America Ruined College Football. Now College Football Is Ruining America.
Updated 12:48 p.m. ET on November 5, 2022
Every sports fan, whether they acknowledge it or not, has a line they won’t cross—where the intrusion of the ugly real world onto the playing field becomes too much to ignore and they have to look away. Maybe you’re a Miami Dolphins fan, so you’ll root for Tyreek Hill, the Dolphins’ $120 million wide receiver whose girlfriend accused him of threatening her life and breaking their 3-year-old son’s arm, but you refuse to draft him in your fantasy league. Maybe you stuck with the Brooklyn Nets’ Kyrie Irving when he wouldn’t get vaccinated, but dropped him when he finally got suspended this week for refusing to apologize for tweeting out the link to an anti-Semitic, Islamophobic documentary.
What are Cleveland Browns fans supposed to do about DeShaun Watson, their new franchise quarterback, whom team ownership signed to a five-year, $230 million megadeal this spring knowing full well that the NFL was about to suspend him for being a sexual predator? Boycott the team? Root for everyone on the field but him? His 11-game suspension ends in early December. What if he turns their season around and they make a playoff run? Some Browns fans won’t skip a beat—they’ll mutter something about second chances and note that the criminal charges were dropped—and some Browns fans are going to feel lousy about it until the day he leaves Cleveland.
I was so obsessed with college football growing up that I would spend all of December watching every single televised bowl game, until it got preposterous, until I was wasting a Saturday afternoon watching the Poulan Weed-Eater Independence Bowl. I still love so much about the game—the unhinged unpredictability, the ludicrous offensive schemes, the mad carnival that is ESPN’s College GameDay, Lee Corso going to his grave in a Wisconsin Badgers mascot head. I wasn’t looking for reasons to break up with college football. The reasons came and found me.
[Jemelle Hill: College football is cannibalizing itself]
I drifted from the game for all kinds of reasons, but at first it was just life stuff. I had two kids, and once you have kids you can watch football on
