It is a sad reflection upon modern life that the term “Orwellian” has become one of our most overused cliches. Invocations of George Orwell and his chilling masterpiece 1984 are so frequent and so flippant that they can almost be viewed alongside references to Harry Potter and the Handmaid’s Tale as belonging to that “huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power,” in the words of Orwell. Yet despite this, every once in a while, a situation arises that is so ludicrous, so baleful, that no other term can appropriately encapsulate it. Such is the case with Matthew Mayhew.

In mid-September, the Big Ten conference finally announced that it would be proceeding with a 2020 college football season despite worries over COVID-19, to the pleasure of many long-suffering fans. One such fan was Mayhew, a professor of higher education at Ohio State University. Together with Musbah Shaheen, an OSU graduate student, he took to the pages of Inside Higher Ed to share his excitement in a piece entitled “Why America Needs College Football.”