Happy Start of Football Season! I’ve had this post drafted up for a bit; it’s sat here because I’ve debated whether people give a hoot about some random message board poster who knows some things but isn’t an insider. You probably are sitting here reading this hoping I’ll just give you the good stuff! Why is this guy who kept getting confused with another insidery guy on this site posting long-ass diatribes on the diaries? Just tell me what you know, otherwise, shut up. But after reading what Brian’s been going through; what he’s feeling is something that I and many people in the industry have had to work through for a long time. This game ain’t fun anymore. I’m going to drop some truth bombs. So sit back and enjoy, or don’t. 

Allow me to wax poetically for a moment. Having worked in the world of football and seeing it through multiple lenses over two decades, my view of the sport has become jaded. You will undoubtedly see some stuff. Some things you just note, some things you tell your friends, and there are some things that you can only chat about with people who have seen and been through the same experiences. You see coaches break the rules with impunity and not get punished, and you see players do the same thing. You start to normalize and rationalize certain behaviors. The football omertà is strong. Those that break it are cast aside. 

I started this account because I wanted to give people as unvarnished a look as I possibly could under the veil of anonymity. I’ve lurked on the site since the beginning and like most folks in Schembechler Hall (you’d be surprised at who) I used to visit this site daily. I left that world of Michigan but still work in football. I’ve been around long enough when message boards were just a thing weird people did online and the people who posted on there were the biggest diehards. I know a lot of the folks who post on message boards as insiders are people who are hearing it from people who hear it from people. There are a few who see it live, but most don’t. I don’t see it live, hence why I don’t claim like I know the day-to-day. I don’t post like an insider, because I’m not. But in my career, I’ve been around enough people to have seen and heard some stuff. Players, Coaches, Support Staff, etc. 

The truth is there’s this media narrative out there that’s complete bullshit. If I hear one more recruiting reporter from the South claim that they’ve never heard about any untoward stuff in recruiting.. I swear. The sad part is everybody does it, but that omerta can’t be broken. Plus ain’t no reporter being told the real juicy stuff about what really goes on. They may hear some things, but it’s not like a coach is going to give some reporter the real dirt. Hell, I know the people at ASU who turned in Herm and the program and even they had to drop that shit off at the NCAA’s desk instead of giving it to some local reporters.

All of this recent news makes me sad and less hopeful about the sport as I’ve ever been

Football’s ultimate axiom is the sausage. Everyone wants to enjoy the final product— dress it up with fancy condiments and enjoy consuming it. Some places add special ingredients, give ‘em cool, funky names, and claim that there’s the best. Chicago Dogs vs. Detroit Dogs vs. an All the Way Dog. 

No one wants to see or hear how the sausage is really made. If they found out, they may not enjoy that sausage as much anymore. That’s the point where I’m at in my college fandom. 

What I find most interesting is that we’re not able to have nuanced conversations about a topic that is definitely not simple— “Pay the players now! Or.. A college scholarship is plenty, these kids should be grateful!” A skill that I think has been lost, is the ability to hold two differing viewpoints and acknowledge that both can be true at the same time. It’s exhausting to constantly have to be on the right side of an issue. 

Some key differentiators between college and pros that are seemingly glossed over in these discussions

College sports are housed by monolithic, centuries-old organizations that have vacillated between institutions of educational excellence and vast money-making enterprises. Just look at Michigan’s endowment and tell me they haven’t done an amazing job of monetizing a commodity (prestige). 

Pro Sports are collectively bargained. Meaning anti-competitive practices are protected 

In the pros, it’s ultimately about making the billionaires even more money— how dare owners have to spend their own money to build a stadium that is used only to make said billionaire more money. It’s a brilliant strategy, especially when all of the benefits that it can provide for a city are hoovered up by these owners when they buy all the land surrounding the stadium and extract maximum dollar from the entire project while taking on absolutely zero risks or downside.  

In the pro game, you’re either making Billionaires more money, or you’re making millionaires some more money. This is a gross oversimplification for illustrative purposes, but it’s the truth. It’s all about squeezing as many dollars as they can from a group of people and then moving on to another group to milk for money (International, Hispanics, Youth, etc) all under the guise of growing the game. 

College football always felt different to me.  

Maybe it was my youth, perhaps a bit of naivety. I just vividly remember watching Desmond and Grbac and thinking how Michigan was the apex of the sporting world. 

When you go to a fall game in Ann Arbor, the entire town swells with pride. Every Saturday feels like a world’s fair. No matter if we welcome Western Michigan or Wisconsin to town. You’re supporting local people, not some conglomerate.

You walk into a Jerry World or FedEx Field situated in the middle of nowheresville in a concrete parking lot that takes forever to get into and you can’t help but feel like you’re a character in the Sims or Roller Coaster tycoon— a small pawn in a game where some imaginary person is pulling levers to extract dollars from you as rapidly as possible so they can swim in an even larger Scrooge McDuck like pool. They are soulless purgatories who only exist to make one family as rich as possible.

We can argue on semantics, but College football felt different than pro football. There’s no threat of moving your team. There’s no Dan Snyder who is going to hijack your club with massive amounts of debt and then hire a bunch of yes-men who are sexually harassing staff, or Jimmy Haslam who made his money from extorting and defrauding truck drivers and trucking companies. Ask UT fans how it's going having good ole Jimmy involved with their program. 

It felt owned by the fans. That we all were in it collectively. Sure you might have to make a donation every year to buy a seat at the Big House, but that money was going to help fund student athletes’ scholarships. It felt altruistic in a sense. It was pure fantasy, a figment of our imagination. The truth is that college sports have become the ultimate arms race. Step 1. Raise dollars Step 2. Spend dollars on unadulterated extravagance. Step 3. Never show any profits. Why show a profit on the books when you can build another waterfall and build sleep pods in the locker room, or give a massive extension with a $20 million buyout to a coach that won you the Outback Bowl even though there was zero external pressure to do so.

Now we’re stuck with Maryland and Rutgers, two of the worst on-campus environments in the Power 5. You go to any of their home games and it’s made up of at least 50% of the opposing fanbase. Maryland is one giant parking lot of a campus. Rutgers is located in the armpit of New Jersey. Both schools' biggest draw is that they are only 45 minutes from a major metro city. That is the only reason why they were allowed into the BIg 10, to lay claim to DC and NYC as Big 10 country, even though both schools couldn’t be more irrelevant in those cities. 

Fans need to demand better

College Football got high on the hog. The sport is no longer about anything other than making more money and winning. We've created this monster. We demand winning. We demand full loyalty. And we demand that it is done on our terms.

Players are fungible assets. We don’t care if they graduate from our school, or even step foot on our academic campus outside of the athletic facilities (cough Justin Fields). We just care if they play well on Saturdays in the fall. And Win dammit. And if they don’t they can pack their bags and find a new school so that we can bring in the next crop of kids to do the same thing with. Rinse and repeat. 

Michigan fans deserve better 

You can say what you want about Harbaugh, but I really feel like he thought he was returning to college football and Michigan in the 80s. He wanted to bring in tough kids, who wanted to go to school to better themselves and get a worthwhile degree, bleed Maize and Blue, and come out after four years as “Michigan Men.” It’s sad to say, but that idyllic version of Michigan no longer exists. 

You watch Michigan Football now and it feels like you’re watching a funeral on loop. We have to win and win with style. If we don’t we want the world to burn. We go on Twitter, we obsess, we critique, we commiserate, but man does it feel like we rarely celebrate. 

Every Saturday feels the same

In a sport where it often felt that any upset could happen, it has been replaced by the certainty that this year the playoff is going to be some combination of Alabama, Clemson, Oklahoma, OSU, and Georgia.

The line between college and pros is gone now. We are staring at the precipice of a 12 team playoff and as Super League. The sport where every game mattered, now becomes the sport where if your name is Alabama or Clemson you simply have to show up and you’ll get a spot in the playoff. The SEC is going to get a minimum of 4 teams every year and then pound their chest in dominance regardless if the odds were always stacked in their favor. 

The game doesn’t feel anymore, because it isn’t fun anymore. It’s so commercialized that we’ve become numb to the changes. Games can go on for more than 4 hours because we need to stuff another Wendy’s commercial during the 4 minute TV timeout after a TD that is followed by another 4 minutes of commercials after a coach takes a timeout. We listen to the same tired, banal arguments for four months about the same four teams. We need to demand more. But we won’t. 

The soul of the game is gone

The losers at the end of the day are the players. Everyone is trying to "build your brand" but you're just an 18-year-old kid. Why all the pressure to be a brand when you're so young? You have to mature and grow up and make mistakes.

Maybe I'm old school. Maybe I'm out of touch. But I miss the days when on a fall afternoon it was about the team on the field. When did everything have to be about making a business decision? College was the period in our lives when it wasn't about the real world. It was about freedom of choice and figuring out what you wanted to do after you graduated.

I want to make it clear, I’m all for players getting a bigger cut of the money. However, they’re already getting a share of it under the table. Let’s not pretend they aren’t. 

I wish we could get back to those good ole days, but we can’t. And I wish this story has a happy ending, but it won’t. But hey at least we’ll get to see 8 SEC teams make the playoff baby! We’ll have Paul Finebaum as the first President of College Football. Nick Saban wins a Nobel Peace Prize and Dabo Swinney becomes the next Pope.