My first love in life was Kelly Kapowski.
My second love was college football.
I’ve seen Neyland Stadium shake as “Rocky Top” hits its catchy crescendo, and I’ve sat inside the cavernous Superdome for an old Conference USA tilt in which opposing fans outnumbered those of the hometown Tulane University team. My eyes have widened while the Sooner Schooner cruised past me down the field to mark the start of an Oklahoma game, and I’ve plucked my fair share of chicken fingers from the chandelier-adorned tents that dot the shady oak trees in the Grove in Oxford, Mississippi, the mecca of tailgating. I dream not of lush camping trips or beach bungalow excursions but of crawling atop Tightwad Hill to watch a Cal game for free, crammed among cheap fans and cold beer.
As a son of the Deep South, college football is as ingrained in me as high cholesterol and the start time of Sunday supper.
But as COVID-19 continues to ravage teams across the country, and the warts of this sport grow more visible, I’ve come to see that college football is like a McDonald’s chicken nugget: I always knew it was way worse than I imagined, but as long as I didn’t question the process, I could consume as much of it as I wanted with delight. But this year has been like watching the mechanically separated poultry parts ooze out of the machine right before digging in.
As of this writing, more than 65 games have already been postponed or canceled because of the pandemic, and the conferences all have different rules for when and how teams can come back from breakouts. The NCAA, the ostensible governing body of the sport, has abdicated virtually all responsibility for what happens when college football players contract the virus, blithely governing tiny school infractions while closing its eyes to the wider crisis. The past three weeks alone have each seen a record high in game cancellations, with no end seeming to be in sight. As CBS scrambles to find an ersatz replacement for its usual SEC Game of the Week and cases climb, the NCAA sits idly on its hands.
Players who contract the coronavirus have no recourse for healthcare or managing potential long-term effects, and many have been forced to play out of a sense of duty to the team or a long-shot chance of catching a scout’s eye to become one of the lucky few to climb out of the amateur ranks. Dozens upon dozens of players have also decided to opt out of the season entirely, knowing that their unpaid labor isn’t worth the risk. Many games have become virtually unwatchable, if they’re even played at all.
College football has always been inherently unfair: In this way, it mimics real life much more than professional football, which rewards failure with top draft picks and forces every organization to play within a confined salary cap to orchestrate parity. In the college sport, a team such as Alabama that rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars annually will usually schedule one of the poorer programs in the country to beat up on for an easy win in the middle of a brutal conference slate. But now, the Alabamas and Ohio States of the world get to use their untold millions for bountiful rapid COVID-19 tests and luxurious quarantine procedures, while the poorer programs, such as Florida Atlantic and Arkansas State, struggle to stay healthy and safe.
The pandemic has also taken away most of what makes college football great. Most stadiums are hauntingly empty, with boisterous fans and loud bands replaced with cardboard cutouts. The sui generis pageantry that defines college football has been all but lost amid the pandemic — gone are the passionate rallying cries, the ostentatious tailgates, and the live shots of fans stumbling into the stadium with painted faces and buzzed grins. Every matchup now seems like a spring game that could get canceled at halftime.
I’ve always known college football didn’t truly care about the health and well-being of its players, the ones they call “students first” when discussing things like compensating them adequately for their on-field labor. After all, Nick Saban isn’t paid in graduate school credits and psychology textbooks. But the coronavirus pandemic seemed tailor-made to exacerbate college football’s myriad problems, and in the process, it vaulted the sport into a somehow even more morally compromised position.
If the on-field and off-field problems have made it nearly impossible for me to watch, I can only imagine what fair-weather fans are doing instead on Saturday afternoons.
The pandemic upended the world, and eventually, college football, as with everything else, will settle into what we will consider our new normal. When that happens, I might be trading in my trip to Tightwad Hill for a beach bungalow excursion after all.
Cory Gunkel is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. Follow him on Twitter @CoryGunkel.
