I was once told that I was in an abusive relationship with the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team. It is true that they have rarely made me happy. More common emotions I feel on fall Saturdays are relief (after wins) and anger and despair (after losses). I do not expect the Irish to make me happy anymore. But even if they did, even if they brought the national championship back to South Bend, however much lasting joy it would bring me—there would still be next season, and more seasons after that, to worry about and then, inevitably, despair over. So why do I stick around, why do I I choose to get mad at a television screen for three hours instead of doing literally anything else with my limited time in this world? It’s a hard question to answer.
I suspect many other fans of college football are asking themselves similar questions. The nature of fandom isn’t changing—we all understand what we have signed up for—but college football is. Every sports fan understands the pain of being let down by the team, but to be let down, almost all at the same time, by every institution with a role in governing, promoting and preserving the sport is a rarer experience. The regional conference identities that defined football for so long are being steadily broken apart by TV networks, who want to show games that will get higher ratings, and the schools themselves, who want bigger rights fees from the networks. The Big Ten, the premier Midwestern conference so named because for the better part of a century it had ten teams, now has eighteen. They include such Midwestern schools as UCLA and Rutgers. The Pac-12, which was the top conference on the West Coast, has been abandoned by ten of its twelve members. Its biggest brands were taken by the Big Ten; the rest found what conference alignment (and TV money) they could, and so Cal and Stanford now belong to the Atlantic Coast Conference. The playoff at the highest level of the sport, which has only been around for about a decade, expanded last season from four teams to twelve.
The players are changing, too. They are no longer unpaid amateurs. National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston, which the Supreme Court handed down in 2021, declared that long-standing NCAA restrictions on education-related benefits were violations of antitrust law. As a result, athletes are allowed to profit off their name, image and likeness. Almost immediately, booster collectives sprung up all over the country to give players previously unthinkable sums of money in exchange for things like autograph signings and appearances in advertisements. And they have to pay up if they want to keep their talent; among the NCAA rules the courts have declared violations of antitrust law are the old restrictions on transferring, which kept most players at the school they signed with out of high school. Players now can transfer as many times as they want without losing their eligibility. And the last line of amateurism—the schools directly paying the players—has fallen with the settlement of House v. NCAA.
So college football is, in effect, now a business with employees. Most things, especially most things that make as much money as college football does, are. It’s very American. But when fall Saturdays come around, we still like to pretend it’s about something else. And this too is very American. All the changes I mentioned above mean that the sport is changing, but they should also remind us that, like the country where it flourishes, it has never been pure. Any simple defense of amateurism fails to reckon with all the money the schools have made over the past decades that the players never saw. But it also neglects the much older tradition of paying players under the table to attend one school and not another, which goes back to the early days of the sport in the 1800s. And it neglects the fact that scholarships, which today’s defenders of amateurism have no problem with, were once viewed by an earlier era’s proponents of amateurism as an unacceptable inducement for a player to attend a school. But all this is thinking; and college football is no place for that. In those three hours or so of infinity, while the game can still be won or lost, we do not think: we yell.
Why do we yell? We yell because football is an exciting game. We yell because we feel such strong emotion. But, most of all, we yell because it is all we can do.
This is what it means to be a fan. The game is decided by those out on the field, and that very fact makes them different from us. Frederick Exley saw it near the end of his semi-autobiographical novel A Fan’s Notes, the great American novel of football:
The knowledge caused me to weep very quietly, numbly, caused me to weep because in my heart I knew I had always understood this last and most distressing reason, which rendered the grief I had caused myself and others all for naught. I fought because I understood, and could not bear to understand, that it was my destiny—unlike that of my father, whose fate it was to hear the roar of the crowd—to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan.
We are fans because we wish we were on the field, but the vicarious participation of fandom is as close as we can get. The greatest sports figures obtain an immortal glory, and we try to associate ourselves with it through bestowing it and hoping that in turn it rubs off on us. They are American heroes. I do not mean that they are heroes to Americans; I mean that they become legends. Jim Thorpe has more in common with George Washington and Paul Bunyan than he does with Joe Guyon and Chic Harley. America is a society of the spectacle; is it any wonder we all want to be part of it? It’s what we know. It’s how we define the world. We wish we could define it and not be at the mercy of others, having it defined for us.
So we wish we were on the team, but what do we want the team to do? What do we wish we were doing? Winning, yes—but more specifically, defeating our rivals. Rivalries are more heated in college football than in any other American sport. For one thing, nobody ever spent four years living at, say, the New York Yankees, and having any number of formative experiences there, whereas in college sports the teams are emanations of the schools. The college-football schedule helps; unlike in other sports, college-football rivalry games are played only once a year, so the winner has a year to enjoy bragging rights, and the loser has a year to stew. And, since most college-football programs have no real shot of ever winning a national championship, success has to be defined by achievable goals: winning the games you should, maybe pulling an upset or two and, above all, beating your nemeses.
But the biggest source of rivalry intensity is college football’s regionality. Many of the best college-football rivalries fall into one of two categories: “the flagship university of one state vs. the flagship university of a neighboring state” (e.g. Michigan-Ohio State) and “the flagship university of one university system in a state vs. the flagship of the other university system in that state” (e.g. Alabama-Auburn). These are rivalries based on proximity—most fans know some people on the other side. You need someone to brag to, after all. When Notre Dame and Michigan played in 2018 and 2019, a friend and I had a bet on the game: winner gets to shave the loser’s head. Looking back, it was as close as we could feasibly get to scalping.
These rivalries provide an expression for fears and resentments already there. The occasional fan who talks as though they are more or less arbitrary betrays that they have not thought through their own feelings very deeply. America has, thankfully, never really had sectarian hatreds map onto its sports (no, older generations of Catholics thinking Notre Dame football and Georgetown basketball are sacraments doesn’t count; the Notre Dame-Nebraska series of the 1920s might). But college football has just about everything else. Some of the conflicts that created the modern world are present; the two sides of Pitt and West Virginia are (in the opinion of the other) effete and out-of-touch city dwellers and inbred hillbillies with bad dentistry. Many in-state rivalries are divided between “the school that produces the doctors and lawyers” and “the school that produces the middle class,” and, as in early modern Europe, the nobility make an alliance with the peasantry (who here are sidewalk fans) against the upstart bourgeoisie.
The regionality of the sport also leads to regional rivalry; in fact, the history of the sport reflects the history of regional identity, rivalry and supremacy in America, as well as broader trends in the life of the nation. The sport’s first powers were in the Northeast, part of what is now the Ivy League, and schools all over the country adopted the game and recruited players from the Northeast to coach their teams and help teach them how to play. The superiority of the Northeast lasted for decades, if a bit longer in the general imagination than in reality, but first the Midwest and then the South caught up and then, as the Ivies deemphasized football, surpassed the Northeast. These transitions were characterized by both schools and fans in each region making the case for their own superiority. Fans elsewhere in the country complained about “Eastern bias” in the same way that pro sports fans do today. The halftime speech given to the Alabama team at the 1926 Rose Bowl was, reportedly, as follows: “And they told me southern boys would fight.” Wallace Wade, the coach who gave the speech, was from Tennessee, but he attended and played football at Brown. Alabama would go on to beat Washington, and the game (a little inaccurately) passed into legend as the game that legitimized Southern football.
From there, more of the same. Advancements in travel made intersectional games more popular and, along with the growth of news media covering the sport, made it possible to speak of college football as one national endeavor. World War II and its aftermath shook up the sport. The South’s refusal to integrate its football teams became a bigger and bigger issue, and they eventually justified it to themselves as necessary to avoid being at a competitive disadvantage. The invention of air conditioning and effective ways to spray for mosquitoes made Florida an attractive place to live for the first time. With this growth in population generally came more specifically growth in high school football players, and this new in-state talent allowed schools in a state that had historically been a college-football backwater to dominate the sport—Miami first in the 1980s, and then Florida and Florida State in the 1990s. Of a piece with the deregulation of the 1980s was NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which allowed schools and conferences to negotiate their TV rights for the first time. In the 2000s and 2010s the South decisively surpassed the Midwest as the sport’s center of power. And finally, college football’s response to COVID was an incompetent, inconsistent mess.
College football is, as its fans will tell you, obsessed with its history and tradition. But, when we say this, we do not mean the history laid out above, and we do not mean the tradition of the United States of America. All the marching bands and fight songs and chants and songs played over the PA and tailgating, let alone the million superstitions individual fans have, are attempts to create a tradition free of all the historical baggage. History is a nightmare. College football is a dream.
And nowhere is that dream purer than in the desire of fans everywhere not to be fans but to be on the field. As strong as rivalries are, wanting to be on the field is not really about wanting to do what they do and obtain symbolic victories. It’s about wanting to be who they are.
This is the source of fan agita about players’ increasing ability to transfer and get paid. We want to imagine that they feel as much loyalty to these institutions as we do, and we want to imagine that they are college students like we once were, who understand our school’s traditions and rivalries the same way we do. (The real genius of the phrase “student-athlete” was in its suggestion, produced every time it was said, that the players are students just like everyone else. Neither the University of Notre Dame nor anyone associated with it ever paid me in the high six figures while I was there; if someone there would like to rectify this oversight, please get in touch.) In other words, it could have been us if not for our deficiencies in talent, work ethic and that ineffable quality, “heart.”
But the real charm of imagining that we’re out there—even of using first-person plural pronouns to refer to the team, which holds up to exactly as much rational scrutiny as the rest of this enterprise—is in getting to be young again. I was one of those lucky ones for whom college was, more or less, an experiment in adult ability without adult responsibility. (This too is an American tradition.) I can only speak for myself here. (But I have, really, been speaking for myself throughout. There is no exploration of fandom that is not also an explanation of some need it meets for the person doing the exploration.) In that holiday from real life the sport becomes a substitute for it. I think I felt more strongly in fall semesters than in spring. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Thomas Paine wrote. The United States into which I was born was not a country where that seemed a live possibility.
I have only felt that sense once. It was during the USC game in 2017. I was a freshman, it was my first rivalry game, and it was expected to be close. As it became clear that the Irish would win in a blowout, I remember feeling weightless, as if I had entered a new dispensation. The whole world could have changed then. I remember something similar in 2020 when Notre Dame upset Clemson. The student body rushed the field, pouring itself out like a wave on the beach—if this is not proof that fans wish they were the players I don’t know what is—and we soaked up whatever magic had attached itself to the playing surface. Later that night I remember wandering around campus and getting breakfast at midnight with my best friend from college. We had a very long conversation; I don’t remember half of what was said, but that night it all cohered. We were immortal, and the central fact of our immortal existence was Notre Dame’s victory.
This sounds over-egged because it is. But to be in college—to be young and free and lucky enough to have no real responsibilities—is an over-egged way of life. It has to be; the human mind will find something to work on, and devoid of weightier matters on which to exercise itself it will assign that weight to more trivial ones. On the one hand, this is inexcusable naivete; on the other, this is the innocence we all dream of.
Here is something so obvious it hardly needs to be said: all the college football players are in college. They are all, with the exception of the occasional thirty-year-old Australian punter, young. College football is not like the pro sports in this respect. We never see anyone grow old or decay. We never see a player who used to be great reckon with his body very slowly betraying him. We never see anyone washed up. We never see some young kid demonstrate, through his athletic ability, that the game has passed a man on the verge of middle age by. We get older, but they stay the same age. In college football, they are all athletes dying young.
And this is the American dream. Not the metaphorical death—although no country with some of the Roman Republic in its DNA could be free of tendencies toward being a death cult—but the unending youth. The surface-level indications of this are too numerous to name; America loves an image, and no image is stronger than that of the young and beautiful. But it goes down to the roots. Paine can write “we have it in our power to begin the world over again” as if it applies to all of America, but that is fundamentally a young person’s desire. Horace Greeley says, “go West, young man,” and has the decency to specify who should go West. The promise of the frontier is the promise of a place where no one is old.
I have written all this without any Notre Dame football on the TV. I am a reasonable man; I can think it through. I can tell myself what I am doing and why I am doing it. I can tell myself that this is bad for me. And yet, when toe meets leather, I forget all this. I rarely feel more alive. I never feel more American.
Photo credit: Maize & Blue Nation (Flickr / CC-BY-2.0)
I was once told that I was in an abusive relationship with the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team. It is true that they have rarely made me happy. More common emotions I feel on fall Saturdays are relief (after wins) and anger and despair (after losses). I do not expect the Irish to make me happy anymore. But even if they did, even if they brought the national championship back to South Bend, however much lasting joy it would bring me—there would still be next season, and more seasons after that, to worry about and then, inevitably, despair over. So why do I stick around, why do I I choose to get mad at a television screen for three hours instead of doing literally anything else with my limited time in this world? It’s a hard question to answer.
I suspect many other fans of college football are asking themselves similar questions. The nature of fandom isn’t changing—we all understand what we have signed up for—but college football is. Every sports fan understands the pain of being let down by the team, but to be let down, almost all at the same time, by every institution with a role in governing, promoting and preserving the sport is a rarer experience. The regional conference identities that defined football for so long are being steadily broken apart by TV networks, who want to show games that will get higher ratings, and the schools themselves, who want bigger rights fees from the networks. The Big Ten, the premier Midwestern conference so named because for the better part of a century it had ten teams, now has eighteen. They include such Midwestern schools as UCLA and Rutgers. The Pac-12, which was the top conference on the West Coast, has been abandoned by ten of its twelve members. Its biggest brands were taken by the Big Ten; the rest found what conference alignment (and TV money) they could, and so Cal and Stanford now belong to the Atlantic Coast Conference. The playoff at the highest level of the sport, which has only been around for about a decade, expanded last season from four teams to twelve.
The players are changing, too. They are no longer unpaid amateurs. National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston, which the Supreme Court handed down in 2021, declared that long-standing NCAA restrictions on education-related benefits were violations of antitrust law. As a result, athletes are allowed to profit off their name, image and likeness. Almost immediately, booster collectives sprung up all over the country to give players previously unthinkable sums of money in exchange for things like autograph signings and appearances in advertisements. And they have to pay up if they want to keep their talent; among the NCAA rules the courts have declared violations of antitrust law are the old restrictions on transferring, which kept most players at the school they signed with out of high school. Players now can transfer as many times as they want without losing their eligibility. And the last line of amateurism—the schools directly paying the players—has fallen with the settlement of House v. NCAA.
So college football is, in effect, now a business with employees. Most things, especially most things that make as much money as college football does, are. It’s very American. But when fall Saturdays come around, we still like to pretend it’s about something else. And this too is very American. All the changes I mentioned above mean that the sport is changing, but they should also remind us that, like the country where it flourishes, it has never been pure. Any simple defense of amateurism fails to reckon with all the money the schools have made over the past decades that the players never saw. But it also neglects the much older tradition of paying players under the table to attend one school and not another, which goes back to the early days of the sport in the 1800s. And it neglects the fact that scholarships, which today’s defenders of amateurism have no problem with, were once viewed by an earlier era’s proponents of amateurism as an unacceptable inducement for a player to attend a school. But all this is thinking; and college football is no place for that. In those three hours or so of infinity, while the game can still be won or lost, we do not think: we yell.
Why do we yell? We yell because football is an exciting game. We yell because we feel such strong emotion. But, most of all, we yell because it is all we can do.
This is what it means to be a fan. The game is decided by those out on the field, and that very fact makes them different from us. Frederick Exley saw it near the end of his semi-autobiographical novel A Fan’s Notes, the great American novel of football:
We are fans because we wish we were on the field, but the vicarious participation of fandom is as close as we can get. The greatest sports figures obtain an immortal glory, and we try to associate ourselves with it through bestowing it and hoping that in turn it rubs off on us. They are American heroes. I do not mean that they are heroes to Americans; I mean that they become legends. Jim Thorpe has more in common with George Washington and Paul Bunyan than he does with Joe Guyon and Chic Harley. America is a society of the spectacle; is it any wonder we all want to be part of it? It’s what we know. It’s how we define the world. We wish we could define it and not be at the mercy of others, having it defined for us.
So we wish we were on the team, but what do we want the team to do? What do we wish we were doing? Winning, yes—but more specifically, defeating our rivals. Rivalries are more heated in college football than in any other American sport. For one thing, nobody ever spent four years living at, say, the New York Yankees, and having any number of formative experiences there, whereas in college sports the teams are emanations of the schools. The college-football schedule helps; unlike in other sports, college-football rivalry games are played only once a year, so the winner has a year to enjoy bragging rights, and the loser has a year to stew. And, since most college-football programs have no real shot of ever winning a national championship, success has to be defined by achievable goals: winning the games you should, maybe pulling an upset or two and, above all, beating your nemeses.
But the biggest source of rivalry intensity is college football’s regionality. Many of the best college-football rivalries fall into one of two categories: “the flagship university of one state vs. the flagship university of a neighboring state” (e.g. Michigan-Ohio State) and “the flagship university of one university system in a state vs. the flagship of the other university system in that state” (e.g. Alabama-Auburn). These are rivalries based on proximity—most fans know some people on the other side. You need someone to brag to, after all. When Notre Dame and Michigan played in 2018 and 2019, a friend and I had a bet on the game: winner gets to shave the loser’s head. Looking back, it was as close as we could feasibly get to scalping.
These rivalries provide an expression for fears and resentments already there. The occasional fan who talks as though they are more or less arbitrary betrays that they have not thought through their own feelings very deeply. America has, thankfully, never really had sectarian hatreds map onto its sports (no, older generations of Catholics thinking Notre Dame football and Georgetown basketball are sacraments doesn’t count; the Notre Dame-Nebraska series of the 1920s might). But college football has just about everything else. Some of the conflicts that created the modern world are present; the two sides of Pitt and West Virginia are (in the opinion of the other) effete and out-of-touch city dwellers and inbred hillbillies with bad dentistry. Many in-state rivalries are divided between “the school that produces the doctors and lawyers” and “the school that produces the middle class,” and, as in early modern Europe, the nobility make an alliance with the peasantry (who here are sidewalk fans) against the upstart bourgeoisie.
The regionality of the sport also leads to regional rivalry; in fact, the history of the sport reflects the history of regional identity, rivalry and supremacy in America, as well as broader trends in the life of the nation. The sport’s first powers were in the Northeast, part of what is now the Ivy League, and schools all over the country adopted the game and recruited players from the Northeast to coach their teams and help teach them how to play. The superiority of the Northeast lasted for decades, if a bit longer in the general imagination than in reality, but first the Midwest and then the South caught up and then, as the Ivies deemphasized football, surpassed the Northeast. These transitions were characterized by both schools and fans in each region making the case for their own superiority. Fans elsewhere in the country complained about “Eastern bias” in the same way that pro sports fans do today. The halftime speech given to the Alabama team at the 1926 Rose Bowl was, reportedly, as follows: “And they told me southern boys would fight.” Wallace Wade, the coach who gave the speech, was from Tennessee, but he attended and played football at Brown. Alabama would go on to beat Washington, and the game (a little inaccurately) passed into legend as the game that legitimized Southern football.
From there, more of the same. Advancements in travel made intersectional games more popular and, along with the growth of news media covering the sport, made it possible to speak of college football as one national endeavor. World War II and its aftermath shook up the sport. The South’s refusal to integrate its football teams became a bigger and bigger issue, and they eventually justified it to themselves as necessary to avoid being at a competitive disadvantage. The invention of air conditioning and effective ways to spray for mosquitoes made Florida an attractive place to live for the first time. With this growth in population generally came more specifically growth in high school football players, and this new in-state talent allowed schools in a state that had historically been a college-football backwater to dominate the sport—Miami first in the 1980s, and then Florida and Florida State in the 1990s. Of a piece with the deregulation of the 1980s was NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which allowed schools and conferences to negotiate their TV rights for the first time. In the 2000s and 2010s the South decisively surpassed the Midwest as the sport’s center of power. And finally, college football’s response to COVID was an incompetent, inconsistent mess.
College football is, as its fans will tell you, obsessed with its history and tradition. But, when we say this, we do not mean the history laid out above, and we do not mean the tradition of the United States of America. All the marching bands and fight songs and chants and songs played over the PA and tailgating, let alone the million superstitions individual fans have, are attempts to create a tradition free of all the historical baggage. History is a nightmare. College football is a dream.
And nowhere is that dream purer than in the desire of fans everywhere not to be fans but to be on the field. As strong as rivalries are, wanting to be on the field is not really about wanting to do what they do and obtain symbolic victories. It’s about wanting to be who they are.
This is the source of fan agita about players’ increasing ability to transfer and get paid. We want to imagine that they feel as much loyalty to these institutions as we do, and we want to imagine that they are college students like we once were, who understand our school’s traditions and rivalries the same way we do. (The real genius of the phrase “student-athlete” was in its suggestion, produced every time it was said, that the players are students just like everyone else. Neither the University of Notre Dame nor anyone associated with it ever paid me in the high six figures while I was there; if someone there would like to rectify this oversight, please get in touch.) In other words, it could have been us if not for our deficiencies in talent, work ethic and that ineffable quality, “heart.”
But the real charm of imagining that we’re out there—even of using first-person plural pronouns to refer to the team, which holds up to exactly as much rational scrutiny as the rest of this enterprise—is in getting to be young again. I was one of those lucky ones for whom college was, more or less, an experiment in adult ability without adult responsibility. (This too is an American tradition.) I can only speak for myself here. (But I have, really, been speaking for myself throughout. There is no exploration of fandom that is not also an explanation of some need it meets for the person doing the exploration.) In that holiday from real life the sport becomes a substitute for it. I think I felt more strongly in fall semesters than in spring. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Thomas Paine wrote. The United States into which I was born was not a country where that seemed a live possibility.
I have only felt that sense once. It was during the USC game in 2017. I was a freshman, it was my first rivalry game, and it was expected to be close. As it became clear that the Irish would win in a blowout, I remember feeling weightless, as if I had entered a new dispensation. The whole world could have changed then. I remember something similar in 2020 when Notre Dame upset Clemson. The student body rushed the field, pouring itself out like a wave on the beach—if this is not proof that fans wish they were the players I don’t know what is—and we soaked up whatever magic had attached itself to the playing surface. Later that night I remember wandering around campus and getting breakfast at midnight with my best friend from college. We had a very long conversation; I don’t remember half of what was said, but that night it all cohered. We were immortal, and the central fact of our immortal existence was Notre Dame’s victory.
This sounds over-egged because it is. But to be in college—to be young and free and lucky enough to have no real responsibilities—is an over-egged way of life. It has to be; the human mind will find something to work on, and devoid of weightier matters on which to exercise itself it will assign that weight to more trivial ones. On the one hand, this is inexcusable naivete; on the other, this is the innocence we all dream of.
Here is something so obvious it hardly needs to be said: all the college football players are in college. They are all, with the exception of the occasional thirty-year-old Australian punter, young. College football is not like the pro sports in this respect. We never see anyone grow old or decay. We never see a player who used to be great reckon with his body very slowly betraying him. We never see anyone washed up. We never see some young kid demonstrate, through his athletic ability, that the game has passed a man on the verge of middle age by. We get older, but they stay the same age. In college football, they are all athletes dying young.
And this is the American dream. Not the metaphorical death—although no country with some of the Roman Republic in its DNA could be free of tendencies toward being a death cult—but the unending youth. The surface-level indications of this are too numerous to name; America loves an image, and no image is stronger than that of the young and beautiful. But it goes down to the roots. Paine can write “we have it in our power to begin the world over again” as if it applies to all of America, but that is fundamentally a young person’s desire. Horace Greeley says, “go West, young man,” and has the decency to specify who should go West. The promise of the frontier is the promise of a place where no one is old.
I have written all this without any Notre Dame football on the TV. I am a reasonable man; I can think it through. I can tell myself what I am doing and why I am doing it. I can tell myself that this is bad for me. And yet, when toe meets leather, I forget all this. I rarely feel more alive. I never feel more American.
Photo credit: Maize & Blue Nation (Flickr / CC-BY-2.0)
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.