January. So to recap: Saban is gone, now sitting fulltime at the College GameDay desk with Pat McAfee, and he might hate it more than every post-game press conference he’s ever done. The same goes for Jim Harbough, who is gone to the greener pastures of ~squints~ the L.A. Chargers. Gambling apps run all the game coverage. Some players might be legally declared employees soon and schools will be court-ordered to pay out a whole bunch of money. Conferences are unrecognizable even by the loose standards of what constituted a conference in the before-times. Nobody knows anything and we're all winging it. For the time-being, it looks like the largest dust cloud has settled and all the schools are sitting tight, trying not to be the first one to make a bad move or to make a good move too late.

What happens when you try to dig up a house by its foundation and move it to higher ground? None of the metaphors I can think of fit cleanly**, because the situation of post-2020 college football does not resemble anything a normal mind could reasonably grasp. What we need are abnormal minds and unreasonable grasps.

**I'll try though: Like, the foundation here is "amateurism" but the thing has been cracked and crumbling for longer than we've owned the house. The walls are, I guess the "quality of play" which look mostly unchanged but wobble a little until they start leaning into the subsiding soil. The windows are, uh, the pundit types, see-through and brittle, most likely to shatter and fall apart under the strain of movement. Maybe the roof is the sense of stability and security for the players; as long as the walls can hold it up, they have a cool dry place to live. Oh yeah, and we're moving the house because a big old flood is coming to wash away the whole thing if it stays put, that's probably lawsuits of all shapes and sizes (yes even more) and other forms of legislative shenanigans and/or skullduggery.

There will be good things that happen. There will be bad things that happen. And there will be deeply stupid and ugly things that happen. From a high-altitude view, all of that has always been true. The shift comes in the distribution. There are a lot of voices and a lot of hands grasping at a lot of money. No one is going to get everything they want, which again, has always been true. But a binary spectrum of good/bad is impossible to evaluate in the context of so many moving interconnected parts. Hence, the chaos. The chaos expands from the football field to the program management to the university management to the conference "management" to the TV overlords and the courts and statehouses, and eventually back around to the football field where it all ticks over again.

The people who gripe the most about “the state of the sport” are the ones who will gripe the most about everything – you don’t have to listen to them. There is this little sweet spot of a paradox where “I hate this sport that I love” makes the most sense in the world, and the people hanging out there are my people.

So how do I feel about the way things are and the fuzzy horizon of where they’re going? I’ll have pangs of guilt. I’ll have fits of joy. I’ll have dumbfounded wonder and exuberant confusion. Things will feel different until they start to feel normal again. That doesn’t mean that every change is a good one, that’s just evolution.

So how do I feel? I don't know man, it is what it is 'til it ain't. What it IS is about to start, so let's watch.

Go Dawgs, and whoever will be left when the football team breaks away to from its own sovereign city-state, maybe some townie dirtbag ultimate Frisbee outfit. Go Disc Dawgs, too.

The Olympics happened again. It was metal as hell in Paris, the biggest theme being “LOOK WHAT WE DO TO OUR TYRANTS.” The games were fun as hell to watch, and I am pumped to watch more games every week as the daylight of the year winds down into the chaos night of the nether-realm (Merry Christmas!). Let’s blast some Gojira and overthrow some monarchs and parkour over the roofs of our troubled past, with government-mandated, riot-maintained three-hour lunch breaks for baguettes and pleasant little cups of coffee.

The rickety old house is making its way up the hill, so far still intact, but the thing about hills is they keep eroding too.

There is no such thing as solid ground.

Play Ball!

-The Dad Rock