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In Praise of College Football

by Christian Huebner 

Tomorrow night, the state universities of Texas and Alabama will compete for college football’s national championship.  This will finish three weeks of bowl games, which are themselves the capstone to hundreds and hundreds of games played all autumn long. 

I’m an unabashed lover of college football.  I can remember vividly the moment when that love began, as a ten-year-old kid growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska.  That year, Nebraska had an unexpectedly great season, earning the right to play the most talented team in the country, Florida State, in the Orange Bowl.  The winner would claim the national championship.

Florida State was heavily favored, but Nebraska surprised everybody and kept the game close.  My parents usually enforced a strict 8:00 p.m. bedtime, and they had counted on a blowout loss in the first half to keep to that schedule.  But as the game dragged on—eight, nine, ten o’clock—and the unthinkable—a win! a national championship!—began to be whispered as a possibility, my parents let me stay up watching.

The game came down to a thrilling finish.  With one second remaining, Nebraska trailed by two points, but was lined up to kick a field goal that would win the championship.

Like I said, I remember the moment vividly.  David Sizes was the holder.  Byron Bennett was our kicker.  The snap—the hold—the leap of the defenders—the kick—the ball sailing downfield into the dark Miami night—and it missed.  Wide left.  Florida State rushed the field in ecstasy and Nebraska stood to shake their hands and walk slowly to the locker room.  As for me, I cried myself to sleep.

There is so much to love about college football and its trappings.  There is, for instance, the festival feel of the game.  Football fandom is joyful hedonism, whether in the living room with friends and a bowl of queso on a Saturday afternoon, or at the game in person.  There are pep rallies, fight songs, marching bands, tailgating, ostentatious fan apparel, the wave, cookouts, and the pouring of libations.

Then of course, there’s the game itself.  It brims with rambunctious energy.  Behind the predatorial facemasks and underneath the Homeric shoulder pads, the sport is played by a bunch of teenagers and twenty-somethings at the cusp between boyhood and manhood.  There’s beauty in the loose and loping way they play, full of mistakes and unexpected bursts of brilliance, all of it teetering on the edge of chaos.

There’s also the fact that college football is played in, well, college.  The institutions of academia lend a kind of amateur nobility to the enterprise, which even the crassest of corporate exploitation has not yet been able to destroy. 

The academic setting also teaches us something about the vanitas of passing time.  A promising young recruit comes in and makes a splash his freshman or sophomore year.  To fans, coaches, and sportswriters, he stands for the infinite potential of the future.  But this is always tempered by the knowledge of one inevitable fact: death -- well, actually, graduation.  After four years, even the best players must be cut off from further competition at the very height of their powers (though some, it is said, will play yet again in the exalted Elysian fields of the NFL).

College football is also something that lives where you live; it’s local, not gated off in luxury mansions and $10 million salaries.  Back home for Christmas Eve mass this year, I nearly ran into the man who was sitting and kneeling with his family behind me: Bo Pelini, head coach of my beloved Cornhuskers.  My sister, who went to college at Nebraska, had classes with football players.  My engineering major friend tutored a number of them through their math courses.

All this is really to say that college football is much more than a game to those who love it.  College football is not life, but I do think it makes life more beautiful, true, and good.

I have a theory about why this is.  Aristotle believed that the great value of the theater was catharsis.  By this, he meant the experience of getting swept up into a character and his story, thinking his thoughts, feeling his feelings, performing his deeds.  In a well-composed drama, we can experience in an hour the kind of terror, sorrow, jubilation, nobility, or depravity that would normally take a lifetime to achieve.  Stepping outside of ourselves and into another’s experience like this, Aristotle believed, purges and cleanses us in some way, and conditions us to live our own lives with greater nobility.  If you’ve ever felt that exquisite kind of exhausted glow when leaving a movie theater, you know what he meant.

College football works a similar magic.  A game and a season are like a play, a wartime epic, you might say.  The difference is that the audience and the actors—the fans and players—are equally interested and unsure about the outcome of each act.  That makes it more like real life.  And somehow that means that the outcome, when it does come, matters more.  The sorrow and joy felt by fans and players is a step closer to the sorrow and joy of real life than you get in a theater.

Properly harnessed, the experience of (metaphorically) living and dying with a favorite team can teach a lot about living well.  That January night when I was ten, I began to learn something about loss; the next season, I’d rejoice to learn about triumph and dreams come true, when the Huskers returned to the title game and won.  Tomorrow night the Texas Longhorns, the Alabama Crimson Tide, and their fans will divvy out similar experiences.  For which I can only wish them well—and also say, look out for Nebraska next year.

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)