On Whether or Not I've Checked Out
An exploration five games into the 2024 KU Football Season
EDITOR’S NOTE: I wrote this over the course of the week preceding the TCU game on September 28th, so some of the information in the piece is now out of date. For example, in the first paragraph, I state that the team is 1-3, whereas they are now 1-4.
I’ve basically checked out on football this year. This is an odd realization to come to given how completely it had engulfed me in the last few years, but I can’t really get myself to take that much interest in it right now. This will be something closer to the Montaignian ideal of an essay than I normally put out here; I imagine it will meander, and I have no intention to structure it beforehand. I have a few notes on points I’d like to get out, but that’s all.
KU has played four games, and they are 1-3 at time of writing. I only watched the two that I attended, both of them at Children’s Mercy Park in KCK. The two away games I missed watching for separate reasons, which I’ll touch on later. I didn’t predict how negative the effect of moving out of Memorial Stadium would be for me. It actually surprises me how intensely negative the effect of driving 40 minutes out to KCK for the games has been for two reasons –
I grew up in Overland Park, so the experience of traveling 40 minutes away from home to see Kansas Football has always been a part of the experience for me.
I have no issues with, and in fact look forward to, traveling the exact same amount of time and distance to KCK to watch Sporting KC on a regular basis, even during the past few years of misery and impotence
It seems paradoxical that I would react so negatively to traveling like this, but I have. For the first game, there was something novel about the travel and about seeing football at Children’s Mercy Park, but I really dreaded going out there for the UNLV game. I didn’t want to go out there, and I think that, if I hadn’t already committed to carpooling with some friends out there, I probably would’ve stayed home after a full work day. This is what irks me. Dread? Fatigue? 40 minutes of driving? I’m writing so logically and unromantically for something I ostensibly care about at the pit of my soul.
I don’t actually think I’d put together how inextricable the three parts of Kansas Football, The University of Kansas itself, and Lawrence are from my enjoyment of the sport. It remains to be seen if the old Memorial Stadium itself must be there for me as well (I suppose we’ll find out next year) but I can’t tell you how uninterested I am in traveling out all the way to Arrowhead for the conference slate. Even if a few breaks had gone differently and the team were entering the weekend 4-0, I doubt that I’d be interested in going on Saturday. I’ve already gone out there twice this year for soccer games, both of which featured logistical parking lot nightmares on opposite ends of the spectrum that I don’t care to relive if I can avoid it.1
Also paradoxical about my disinterest here is that I traveled far further out of state to watch this team in both 2022 (Memphis for the bowl game) and 2023 (Stillwater for a regular season game). Both of those experiences were novel ones, I suppose. Maybe the problem here is that I realized last year how much I truly loved the ritualistic experience of traversing the Oread, tailgating in the Spencer Museum parking lot with friends and family, watching the band come down from the Campanile, taking our seats, watching the game, and then walking back after the game was over. I loved that almost more than I loved the football itself. Now I’ve lost one of the final things that I truly loved about the sport of college football and I feel bitterly jilted by the fact that I’ve lost yet another thing that I truly loved about the sport of college football. If the requirement to drive 40 minutes out to a stadium I already feel deep fondness for already has me jilted, tacking on the additional 20 minutes or so plus parking fees plus navigating KCMO plus the miserable experience of trying to enter and exit that stadium will not help.
The fondness that I feel for CMP actually ties in here. I’m veering into a maudlin, overly-romantic area here, but I think it’s interesting to follow, too – I considered the old Memorial Stadium, where I marched in the band for five seasons, where I watched games with my family all throughout youth and adolescence, where I returned for a game every season after graduation in 2017, including the two I spent living out of state and one I spent living out of the country, a home of sorts. That was my home stadium. I doubt that too many other people care about this but I recall Doris Kearns Goodwin speaking this way about Ebbets Field in the Ken Burns Baseball documentary so I don’t feel like the loneliest soul in feeling this way.
With Memorial Stadium gone, Children’s Mercy Park has taken over that role. That is the only other place I’ve felt such an intense emotional connection. I can remember touring the stadium with my dad back in early 2011 before they hosted games there, I saw my first trophy raising there (2012 US Open Cup final), the active support I engage in with The Cauldron is the closest thing I’ve had to the Marching Jayhawks since graduation.
It was strange to see the two worlds melding. I throttled between feeling joyful about others getting to experience the place and the sort of selfish “WHO LET THESE PHILISTINES INTO MY SANCTUARY” sensation I’d like to punctuate with a link to the Birthday Boys sketch where Mitch lets the other guys into his secret garden and they turn it into a depraved frat party within the span of a few hours, but said sketch has not been uploaded to YouTube and the entire series is in the odd early-2010s space where it’s only available via $3 per episode Amazon downloads and not on DVD and I’m just not going to go to the effort to rip it and put it on YouTube myself for the sake of punctuating this point eight paragraphs into an already overly-self-indulgent piece that many readers have already clicked away from and even fewer would even deign to click on the link to the sketch that illustrates this point were I to upload it, but if you know The Birthday Boys sketch comedy show that ran for two seasons on IFC in the early 2010s, you know what I am referring to, and in that way we have our own little exclusive little deep cable sketch-comedy appreciation society together, just you and I, reader, and isn’t that enough? Here - the band played a Santana show last week, and that reminded me of Wayne the Skeleton King, which is on YouTube, though at an abysmal framerate, but that’s what we must make do with here today. I loved seeing the KUMJ drum majors using the capo stands that were installed in the Cauldron last year, also.
All that this really reflects is that I’m more bitter about the old stadium getting torn down than I think I understood. Maybe that all dissipates when I first experience the shiny new place, but at the moment having the old love with the new home juxtaposed like this is hard to stomach cleanly. Were this wretched heart less cloying and sentimental I wouldn’t have written these last two paragraphs, but alas, this is who I am. I will also say that the UNLV game felt precisely like half of the Sporting KC matches I’ve seen at CMP this year, with the home team taking a lead early and the visitors encroaching down with agonizing efficiency, only the clock fighting to save our souls, ultimately failing in expected but still gut-wrenching fashion late on.
I was also struck by how miserable the patrons seated around me were. I don’t understand these people, who travel to these games and pay for tickets only to be laser-focused on exploding in impotent fury over every non-touchdown play from kickoff to the final whistle. I came to a terrible realization when the guys in the row behind me were hoarsely moaning over a first-down incompletion in the middle of a perfectly good drive in the FIRST QUARTER that, if the team didn’t end up basically blowing UNLV out, we were in for an even more miserable experience than the experience of simply losing would have been. This is the luck of the draw with any sporting event, and dear god did I get the dud for that game. I’m not asking them to be happy about a loss at the game’s end, but there are levels between that and the one where a grown man starts popping capillaries over a three-yard halfback dive in the second quarter and we had passed them.
The chance that I don’t end up a row ahead of misery incarnate is higher in a larger stadium, and there’s a great likelihood that the seats behind me would be empty in Arrowhead anyway given the team’s form, and there have always been and will always be miserable downers who attend these games. I suppose my goal is to keep from becoming one of them.
The other thing to keep in mind here is that a good number of men in attendance at any sporting event not only has the capacity to reach straightforward, clean Sports Fury, but also elected with a few taps on his smartphone screen from either the passenger seat or in many cases the driver’s seat on the highway leading to the stadium to bet fifty dollars on the successes and failures of the men he’s already paid money to see, leaving him not only mad, but also poorer. I don’t think that was the case with the particular men behind me but, my goodness, does it feel like the atmosphere of a sporting event can turn to rancid fury so quickly nowadays, and I’m guessing that’s why. I may also just be atypically sensitive to impotent fury given my chipper everyday disposition, but I make no apologies for that.
I notice that I keep coming back to impotence (ladies,), and impotence serves as a convenient segue to the second of the two road losses that I missed watching. The Illinois game was a no-brainer to miss, as I was in attendance at my cousin’s wedding. I talked a bit about my history of putting in extra effort to watch the Jayhawks back in 2022 (I have to have included the sentence you can see written in the journal in the image accompanying that post on purpose, but I don’t remember), but this was my cousin’s wedding. I wasn’t going to be distracted by a football game at an event like that. I didn’t even keep up with the score.
The West Virginia game, though, I ignored during a wholly different situation. Due to a series of misadventures involving a Sigur Ros concert and the total breakdown of my friend’s 2012 Subaru Forester ten miles south of Joliet, Illinois, I found myself last Saturday driving a rented Mitsubishi Mirage from Joliet, Illinois all the way home to Lawrence. Ben, my friend, mentioned a few times during the 2022 updates of this blog, streamed the video feed of the game on his phone from the passenger seat. He offered to play it over the car’s Bluetooth connection for me to listen along, but I declined: I didn’t want to cede the control over my emotional state into the hands of anyone else that day. The risk of getting frustrated about the Jayhawks, or even being happy about the Jayhawks, felt senseless. I was having a difficult enough weekend as it stood, and I was handling it well. I decided to listen to various FM stations in Central Illinois, a Spotify UK Garage Playlist, and the trio of Los Campesinos albums from the early 2010s instead.
This contrasts with how I approached the team in 2021, a year in which I more or less sought out misery from this team, finding comfort in the weekly deliverance of failure that matched what was happening in my personal life. I enjoyed the congruence of it. I was a homesick miserable loser and my home team was a miserable loser just as well. This should have been one of those moments of congruence, where a win would’ve been a mood lifter and a loss would’ve at least felt literary. It would’ve made sense for me to have sought out the game, then, I’d think… But I just had no interest.
This may have been aberrational (I certainly hope I never drive seven hours in a Mitsubishi Mirage from Joliet to Lawrence again) and it’s possible that, next time I’m in the mud personally, I’ll be ready to appreciate this sort of suffering again. But it reflects a personal shift that I’ve noticed in which I’ve lost interest in wallowing in self-pity the way that I once did, especially in things that I can’t control. I still have the capacity to enjoy sports, and even still find something from losing, but I think I have more in my life that I’d like to focus on and lose time to focus on those things if I spend too much time and energy bleeding over sports, when I ultimately can’t do very much about them.
This extends past just what happened last Saturday. I’ve stopped paying attention to the sport as a whole, too. Last year, as dissatisfied as I was with the whole shifting landscape of the endeavor, I still kept up with the sport. I still listened to multiple weekly podcasts, read columns in the Athletic, and even kept up with the Subreddit, but I’ve had no desire to do so this year. I knew that would happen on the national level, but it’s happened on the local level, too. I don’t feel any impetus during the week to read blogs or the LJW columns or anything of the sort. I barely use social media anymore anyway, but I’m not keeping up with anything there, either.
I think this is the conclusion, then: A few years ago, I had a sense that this would fade from an all-consuming obsession to something less gripping, and it has finally done so. As I predicted, college football itself has now fallen into the realm of the Weezer albums and Paper Mario games: something that I once bled over but now remember with idle disinterest. Kansas football has become a weekend outing, a socio-familial event, something to do on a Saturday. I believe, and earnestly hope, that when the team returns to playing home games in Lawrence next year, I’ll get some of the emotional connection back, but there is a palpable disconnect at the moment.
What surprises me, at the end of this, is that I’m not that sad about this development. It feels, distressingly, like I’ve outgrown something. It’s less like a messy divorce and more like the day that I realized I felt kind of lame playing Guitar Hero. I have other things to do, and I like those other things that I do. When this all started really descending a few years ago, I figured that I’d hurt more now once we hit the bottom. I dreaded this moment, figuring that the chasm left in this sport’s absence would be deeper and wider. This is more of a ditch.
Editors Note: I missed the TCU game to go see my friend play in the pit orchestra for a musical.
Sporting KC vs Inter Miami in April involved multiple bottlenecks both exiting the stadium on foot and leaving the parking lot in my car, while leaving the Copa America match between the United States and Uruguay felt like a gumball rally, nary a security guard or police car or any degree of planning on the part of the tournament organizers in sight as everybody sped out as quickly as possible.