There’s a darkened room somewhere in northern Indiana. Once, perhaps, it had been occupied by a laborer at Studebaker, or a professor at one of our local universities. Now, it houses little of note beyond some collected books and a computer, a device of countless strange purposes, only one of which, tragically, is sports blogging. I flick the switch on the wall as I enter, the light filling the room, and approach the disused device. 

I click open the WordPress editor, praying that there’s no such thing as a digital cobweb. I tap the keyboard gently, as if it were a microphone, testing to see if it still works. Lo and behold, it does. 

Oh. Ok great. Everything’s just as I left it.

We’re back folks! Well, for the moment anyway. I’ve got a somewhat big move coming up, and I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to devote to my favorite/least favorite hobby, college sports. 

So why the absence? Well two things really — first of all, turns out that all that free time you think you’ll have when you’re no longer in school and “only” working a nine-to-five job is faker than a desert mirage. It’s been hard to find time to write as consistently as I wanted, but I have gotten better recently at at least getting something on paper each day. Clearly, that hasn’t resulted in a lot of publishable posts, but maybe they’ll cohere into something usable at some point. That’s the hope, anyway. Sometimes it’s hard to know where you’re going until you get there. 

Second, and more relevant, is a good deal of disillusionment with college football in the wake of last season. Between yet another good-but-not-quite-good-enough season out of my Fighting Irish, a gross amount of off-field, behind-the-scenes shenanigans fundamentally changing the sport’s familiar structure, and Satan himself winning the national title, I was not exactly inspired to strike up the keys. Instead, I rather wanted to devote my time to other things, such as an extremely fun women’s basketball team (WHOOOO BOY am I excited for this season and AWWWW MAAANNNNN am I sad I’m gonna miss being in person for it) and, like, breathing fresh air once in a while. 

So why then am I back now? Well, turns out that despite it all, college football really is the best sport in the goddamn world. 

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Really, it may be because of it all. College football resolutely, absolutely, refuses to be made sense of. Nonsense is not just a characteristic of the game, it is intrinsic to it. It is the game. In some ways, that’s the fundamental premise behind this site’s college football coverage (Content? Semi-coherent ramblings?). So let’s take that premise to its logical extreme. Such extremities are in vogue around the sport these days, so I’ll follow suit. 

I think we can all agree that sports are a little bit silly, right? That’s not a value judgment — many of the best things in life are more than a little bit silly — but it is nonetheless true. And if they stayed that way, stayed as a way to blow off competitive steam in a relatively harmless manner, they wouldn’t be all that silly. But instead, we’ve decided to attach immense weight to these children’s games. Billions of dollars are invested around the world every year in athletics of all shapes and sizes. Billions of people attach part of their sense of self-worth to the bounce of a ball. We stage reenactments of national conflict and reconciliation, playing at geopolitics in miniature. It can all feel a little bit overwrought, if not futile. 

And of course, our beloved college football isn’t above all this. In fact, as a sport led primarily by public institutions ostensibly designed for teaching and research, college football is arguably the poster child for the inherent absurdity of our modern sports landscape. But unlike, say, the Olympics, which try to sanitize and obscure the underlying silliness for the sake of amplifying the higher ideals of sport, college football veers hard into being as aggravating, dumb, and ridiculous as possible. College football’s singular gift is reminding us that investing time, energy, emotional well-being, and above all money in sports is a very silly thing to do. 

The examples of this principle in action are myriad, and I could write a whole essay just about them (in fact, trying to is part of the reason I’ve been away so long!). So instead, let us consider a single exemplar, a situation so perfectly constructed to illuminate the deep, essential soul of this sport I wouldn’t be shocked to discover somebody planned it this way. Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to consider the curious case of the Florida State Seminoles.

If you can cast your minds all the way back to last December, you may recall there was a controversial playoff decision between the Alabama Crimson Tide and Florida State Seminoles. Florida State was 13-0, newly minted ACC champions, but had an injured starting quarterback and looked offensively lethargic in their final two games as a result. Alabama, meanwhile, was 12-1, newly minted SEC champions, did not have a quarterback injured, and had just beaten the former #1 team in America. So who do you pick — the team that won more football games or the other team? Naturally, the playoff committee picked the latter. Because a) It Just Means More in the SEC and b) c’mon who’s gonna leave out Nick Saban amirite?

This generated quite a lot of very justifiable angst, especially among Florida State fans, but also among the sport in general. No undefeated champion of a power conference had ever been left out of the playoff before. While the decision has been heavily analyzed from all angles, count me among the playoff committee’s defenders on this one. The committee made the right decision, but not because Florida State shouldn’t have made the playoff. Florida State should have made the playoff. That they didn’t is the wrong decision, and that makes it the most appropriate outcome for this sport. To be clear, this isn’t a justification — the decision is unjustifiable. I’m saying that the decision was incorrect, and that’s what makes it right. If that seems contradictory to you, allow me to welcome you to college football. If your first thought when you saw the decisions was, “what a joke,” you’re on the right track. 

It is a joke! College football, while looking like a sporting competition, isn’t. It’s a satire. A social mirror. Its spiritual predecessor isn’t the ancient Olympic Games or medieval jousting tournaments. Heck, it’s not even Shakespeare. It’s Molière. College football satirizes our society far, far better than any late night comic or playwright could hope to achieve. Not even Twain could cook up some of the stuff college football churns out on a regular basis.

The Florida State situation is deeply funny because the entire debate never should have existed in the first place. In any reasonable sport, suggesting a team that won fewer games should get a shot at a championship over a team that won more games wouldn’t even enter anyone’s mind. But college football has invented a totally false distinction to argue over who gets to compete for its highest prize — namely, whether particular teams are “better” or “more deserving.” The thinking goes that sometimes teams are better at actually playing football than what their final record shows, due to weird luck, bizarre circumstances, or just generally a tougher schedule. When a sport has as small a sample size as college football, this argument holds, the best team doesn’t always win. While this argument may technically make sense, it really misses the fundamental fact that the point of a sporting competition is to score more points than your opponent based on the agreed upon rules for scoring. Imagine, for instance, if this was how the actual games worked. Imagine if one team outgained another, won the turnover margin, generated better advanced stats, and generally did all the things you’re supposed to do to put your team in a good position to score points, but failed to score more points. If the “better/more deserving” distinction was real, that team would be awarded a victory despite not scoring as many points. Sorry, guys, but when the goal is to win football games, the teams that win the most games are the best teams at winning games. 

Every other team sport in the world recognizes this simple, fundamental fact, and has a clear, logical, and organized system of standings based on win and loss results. But such consistency is far too mundane for college football. Instead, we arrive at a situation where an entirely artificial, farcical, and nonsensical debate is a critical part of the sport’s championship structure. Can you imagine the 12 hours of pure hell the sport willingly subjected itself to debating which four teams should be in the playoff last year occurring in any other sport? No other sport does this — even college basketball has the good sense to guarantee teams that win all their games a spot in March Madness. 

But of course that is precisely the point. College football hit a masterstroke by centralizing these kinds of arguments into its very structure instead of confining them to the periphery. Other than appealing to some base desire to argue, the importance of debates to college football shows that deep down, the sport is inherently arbitrary. College football fans are always guilty of overthinking, a byproduct of the small sample size our favorite sport gives us and the corresponding intense weight we attach to each and every small thing that happens in it. But this is nonsense — none of these things have any real weight at all! Whether or not the ball bounced a particular way or the guy wearing one color jersey was able to outrun the guy in the other color jersey isn’t inherently meaningful in the slightest. We constructed the whole shebang on an arbitrary basis, so we might as well arbitrarily pick the teams we like the most to compete for a championship. Like quite literally everything about this game, the playoff is a creation; and that’s the tragedy and the beauty of college football. It calls attention to its own constructedness better than any sport on the planet, with the result that most of its fans are in a perpetual state of discontent because they think it could be so much better. So much simpler. But to do that, well, that would ruin the fun of it, wouldn’t it?

And lest you think that I’m reading too much into this, we know that college football is making a joke here because of what’s happened to the Seminoles since the decision. First, they got absolutely demolished by Georgia in the Orange “Teams that Would Rather be Golfing” Bowl, kneecapping the indignant rage storm quite quickly. Then, they sued the ACC for doing what Florida State told it to do in locking in a long-term television contract, rather than take it back to the open market, arguing that this arrangement, which Florida State agreed to, doesn’t give them enough money to field a national championship-caliber team. And then they went out and backed it up by immediately losing their first two games of 2024 to ACC teams. Gotta hand it to them, a bold and innovative legal strategy to prove that you can’t fold a competitive football team by actually failing to do so! And oh, by the way, the ACC apparently guards their media rights document like it’s a nuclear secret. Just tremendous content all around. 

So yes, laugh at Florida State all you want. Lord knows I’m enjoying the hell out of this. But just recognize that the gag, fundamentally, isn’t on them. It’s on us, the sports fans, who expect any of this to ever make sense. You can be mad about the arbitrariness of the playoff decision, or of a team seemingly getting screwed over, or anything college football serves up really; but just remember that you’re really getting mad at yourself for caring too much. You signed up for this. You knew you were going to project meaning where there inherently isn’t any. Caring about how a ball bounces is a really, really funny thing to do. College football is just better than most sports at letting you in on the joke. 

College football is a parody of itself at the most fundamental level, a knowing mockery of the very idea of sports. It is utterly, unrelentingly, absurd. To its very core. And that’s precisely why we love it. 

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So, uh, speaking of absurdity… how about them Irish huh. Notre Dame just had one of the wildest two-week swings in quality I think I’ve ever seen, and at this point I’m barely even surprised. To paraphrase former Alabama Crimson Tide player Forrest Gump’s mama, college football is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get. Sometimes it’s a delicacy like the program’s biggest road win in a dozen years, sometimes it’s the crap sandwich of the program’s worst home loss in at least a decade (and maybe longer?). 

I didn’t rage-tweet a whole lot on Saturday due to being in the stadium — partly that meant cell service was spotty but mostly that meant I was a little overly distracted by the unfolding horror show. But looking back on it now with around forty-eight hours of sous vide anger rather than the flash-fried fury Saturday afternoon would’ve provided, it’s become really clear that the staff just sort of assumed they were going to win the game and didn’t put in the necessary play-calling and game management work to actually win it. From not going back to the quarterback run game after the first possession to burning an early second half time out to not adjusting blocking on field goal attempts (not to mention trusting a college kicker to nail a game-winning 61-yarder), Freeman and co. managed the game like they assumed it was a W before kickoff. Things don’t just happen, guys! 

What was, admittedly, a weirdly fluky and kinda snakebitten first quarter and change quickly devolved from “well this is gonna be a little uncomfy for a while” to a full on crisis to one of the most devastating losses in recent memory (which is saying something!), all without the staff ever making a significant adjustment. Sure, the defense settled into things after a few off possessions, but it turned out those early points were all Northern Illinois needed to make the Irish sweat all afternoon. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Notre Dame’s offense simply cannot expect to score fourteen points and win football games. 

For the second year in a row now the Irish are arbitrarily handcuffing themselves with a bizarre running back rotation that keeps the best guys in the room off the field for the biggest moments. A week after being maybe even a little overly aggressive on fourth down in his own territory, Freeman decided to punt from his opponents’ 39-yard line. Perhaps most maddening at all, Mike Denbrock either wouldn’t or wasn’t allowed to go back to the only thing that generated consistent yardage all afternoon — Leonard’s legs. Instead, the staff elected to treat a one-score game against a MAC team with the season on the line like an after-practice throwing session. And lest you think the defense gets off scot free, Al Golden, who just about everybody in South Bend was ready to coronate after Southern Cal last year, was unable to get his charges to stop bleeding five or six yards after contact seemingly every rush, which would be frustrating if it didn’t happen to a lesser degree in basically every game of his tenure.At some point you have to recognize there’s an actual football game being played in front of you. 

Combined with a quite-brazen-even-by-Notre-Dame-standards intro hype video, a national media environment that featured quotes like “Notre Dame is the safest at-large pick in the country,” and the fact the university moved its finals schedule to accommodate a hypothetical home playoff game (yes, that really happened!), Notre Dame vs. Northern Illinois is worthy of its own exhibit in the Museum of Tempting Fate. Has anyone in South Bend learned anything from over a century of college football? Nick Saban liked to call all this “rat poison” — well, we had enough to kill the whole cast of Ratatouille. The Irish all but dared the college football gods to punish them for their arrogance, and, vengeful and spiteful as the college football gods love to be, they obliged in grotesque fashion. 

It amounts to yet another sudden, momentum-killing catastrophe. Like Ohio State. Like Stanford. Like Marshall. The moment it looked like Notre Dame and Marcus Freeman had turned a corner in their ability to field a consistently strong football team, the moment they finally looked like they might be worthy of having expectations heaped upon them, the moment it looked like the growing pains of the last two years were finally paying off, they blew it. There’s no excuse, no dodge, not even really an explanation this time. At some point, losing games in which you are heavily favored moves from a mistake to a part of a pattern. I daresay we’re at that moment, in year 3 of a coaching regime, with a veteran pair of coordinators, unprecedented financial commitment, and an ability to plug roster holes like never before in college football. There’s no reason Marcus Freeman should have allowed a day like Saturday to happen on his watch. Whatever other factors contributed to it, this loss is squarely on the head coach. 

Let’s be clear — if Notre Dame does not make the playoff this year, the season is a failure. That was the preseason expectation, and barring a whole raft of catastrophic injuries, that is still the expectation. Losing almost any game on this schedule would have been really bad, but losing this one in particular is inexcusable. It completely destroys any grace the Irish got from their efforts in College Station, obliterates any remaining margin of error, and puts the pressure on the team and staff to deliver week in and week out — something they’ve not yet proven capable of doing. Maybe Freeman’s team needs that — paradoxically, they’ve done much better after failure than success in his tenure — but I can’t imagine it will be a comfortable experience for anyone involved. And even if somehow Notre Dame finds a way to win out, they’re not guaranteed a playoff spot with precious few resume wins remaining on the schedule; even if they do make it, they almost certainly will have a road trip to a hostile environment to kick things off instead of hosting a very winnable game. Now, unless the Irish win their next fourteen straight games, what set up nicely as a breakthrough season will collapse under the weight of what might’ve been. 

So, as it always is with this sport, joke’s on me. I’ll try and squeeze in just one more home game before I write again, I foolishly thought. What could possibly go wrong? Only the whole season, and quite possibly Marcus Freeman’s head coaching career. Man, you really think I would’ve learned by now.

Look on the bright side, though — only 55 days until women’s basketball!

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A few words on what you can expect out of this site, such as it is, going forward. First, as I hinted at above, I have a big move coming up. Across an ocean, in fact. I’m starting a fellowship program in France in… *gasp* three weeks! 

Aside from the obvious stresses of moving, settling into a new country, and starting a new job, all of which will significantly inhibit writing time, there’s a significant time difference to consider when it comes to catching live sports; and after Saturday, you’ll forgive me for not being super keen to watch a disappointing Notre Dame team play a disappointing Florida State team at 1:30am local time. So, expect a little bit less live tweeting and somehow even less timely blog posting, though there may the occasional bit of shared contemporaneous angst (as underwhelmed as I am by the above example, there is still a game against some certain other non-Northern Illinois Huskies coming up, for instance). This will also be a good opportunity for me to explore what I have to say on other topics, as I promised way back when. 

It is really valuable to me to have an outlet for writing of some kind, even if it is really scattershot and sporadic. I’m gonna keep carving out time as often as I can, one way or another. 

Until then, happy journeys and please stay sane, even if your favorite sport isn’t. 

– EC