The Moral Compromise of Loving College Football

Why I still love the game even though I know I probably shouldn’t.

Of all the major sports, perhaps none is more distinctly American than college football. Not only is American football its own unique amalgam of rugby and a handful of other sports that pretty much no other nation apart from Canada has shown much interest in, but additionally, the idea of making a university the home of a major athletic program is something that only happens in the United States and nowhere else.

Fans of college football, including myself, are forced to wrestle with the fact that we love a sport that probably shouldn’t exist — at least not in its current state. It’s an inherently violent game that, all too often, leads to lifelong injuries. While that violence can theoretically be tempered through rule changes, it can never be eliminated. And there’s also the fact that while college football is a multi-billion dollar enterprise, bringing in tons of money for sponsors, television networks, and the universities themselves, but the players are unable to share in the wealth they create. It’s not really defensible.

A century ago, Amos Alonzo Stagg made the University of Chicago into one of the young sport’s first powerhouses. He was an innovator who helped show the promise of the forward pass, and through his ideas, helped to open up and modernize the game. He won two national championships and became the most important figure on campus, raising millions for the university as the team continued to win. However, the administration began to question whether a football team having such outsized importance was such a good idea, which eventually led to the school raising academic requirements for new students, reducing the team’s ability to recruit. The team began to lose and eventually Stagg was let go. Less than a decade later, in 1939, the football program was shut down. I can’t help but think they made the right decision while also being grateful that not too many others followed their lead.

I know that, morally compromised as I feel settling in to watch the Iron Bowl every year, college football is responsible for some of the greatest, most ecstatic and joyous moments of my life. I remember where I was when I watched Chris Davis return Alabama’s missed field goal in 2013, where I was when I watched Marshall come back from a 38–8 halftime deficit to win in double overtime in the 2001 GMAC Bowl, and where I was when Boise State somehow beat Oklahoma on a hook and ladder and Statue of Liberty play.

College football is just so fun to watch, especially when compared to the NFL, which prizes uniformity so much it becomes antiseptic. Whereas in the NCAA, there is such a wide range of offensive schemes that a matchup between teams from the PAC-12 and SEC can seem like the clashing of two separate worlds. It’s so much more than just a pipeline for NFL talent, as the college game is its own weird, strange thrilling universe that provides the type of thrills and delight I can’t find anywhere else. Though even as I rewatch Seneca Wallace’s crazy touchdown run against Texas Tech from 2002 on YouTube for the 28th time, I still can’t help but feel a little weird deriving so much pleasure from such a fundamentally immoral enterprise.

While I and many others cannot really attempt to defend our love for the game, we can at least try to explain it. As Michael Weinreb writes in the introduction of his book, Season of Saturdays, “I would like to tell you [critics of the game] that you’re wrong, but I also know that you’re not entirely wrong.” And while he recognizes the sport’s “inherent hypocrisies,” it is still something that he enjoys “more purely and completely than I enjoy almost anything else in my life.” This book, while ostensibly a history of college football, is one man’s attempt to explain what those inherent hypocrisies are as well as just why it brings him so much joy.

In Season of Saturdays, Weinreb has written a unique and engaging history of college football. He focuses on fourteen notable games and explores what they tell us about the evolution of college football and the debates it engenders. I spoke with Weinreb about the book, and together we reminisced about some of our favorite, larger-than-life figures from the game’s history and the moments we can’t forget, while also trying to make sense of why we love this game so much.

Show notes:

Who are the most interesting figures in college football history?

How did the Penn State sex abuse scandal change the way we see college football?

What does our nation’s passionate love of college football say about America as a nation?

Has something been lost with the recent transition to a Playoff?

What keeps us and so many others coming back every fall?

Additional Reading:

“Get Behind Me Saban” (Rolling Stone)

“The Ballad of Reggie Bush” (Grantland)