College Football and the Russian Masters
Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I’ve been reading a bunch of Tolstoy and Chekhov. Very time-consuming. Oops!
I live in Spain now. Yesterday it was sunny and breezy, and my brain was fried from being cooped up in our apartment all day and from all the computer screen shit I’m forced to do by this godforsaken, placeless, timeless society. I popped my headphones on, took the elevator down six stories, and went outside on a walk, listening to my parasocial friends Doug and Bill back in Ohio talk about whether Brigham Young University or the Indiana University was in better shape this season.
It was a complex set of judgments. But the truth was both programs were looking pretty good. BYU’s coach Kalani Sitake has been a sober force for over a decade now, and their not-Mormon-but-very-Jewish quarterback was coming back. He’d started off at Golden West College, then transferred to Riverside City College then to BYU. Not a typical D1 pedigree.
Doug said he’d gone back and watched a bunch of Retzlaff’s tape. He said that Retzlaff is “totally crazy.” Neither in a good nor bad way, but he’s like a coiled spring. They’ll lose a game you don’t expect because he’ll throw three unforgivable picks. They’ll also win a few games you don’t expect because he’ll throw three unforgettable touchdowns. They also picked up an NFL-caliber offensive line “traitor” from the University of Utah down the road and another big Mormon OL kid that had been spiritually stranded at the University of Michigan for four years. Not bad—the saintly Mormons were doing well!
It’s an odd thing the way noise-canceling headphones can’t really deal with wind. I was hoping to walk along the coast to Playa Mataleñas but had to detour back into the shitty new high-rises to avoid the static rustling.
Anyway, Indiana University was apparently gearing up for another good year. Last year was Kurt Cignetti’s first year as head coach, and he’d brought his entire James Madison University team (his last, quite provincial job) to Bloomington to replace the entire Indiana team—players, coaches, everyone. Cignetti was the kind of drunk, asshole, small-town American dad that brings his kids to soccer tryouts in the big city where they will be outclassed. He brags about how good his kids are at soccer for an hour before the tryouts. The city parents roll their eyes and think, “This cute provincial dipshit doesn’t know a thing about real soccer! His bitchass kids are gonna get their asses handed to them.”
But then the soccer tryouts start, and the cute provincial kids beat the shit out of the elite and cultivated talent of the upper class. The year before Cignetti’s arrival, the IndyStar reported that “Indiana football first D-1 school to lose 700 games.” In his first press conference as the coach, reporters asked whether he thought they could potentially go 0.500, 6-6, a huge accomplishment for such a shitty program; he just said, “Google me.”
In his first year they went 11-1, edging out Alabama, Ole Miss, and South Carolina for the final spot in the inaugural twelve-team College Football Playoff. In the aristocratic structure of American college football, where Alabama all but “deserves” a playoff bid, this should be impossible. But it happened. And this year most of their team passed on the NFL draft to come back for another shot. The hot, boring egotism of Indiana was elevated again.
A few years ago, on one of the daily hour-long podcasts that Doug and Bill make together, Doug said something about how he enjoys the offseason better than the actual football season. Now, this is basically unimaginable to “casuals”—a derogatory term for the 99.99% of the college football audience who are not psychopaths who mistake podcasters for their close friends. (Isn’t the whole point of sports watching the goddamn games?) But this has, sadly, basically become true for me too. I love the offseason.
The other day it was also sunny—it’s always fucking sunny here—and I was on my terrace reading a very odd piece of writing. It was basically the literary equivalent of a “reaction video,” a reflection by the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist George Saunders on Ivan Turgenev’s short story “The Singers,”1 a 12-paged masterpiece he’s taught for decades.
This is the plot of “The Singers”: a middle-class man is wandering in a dirty peasant village; he catches wind that in a nearby bar there’s going to be a singing contest between a passerby and the best singer in the town; curious, he goes to the bar; there are five or six other people, including the bartender and his wife, all peasant-y; there is awkward buildup to the singing contest; the contest happens, and the local guy wins; the narrator leaves; the end.
Cool…but what Saunders talks about in his reflection is that every time he teaches this story to students, the same thing happens. The whole class is like, “This was boring as fuck. It’s all just pointless digression into the character’s backstories. I don’t get it.” It’s true. I felt the same way reading it. Beyond the things that happened (above paragraph), every one of the six or seven characters gets their own detailed characterization.
The title of Saunders’ piece about “The Singers” is called “The Heart of the Story.” At the heart of the story is the actual singing contest. Duh. He says it’s the ancient variety of story “when A and B meet in a contest of skills and one of them wins.” Think: The Iliad, The Karate Kid, Rocky, or…a lot of children’s books for boys.
A while ago my PhD advisor, Justin, texted me about how all of the books he reads to his youngest, Wiley, take this form: “Who would win: Tiger or Shark?” To know, the child is led through all the biological details and skills of each and has to decide for themself who would win and why. The consequence is the kid learns tons of biological details about the animals themselves, but the question—who would win?—is the engine of the story.
To the chagrin of all Saunders’ students who are bored to death by “The Singers,” he points out that a competition is a meaningless spectacle if A and B are themselves meaningless to the audience:
“What gives this type of story meaning? If we just say it that way (“A and B meet in a contest of skills”), why do we care who wins? We don’t. We can’t. A is equal to B is equal to A is equal to B. Nothing is at stake if the contestants are identical. If I say: “Two guys got in a fight in a bar across from my house and, guess what? One of them won!”–that’s not meaningful. What would make it meaningful is knowing who those guys were. If A is a saintly, gentler person and B a real stinker, and B wins, the story will be felt to mean something like, “Virtue does not alway prevail.”
Characterization is vital to render competition meaningful. The reason the biannual (two times a year kind, although this year three, don’t worry about it) match between Barcelona and Real Madrid (“El Clasico”) is so meaningful—even outside of Spain—is that for many, Barcelona represents the idea of local left-wing sovereignty, and Real Madrid represents right-wing Christian imperial excellence (as they say, “Dios es del Madrid,” “God is a Madrid fan”). When Alabama and Ohio State played in the 2014 national championship semi-final, the Battle of Gettysburg was reborn. Competition is not just a singular spectacle. What’s at stake is based on those involved, who they are, and what they represent.
Consider this: For my birthday I went to a La Liga match in San Sebastian between Real Sociedad and Celta de Vigo. The match had no real stakes (some for Celta, but I’m not going to explain it here). There was no trophy. Just: A meets B; someone wins. Boring. But the stadium was electric.
In the “ultras” section (big time fans), three flags flew the entire game, none of them Spanish: Basque, Scotland, and Quebec. Why? Well, San Sebastian is in the Basque Country. Celta de Vigo is a team from Galicia, the region where Franco, the former fascist dictator of Spain, is from. The meaning of the match became clear: a referendum on regional autonomy within a super-regionally distinct nation. Celta de Vigo won. Today, on my birthday, fascism prevailed. Fuck.
The white sand of La Playa de Mataleñas is so fucking gorgeous, sunken between Cabo Mayor and Cabo Menor, right near my apartment. But it’s always fucking windy. I can’t believe I live here, but I also can’t believe how addicted to this long, drawn-out characterization of all 134 D1 football programs back in the United States I’ve become.
Unlike Saunders’ students, who find the character backstories of everyone involved in the singing competition boring, having lived enough seasons of college football, I know the payoff is meaningfully massive. I’m addicted to that delayed gratification, to all my intuitions, to all my little pet theories—addicted to the offseason.
There’s no other sport like it. Soccer happens year round. Basketball is a nine month blur. But football is just 12 weeks in the fall, the crisp fall, when all the unauthored dramas unravel with the year. College is much better than even the NFL because there’s so much changeover. Young recruits come in, older ones graduate, and everything constantly needs recalibrating. New expectations must always be set with the new faces, new names, but same old programs. The players are plot lines, not characters.
The characters are the programs in this Marvel Univesity Universe. And so, a story in college football is how the programs transform over time. Often this comes with the arrival of a new head coach. The coach is a structural unit of the story of the program. Will he be a success or failure? What will the narrative of his tenure be? Will he elevate the program? Did he snag that hot five-star lineman out of Bufurd High School in Georgia? Subplots proliferate! Transformations abound!
A good example of this is how literally everyone in the country hated Notre Dame for 100 years because of a handful of reasons ranging from their exclusive TV deal with NBC for like also 100 years, Americans hating Catholics for most of the history of the USA.
But a few seasons ago Marcus Freeman took over as coach. He was a hot, smart, talented, kind, intelligent, Black, Catholic convert, who is essentially impossible not to root for. But everyone underperforms at Notre Dame. Right? It’s too bad this nice guy is gonna have to go through the ringer too. They can’t get over the top. Always good, never great: Notre Dame. But in his second year Freeman beat the aristocratic Georgia Bulldogs and brought the Fighting Irish to the national title game, only to lose to my beloved, sacred, holy, Ohio State Buckeyes.
But then there are juxtapositions of meaning that kind of just transcend the current moment. There’s this funny term that’s tossed around a lot now: “helmet game.” It basically means that the rankings don’t matter, the players don’t matter, the coach doesn’t matter, the game itself, the helmets and the iconic historical meaning they hold themselves will make the game meaningful and thus highly watched (i.e., it’s inherently meaningful). You don’t need characterization in the offseason. This is what college football is all about!
Unlike Chekhov short stories however, sports are chaotic. There is no author. The author is nature, or God, or whatever the fuck you believe in. In the offseason I load myself up with meaning and expectations, and then the season starts. It feels unworldly, like the way circles are never perfectly round in the real world. It’s like the difference between porn and real sex, or social theory and how the world really works.
The actual football season is disgusting. It moves fast in seven day increments. It’s tiring. By about November I find myself checking the Premier League and La Liga tables daily. By December I kind of want it to be over so we can get back to recruiting updates and theorizing about effects of Congressional bills on competitive balance. All I want is to imagine, in my head, for one second longer, how goddamn loaded the University of Utah’s offensive line is going to be this year. No, I don’t want to see them play. Gross!
Sorry, I don’t like football. I just love my parasocial community of boys arguing over who will win: a Tiger or a Bear (Week 1, Friday, August 29, 2025, Auburn University versus Baylor University, McLane Stadium, Waco, TX)? The Bears are going to win, another embaressment for the SEC, a conference whose aristocratic history excellence is waning, as money flows into our sport, as contracts are drawn between players and schools, the Union General William Tecumseh Sherman reminds us that:
The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first, you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail. I can fight a long war if need be. I can fight the war with one hand, and I can whip you with the other.
Saunders, George. 2022. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks.