Sunday, September 2, 2012

How I Fared in My First Weekend Without College Football

Thursday, as the college football season was beginning, I wrote about why I could not in good conscience watch the sport anymore, despite enjoying it quite it a lot over the past couple of decades.  Well, after the first Saturday of the season, I can truthfully say that I did not watch or, with one small but important exception that I will note momentarily, follow along with any college football games over the past three days.  As I expected, though, it was difficult.  On Friday morning, as I checked the Arizona State University website to read other news, I saw that one of my alma maters, Arizona State, won big over Northern Arizona on Thursday night.  Because I haven't been following the sport, I hadn't even realized that ASU played Thursday night.  Seeing a headline about it gave me a small twinge of longing to have watched a bit of the game.

On Saturday morning, while checking other sports news on espn.com while eating my breakfast, I saw that Michigan State -- another of my alma maters and the team from among the big six conferences that I have most rooted for and identified with over the past 15 years -- won a close and apparently exciting game over Boise State on Friday night in what appears to have been billed as an opening weekend heavyweight matchup.  Again, I had not even realized that Michigan State had played Friday night or had opened with Boise State.  Had I been following the sport, I would have known this and probably would have watched, and so on Saturday morning, reading about this, I felt quite a lot more longing for college football.

Then, during the say on Saturday, as I logged into Facebook a few times, I saw people using their Facebook status to provide updates on the game between Bowling Green and Florida.  Apparently, Bowling Green scored first, was in the tie with Florida at 14 points apiece in the second half, and hung in well against an opponent that was expected to demolish them.  I learned all of these things from other folks' Facebook updates, and this is when I had the biggest longing of all.  It was very hard not to turn on the television and see if I could watch.  This is when I most started stretching the boundaries of my pact, as twice I went to espn.com, eventually to read stories about tennis, golf, and auto racing, but also, to be honest, as an opportunity to look to the upper left quickly and see the BGSU-Florida score.  It was hard to stop there, and it took a lot of my might not to do more to keep up with the game.

Then, last night, while surfing the net for some reading material while eating something, I saw the headline for this story on the main page of usatoday.com.  Since my checks of espn.com when I glanced at the BGSU-Florida score also meant that I saw headlines indicating that the Nittany Lions had lost to Ohio University, I already knew the outcome of the game.  And, since this was a commentary on Penn State and not a game story, I decided to read the piece.  I'm glad I did, because while reading some of the signs from the Penn State game that are listed in the piece and while reading the tone of moving on from what happened at Penn State that the piece reflects, this story strengthened my resolve.  It feels as if we have learned nothing from what happened at Penn State, nothing about how football occupies an inappropriate place in the structures of universities, and nothing about ourselves.

We are addicts.  We have become addicted to college football, and my own behavior on Saturday demonstrated it.  Like someone addicted to alcohol who finds a way to justify one drink at a social gathering or someone addicted to gambling who starts drawing distinctions between gambling for money and gambling without money, I was already on the first Saturday of the college football season looking for ways to skirt my own commitment to quit the habit.  And as many an addiction program will tell us, the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have a problem.

A major reason why college football is able to keep driving the ship at universities around the country is because so many of us have a problem.  We've become addicted to it.  We spend gobs of money on it, we spend considerable time with it, and we allow it to have heavy influence on so many other parts of our lives.  In the name of this addiction, we justify all kinds of things that we really have no business justifying, from boys being abused at Penn State to allocation of financial resources away from academic programs to a bunch of other things along the way.  As I keep saying, this is a matter of priorities, and like an individual, when a society is addicted, its priorities are out of whack.

I learned this opening college football weekend a little more about the depths to which my priorities have been out of whack.  I was then reminded in the story on usatoday.com how widespread those misplaced priorities are.  I largely made it through the first few days of the college football season with my commitment not to follow the sport intact, yet the ways in which I circumvented that commitment are deeply telling.  I have work to do to relinquish college football's hold on me, and I feel pretty sure that I'm far from alone.

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