A Field With A Ball

I wrote this article last summer, but with fall camp underway and college football just 30 days from kickoff, it felt fitting to run it back. A lot has changed in the college football world even since last August, but this is a reminder that no matter what shifts around it, we return to the sport for the same reasons we loved it in the first place.

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The first time I met Glen Dyer, my grandfather-in-law, I was amazed to learn he once played quarterback at Texas. But his quick dismissiveness was even more pronounced than my initial reaction to the news. “The only thing we had in common with the sport they play today is that we played on a field with a ball, that’s it!” he said with a chuckle, in his trademark high-pitched voice that was always sprinkled with excitement.

He loved to downplay his football career, evidenced by how he reacted to a draft questionnaire from the 49ers that he received via Western Union. He immediately dismissed the idea of professional football and he opted instead to become a dentist. If that kind of decision was made today, I’m not sure I’d want that doctor around my teeth.

Since that story took place nearly 70 years ago, it goes without saying college football is dissimilar now than it was then, because the whole world looks completely different. But these days it can feel like 70 years’ worth of change has occurred since the Covid-19 season alone, to the point where you can imagine Sam Ehlinger making a remark similar to Dr. Dyer’s but he’s speaking to Arch Manning.

I am about to be reminded of what Glen said to me multiple times a game this fall, since we’re just a month away from a season that will inundate fans with commentary and cheap graphics about how the sport has a new look and a new playoff.

Get ready for cartoon maps highlighting travel distances between opponents, there will be animations representing the multiple stops a transfer has made on his college football journey with each university resembling a gas station, and our announcers will constantly be reminding us that a team like Iowa’s playoff hopes are still alive, thanks to the “new 12-team playoff.” 

And where Glen Dyer once scoffed at the prospect of football as a worthwhile future endeavor, our current Longhorns quarterback Quinn Ewers is the star of Dr. Pepper’s Fansville commercials where he’s bringing what was once reserved for message board meta commentary into mainstream advertisements. 

“a field with a ball, that’s it!”

When I wrote earlier this summer about what I hated about college football right now, I said I’d write a post next on how to fix the sport. I started to write that article and quickly lost interest. As I began, I remembered that the flaws, the stupidity, the constant change are as baked into the sport’s DNA as the fight songs and mascots. College football is the drunk uncle of American sports: the most entertaining and the most unpredictable. It’s true that the circumstances are more dire than they’ve been before, and the sport must adopt guardrails similar to the bumpers my son uses when we go bowling, or it risks careening off a gigantic cliff. I want my kids to have relationships with future Longhorns like I have with legends of the past, but I’m not sure that’s solved by the NCAA being usurped by a better book of rules and regulations.

Connections and love for the sport come from making memories, from experiencing the euphoric highs and devastating lows of Saturday, alongside the people you love. Still while laughing at the sport’s absurdity (and at our own for caring in the first place). Cheering for laundry or for a logo alone might be different from what we’ve had before, but it’s a cynical view to say it’s all we have left and I’m getting too old to have so much energy for cynicism.

Though their only similarity might be the fact they played on a field with a similarly shaped ball, Glen Dyer and Arch Manning are also inextricably linked by the logo they played for, the fans they played in front of and the song they sang after the games.

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A month from now, Texas will play Ohio State and it’ll be just one game among an entirely new-look college football universe that will at times feel unfamiliar and frustrating, but it’s the same stupid sport we’ve loved forever.