Football on TV

Picture a college football game: it’s a kaleidoscope of light and sound, of organized bellowing, of overwhelmingly blaring music that is one of the three types of music that are allowed to be played at a college football game: popular songs from five year ago, the AC/DC catalog, and martial music from the early 1900s played by students dressed like Habsburg infantry. The stands are full, the stadium quakes, the pads clack under the din, the smells of roasted meats waft in from the parking lots. This is the image of college football that you see in television commercials.

And then there is the true soul of college football in most stadiums which is two teams desperately trying to qualify for the Imitation Truck Testicle Bowl in stadium that are half full and look like they might be foreclosed upon, listless blowouts, mudpuddle punting exhibitions, the universally despised Red Hat Television Official. The vast majority of college football games are wonderfully ephemeral things that almost no one cares about that are barely sports stories and that pass unremarked upon outside the participants' own fans and somehow this is worth a billion dollars.

I don’t understand how any of this works, but apparently college football games are so valuable that advertisers are willing to spend astronomical sums of money to show you the same fifteen commercials you will see so often during a college football season that it will actually turn you against the products they are selling and in fact only become willing to purchase something that will let you virtually enter the Fansville Universe and lay waste to it with a Grave Digger. It is either so valuable that networks can command top dollar for commercials that air during a Rutgers-Northwestern game that only I and the guy who shaves Rutgers welcome to the Big Ten into his body hair cares about or the big games between the vanishingly small amount of name brand teams that anyone cares about are so overwhelmingly lucrative that advertisers are willing to spend unfathomable amounts of money to put truck ads on a broadcast of a Rutgers-Northwestern game watched exclusively by people that should probably not be legally allowed to operate a truck as long as they also get to sell those trucks in prime time.

The money is clear: college football is a television show. The stadiums, the bands, the drunken students in body paint or dinosaur costumes are all extras, the head coaches are all played by grimacing 55 year-old character actors that have appeared in 155 films telling Steven Seagal he is not allowed to become a rogue operative. The Big Ten will make about seven billion dollars under its new television contract that starts next year. Its games will no longer appear on ESPN, but instead air on Fox, CBS, the Big Ten Network, NBC, and a variety of streaming services associated with these networks. The number is astonishing, not only because of the sheer amount of money involved that will still not go to any of the athletes directly but because the current model where the networks are negotiating with conferences means that the they are sending money planes into Rosemont for approximately six games of national interest per season and roughly 900 games that no one cares about between mediocre teams doing fullbacks at each other in 11:00am sleet storms, and this includes every single game that the team that this blog is about has ever played.

The new TV deal does not mean that Big Ten teams will all of a sudden find themselves on network TV. It is likely that when one of these teams manages escape velocity from Big Ten Network Regional Action, they will find themselves shunted onto some associated steaming service that will be even harder to find than those non-conference games that the Big Ten has the balls to ask you to pay for even though they should be paying you and in fact sending you free psychadelics if you are willing to watch Illinois vs. Ball State. I suspect that within the next five years, a crucial Hat Game will be only found on gas station TV.

At some point the whole edifice feels unsustainable.  With this much money at stake, it seems impossible to believe that networks will buy college football packages not based on a team's draw or popularity but because they chose to join an athletic conference at a time when college football involved unloading a train car full of a school's most cauliflower-eared toughs and letting them literally stomp each other to death before the spectators would end the game with a riot that involved throwing wagon wheels at each other or trying to poison each other's mustaches.  At some point, the television networks will want to pick the teams that will make the most money and leave the rest of them to shove each other around on an app.  But then again, maybe this exactly what the networks deserve.  After years of shunting shows onto an increasingly byzantine and expensive series of streaming services, maybe airing Northwestern games to an audience of sickos is the equivalent of making TV networks pay for Paramount+. 

AN INTERNATIONAL INCIDENT

I have no idea what the people of Ireland did to deserve this, but Northwestern and Nebraska will open the season in Dublin.  This will be the seventh NCAA football game in Ireland-- most of these games have predictably revolved around Notre Dame or Boston College with the exception of a bizarre game between Penn State and UCF and the truly chaotic pairing of Pitt and Rutgers inflicted on 20,000 people in 1989.  I am genuinely confused by why this is happening, why two teams that certainly have little recognition outside the United States (and in fact one that has most Americans scratching their heads to locate it) and that are known for playing the absolute dumbest football game you have ever seen have been sent overseas to spread the magic of football.  The best explanation I can think of is that a Northwestern-Nebraska game has quietly been banned in the United States.

International college football games in 2022 are still rare enough to be a novelty but not so rare that they are an event.  Teams in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century played in Canada and expanded to Cuba and Mexico.  In the 1970s, several teams played in West Germany and Austria, and the 1980s featured a series in Japan.  But the most incredible international game planned that never came into existence was an attempt to send USC and Illinois to play in Moscow in 1989 in a game called, astonishingly, the Glasnost Bowl.  According to the Glasnost Bowl Wikipedia page, the game inspired puerile interest from Soviet audiences who wondered if football players routinely died in the violence; a five minute program explaining football had been planned to air before the game. The teams planned to transport all of their equipment and several thousand pounds of food, but USC planned to find a local Russian horse because they could not fly the actual USC horse overseas.  

But the game never happened.  Raycom, the game's organizer, ran into a maze of Soviet bureaucracy and could not get guarantees on hotel rooms and other accommodations.  Apparently, they also failed to sell many tickets to Americans because the game and travel packages were expensive and (presumably) featured Illinois football.  The game was cancelled just months before it was scheduled and moved to Los Angeles, a backup plan in case "any unexpected flare-up in the fading Cold War tensions prevented the game from being played in the Soviet Union."  Its legacy may be these two incredible Wikipedia Sentences that could only exist on that website: "The attempt to use Moscow as the venue for an American football game can be viewed as an element of intense dialogue among Russians and Americans in the late 1980s. This exchange dialogue cut across many elements of culture and served as an important step in the political transitions leading to present day Russia."

The 1989 Illini, an excellent team, ended up upsetting the Trojans in their own stadium but if I am reading the Glasnot Bowl wikipedia page correctly, they also are responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union.

The insane pointlessness of this Dublin game is the highlight of the football season for me.  Northwestern football is often ignored and hidden and now it is unavoidable.  You want college football, well here comes Pat Fitzgerald standing wistfully in the land of his ancestors and meaningfully punting.  Here comes Scott Frost, a man who is desperately clinging with the very tips of his fingernails to a job no football coach in his right mind would want.  This game is largely an excuse for fans of both teams to take a trip to Ireland, for Northwestern fans to pretend to read Ulysses in the stands and for Nebraska fans to show up in massive numbers as they do at every away game to marvel at how many of them there are and congratulate each other for coming up with the idea of leaving Nebraska.  But in my mind, I'd like to think there is a group of die-hard Irish Northwestern fans who are coming out in homemade Justin Jackson jerseys and arguing with each other about the 2013 Tax Slayer Gator Bowl.  I would like to see Northwestern football as a small but important detail in the background of the next Sally Rooney novel, much like how Nebraska football has become a touchstone of an important part of 2022 pop culture.

 

Northwestern and Nebraska have routinely played football games that are not good but exciting and down to the wire.  The major exception was last year, when a horrible Northwestern team got absolutely thrashed by an atrocious Nebraska team.  Northwestern fans are hoping that last year was an aberration and that the Wildcats have gotten into a 2010s San Francisco Giants pattern of only being good in even years.  Nebraska fans, I presume are hoping that the football team will be able to finish a game without wandering into a series of bear traps or accidentally gluing themselves to a kicking tee.  I would say that Big Ten and TV officials are hoping that this game can go into the NU/NU Vortex and end on a series of laterals or hail marys or lateral that lead to a hail mary and 14 overtimes but they probably don't care because they already got paid and the game could consist of the ball getting stuck in the field during the opening kickoff and then both teams try to dig it out for the next three hours only pausing to get into shoving matches.

Who will be Northwestern's quarterback? Pat Fitzgerald will not say.  There is nothing Pat Fitzgerald loves more than to not tell you who is playing quarterback.  He would sooner die.  He will tell you who the quarterback is only if you show up in formalwear at an appointed time and crawl through a tiny door into a room that holds a live alligator.  Fitzgerald's meatheaded cloak-and-dagger routine is one of the funniest aspects of Northwestern football now, especially considering that this may be a year where they use like 15 quarterbacks over the course of the season and manage one touchdown pass thrown by a wide receiver who played quarterback in high school.

It may be strange and perversely funny to send two extremely undistinguished teams to play in a foreign country as ambassadors of the sport, but it also kind of rules.  If you're going to pay seven billion dollars for Northwestern and Nebraska football, they should be opening the college football season in Ireland.  Send Illinois to Ulaanbaatar.  Let Rutgers and Minnesota battle it out in front of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.  They already bought it, they might as well make it look great on television.