The 2023 Football Hell Post-Mortem
As the 2023 season comes to an end, a retrospective on the Jayhawks and college football in entirety
I remember every one of the wins that I saw as a student. It took me five years (well, four years and an extra fall semester) to complete my bachelor's, each fall spent with the Marching Jayhawks.
September 7th, 2013: Kansas 31, South Dakota 14 – It was the first game of my freshman year, still summery and hot enough that we couldn't wear our full uniforms, instead wearing the standard-issue blue polos with khaki shorts. My dad said we looked like Best Buy employees, my family could pick me out during the halftime show because my shorts were a slightly darker shade of khaki than the people around me. It was Jake Heaps' first start, it would've been a more prolific offensive performance if there hadn't been a series of drops from our wide receivers, Keon Stowers had a fumble recovery and should've scored, but it was called back for a penalty on the return.
September 21st, 2013: Kansas 13, Louisiana Tech 10 – The game was ugly, tied 13-13 nearing the end of regulation and Charlie Weis left the fate of the contest at the feet of a freshman walk-on kicker named Matthew Wyman, who nailed a 40+ yard field goal as time expired to win it. I thought it'd be a bigger deal, a gutsy win that would portend great things, as Louisiana Tech had been very good the season prior, but that was not the case.
November 16th, 2013: Kansas 31, West Virginia 19 – Weis had burned the redshirt on a freshman quarterback named Montel Cozart a few weeks prior, and his potential seemed to come to something at least resembling fruition in this game on a windy autumnal afternoon against a recently-introduced conference foe. Their quarterback couldn't pass accurately due to the wind and our running back tandem overpowered their undersized defense. Students tore down the south end goalposts after the game, only able to get the crossbar and uprights down but not the stanchion beneath, leaving it jutting out from the ground.
September 6th, 2014: Kansas 34, Southeast Missouri State 28 – We ran out to a 24-0 lead in the first quarter, and looked to be absolutely rolling by halftime, at which point most of the students left (it felt like 80% of them) and very few people watched as the team nearly gave this one away. SEMO recovered onside kicks and scored on downfield bombs as we clung for dear life to whatever we had.
September 20th, 2014: Kansas 24, Central Missouri 10 – This was the only mundane game of my entire collegiate career, and oddly enough the best win, in retrospect an upset, as that Central Michigan team went on to have a very good season, and these Jayhawks went on to have a standard 2010s KU season. It was the only time in which the Charlie Weis offense looked like it was supposed to, when our team actually seemed to have the much-self-ballyhooed "Decided Schematic Advantage" that Weis was intended to bring. I left this game and looked up the Big XII's bowl tie-ins on my laptop in my dorm room, no sense in my mind as of yet that I had already seen more than half of the wins I'd see as a student.
November 8th, 2014: Kansas 34, Iowa State 14 - Weis had been fired after a homecoming shutout loss to Texas. Clint Bowen, the defensive coordinator, a former KU player, had been made the interim coach. The primary things that I remember about the Bowen tenure were:
1) It mattered to him whether Kansas won or lost, which seemed disquietingly insignificant to the prior coach
2) He played Michael Cummings at quarterback, who had made spot cameos in each of the prior three seasons, coming in when the starter would either get injured or benched, play better than the starter, and then not see the field again until the starter got injured or benched again.
3) He instituted a consistent identity in uniform that I found refreshing -- Blue helmets, blue jerseys, gray pants at home and all-white uniforms on the road. I am not normally one to complain about uniforms, but we would come out in something different every week (the all-gray ensemble worn in the 2013 West Virginia win was the worst, followed by the Kool-Aid man-inspired all-red getup we'd worn in the loss to Texas that got Weis fired in 2014). This was during Adidas' insecure period, in which they seemed content to throw everything they had at the wall in attempt to compete with Nike, most of them widely disdained by the clientele.
The uniform thing stuck with me because it reflected the sort of humility and simplicity that Bowen brought to the team during his tenure. The season was lost, there was no bowl game in the future, so the the team basically played out the schedule for the sake of their own dignity. It was a delightfully unvarnished KU Football experience: Creative, exciting uniform combos were for winners, and we were not. The former five-star transfers and promising young dynamos were benched for the guy who could consistently hit a crossing route to the tight end. We ran the ball and punted on fourth down. Bowen would've turned off the video board and put the games on Channel 6 if he could've. Bowen would've played the games behind closed doors if he could've -- our fans more or less fulfilled that for him anyway.
The most bizarre thing was that Bowen's vision almost came to genuine fruition multiple times during the late-going. We nearly upset both Oklahoma State and TCU, and actually dominated Iowa State in the third win of the season, the sixth of my collegiate career. It was 34-14, we were primarily out-muscling them on the ground. A TV camera caught me crossing my chest and shouting "Rest In Peace" after we turned them over on downs at one point. Students tore down the south end goalpost again. That was the only win which left me with a roughly proportional sense of perspective. I got back to my dorm room that evening with the understanding that we had won a single game, one that was not going to necessarily lead to brighter days in the future, one that did not necessarily portend anything of significance outside of the outcome of that specific game of football against the Iowa State Cyclones, which was a win, and that was enough for the night.
September 3rd, 2016: Kansas 55, Rhode Island 6 -- When I leave Kansas, I tell people that I am from Lawrence. I did not grow up in Lawrence, but I underwent a sort of spiritual death and rebirth in Lawrence over the course of the fall of 2015 and the accompanying KU Football season that mangled the spirit of whomever I was before it and thrust me out a different person, one who was, if not damaged in soul, at least permanently creased. I am both melodramatic and absolutely sincere when I say that, when I spent my college years putting in hours and hours of effort with the band during the week and going to the stadium on Saturday to be razor-focused in watching an entity of such importance to going about its business with such ineptitude fundamentally informed something about my priorities in life since then, and though I like the effects (to try to put it as succinctly as possible: Communal effort towards any purpose will lend enough importance to it to make it worthwhile, also, somebody invariably cares about that which the zeitgeist deems insignificant, and if that is me who cares, then I must care fully), it left me with a desperate desire to see my self-penance come to some sort of narrative conclusion, and the 55-6 domination of Rhode Island to begin the 2016 season provided it.
There was all sorts of chatter pre-admonishing the students for engaging in a then-theoretical field rush in the week leading up to the game, which I found presumptuous, even if Rhode Island was an abnormally weak and non-regional FCS team to bring to Lawrence for the season opener. It was one of the few times I've ever 'gone viral'.
We started the game with a three-and-out. A deep chill overcame me as we lined up to punt, the one that accompanies an anxious dread in which one takes honest stock of how many days lay ahead of them in life, the one which pre-empts how many ridiculing Tweets and Reddit posts they'll force themself to read over the remainder of the season, all of the hours of arduous rehearsals they'll go through for the sake of playing at the halftimes of another winless season. As that punt flew through the air, I said "here we go again," in a rare instance that I'm sure the Germans have a single polysyllabic word for, in which the dictionary denotation of each of the words of a mundane cliche phrase suddenly took an individual weight, compounding down atop the sternum. Was I going to put myself through it again?
The Rhode Island player dropped the punt, a KU player recovered, and we bulldozed those FCS interlopers. A smattering of students rushed the field to a chorus of boos from the fans remaining in attendance, admonished by the stadium announcer with a phrase that has stuck with me and my friends since: "This is the beginning of a new era of Jayhawk football, one in which we expect wins."
November 19th, 2016: Kansas 24, Texas 21 – I try to live every day with the respect that I displayed for each hour that I got to spend on the day of the 2016 Texas football game. I was 21 years old, perennially plagued with an inability to focus on that which was in front of me. I was perpetually out of the moment, worried about something in the future, thinking of what I'd say years in the future about each minute, each experience, only partially experiencing it while it actually happened.
The Texas game was supposed to be my senior day, my last game with the Marching Jayhawks. I can remember, as I put on the uniform for the final time, committing myself to appreciating every minute I got during that day, regardless of the outcome on the field.
This is careening towards becoming a sentimental tome on what was one of the most significant days of my life, and I could write a book about it. This whole part was supposed to be briefly illustrative of how well I can remember every win of my student career -- anyway, to put it as succinctly as I can here: I lived on this day. In the time between the rehearsal and the game, I made a point to be around as many of my friends as I could, and I told people I appreciated and loved them with a degree of lucidity that I rarely embodied. The game itself was delightfully ugly, reliant on fumbles and turnovers and trick plays, finishing after nightfall in overtime. Security had surrounded the South endzone goalpost, but a much smaller circle of guards surrounded the goalposts on the North end. The mob of students that had congregated at midfield sensed the impossibility of going after what had become the standard goalpost, then turned towards the bowl end, the end in which I stood with the band, and rushed the northern one. It took them an abnormally long time to get that one down.
September 2nd, 2017: Kansas 38, Southeast Missouri State 16 – I came back for a fifth year. Sometime that summer, I had realized that I was only set to take nine credit hours in my final semester and all of my friends were also in the band, so I was about to have a lot of free time. I thought it was possible that I'd get to go to a bowl game, too. I was riding high, I thought this would be the year that Kansas Football finally returned to consistent competence. I had an underlying, unshakeable sense during this game that the team was not dominating SEMO the way that I needed them to, but I handwaved that feeling away with the knowledge that David Beaty was likely holding back our best plays for the bigger games against better competition. This was not the case. The team was simply not that good, and 2017 was simply not the year that it was to all turn around.
I've spilt all of that ink to establish this point: I was in school for five years. I saw nine wins. These nine wins spanned three coaches. These nine wins spanned three changes in majors, four living situations (two dorm rooms, two apartments), and two instruments for me. I entered that first game against South Dakota an inexperienced teenage boy with an unkempt pseudo-mullet, an unruly chinstrap beard, and khaki shorts that were slightly too dark, and I left an over-experienced twenty-two year-old with a more-kempt sort of high and tight haircut, no beard, and official band-issued khaki-colored Adidas basketball shorts intended to ensure that nobody came out wearing slightly-too-dark khaki shorts.
My point: It took me five years to see nine wins. This year's team matched that in a single season. There were wins in 2023 that I would have done anything to have seen. The upset over Oklahoma and finally getting the bowl win, certainly, but I could not imagine telling me at 22 about the third game against Nevada in Reno. Not only would KU win a road game (KU held a road losing streak that started in 2009 and wasn't broken until my first year after graduation in 2018), but I'd be disappointed in the team's performance at its end? I could not imagine how excited I'd be not just to see KU win that second game against Illinois, a Big Ten team coming off of an eight-win season, but to see it happen on a Friday night on ESPN? We routed BYU and UCF at home, plus Iowa State and Cincinnati on the road, and I had to count those wins on my fingers here at my laptop in public to remember that.
I have no frame of reference for that. Every win that I saw as a student I remember in a pleasant sepia-tone, soundtracked with the Joe Cocker cover of that Beatles song from the Wonder Years intro. Now, this team's so good that it's normal - I can't even remember the FCS team that we played at the beginning of the year! Kansas won nine games!
Football Hell was only supposed to be a 2022-specific blog project. I decided to undertake the project because I felt that the 2022 season encompassed a particular moment in history in several intersecting arenas: The Jayhawks seemed set to take a step forward (they did), I was back in Lawrence again and able to attend all of the home games (I did), and college football seemed poised to further descend into a form unrecognizable from what I originally grew to love shortly after the 2022 season's conclusion (it did). It was akin to a senior thesis, in retrospect. I decided to take in the 2022 season as fully as I could while acknowledging that I'd end up going about 2023 in a different fashion. Whatever those changes looked like would happen as they happened.
Now, writing in January of 2024, I think that what changed for me was this: I gravitated primarily towards the local-level, took a sort of academic observance of the system-level, and I abandoned the national-level almost entirely. This is to say that I dove headfirst into Kansas Jayhawks football as an activity, kept up with the massive structural changes within and surrounding the sport out of a genuine, though morbid, fascination with them, and didn't really follow the college football season outside of that. If I were to put it in numbers, I think it was 85% Local, 10% Systemic, and maybe 5% National (and a solid chunk of that 5% was taken up by San Diego State1). I’ll explain myself in reverse order from there:
The National-Level:
There was a point at which I was fully engaged by college football as a national fascination. I used to know about all of the conference races, which teams had the best players, and which of the big games coming up had national implications. I would plan my Saturdays around the upcoming TV schedule. I was a Kansas fan and I was a college football fan. This year, I just didn’t focus on the national interest that is College Football. I never made a conscientious decision to object to the 2023 college football season, but I more or less dropped out of it. I can't name a non-KU or SDSU game that I sat down to watch during the regular season.
It is strange to recognize that I’ve stopped caring about something that used to bring me so much. College football (and I mean all of college football) was my favorite sport, and among my favorite things in general, one of the few aspects of my personhood that was impenetrably linked to the way that I went about my life each fall. From some time in elementary school up until this year, it provided an unquestionable anchor point. I could pick any fall Saturday from about 2003 to 2022 and, if I wasn’t at Memorial Stadium, I would almost definitely be in front of a TV watching the biggest matchup of the weekend. I’d spend the weeks between games reading blogs like EDSBS and Bleacher Report, posting on message boards, Reddit, or Twitter about the sport, watching College Football Live, and listening to the Solid Verbal or Shutdown Fullcast. It was a constant underlying aspect of my life, a personal fascination, and I’ve felt it slip down to being just another piece of background noise in that regard.
I suppose that this isn’t abnormal, as I’ve had many interests fade in my life. I used to keep up with Vaporwave music, NBC Sitcoms, webcomics, and political podcasts, and I’ve found my interest in certain sporting competitions wax and wane over time as well. During college, I would watch Southampton FC in the Premier League every morning and keep up with NBA basketball in the evenings. I watched skate videos in high school, and I watched NASCAR in elementary school, and I lost interest and moved on from those things in an unspectacular fashion. I just didn’t care anymore. There was no teary-eyed moment in which I cast off these interests. I just moved on. I expected for this to feel a bit more dramatic, though, or at least to hurt a little more than it does, but I’ve found myself moving on from national-scale college football with the same sort of dull non-thud that accompanied everything else.
It’s frustratingly rational. I don’t really like what the sport is becoming, and as a result, I don’t care to follow it that closely anymore. It’s cynical, it’s too consolidated, it’s too predictable. Televised games feel overloaded with commercial breaks. There’s so much time spent on the promotion of gambling, and I have no interest in it. The national focus is laser-sharp on a playoff that all but a few teams had any genuine access to.
It all reflects an insecure yearning for extrinsic meaning that counters what drew me to the sport. I liked that college football sold itself on its uniqueness. I liked that you could have a successful season without winning a championship. There was an intrinsic self-confidence to it all – I grew up going to Kansas/Missouri games in which neither team was guaranteed to make a bowl game, neither team was playing for a Big XII championship, and the winner got temporary control over a bass drum that the two teams routinely forgot to bring to the game: But that game always mattered, and that was more than enough for me. The two schools across the San Francisco Bay played one another for ownership of an axe in a picture frame, Minnesota and Iowa played for a bronze pig, UTEP and New Mexico State played for a spade, and those games almost never had national championship implications and rarely even had conference-level implications, but they still mattered to those people, and that was enough them to matter to me as well.
It was always enough for me, and it still is, but it is so tedious to try to keep up with it when everything is ballasted by this cloying for relevance, for ‘stakes’, for somebody else to tell the viewer that it’s okay to care. It is reflected in the incessant cutaways to the playoff standings during games between two teams without a prayer at making it. It is reflected in the references to betting lines, giving viewers unable to find intrinsic meaning in a game the opportunity for quick-fix extrinsic meaning in the form of maybe making or maybe losing a five to ten dollars on it. It is reflected in the constant commercial breaks, which make it clear that this sport’s value to is primarily to serve as a method for bloated cable giants to scrape whatever scant amount of monetary value remains on the back of this slowly desiccating husk of a sport before both of them topple over into the mud. This is a sport undergoing a transition out of an identity, but not necessarily into another defineable one, and while I have become disinterested in the product on the field, it is fascinating to watch it struggle to undertake that transition.
The Systemic Level:
It is morbidly interesting to watch all of this change happen so quickly.
It seems like the entire imperfect system has undergone a paradigmatic shift within the span of the past four years. I have to step back and remind myself of that every now and then. Each of the changes – conference alignments, TV deals, player compensation legislation, transfer rules, the structure of the playoff – have been utterly massive on their own, the sorts of things that we’d typically look back upon as era-defining watershed changes, and they’ve all barged in at a breakneck pace. It’s hitting the same nerves that I get when I watch The Smartest Guys in the Room, realizing that nobody’s going to be able to wrangle the whole thing in. There’s just so much that’s new, so much that the sport’s struggling to deal with, and it’s all piling up at the same time, overseen by by a melange of broadcasters, bowl game executives, legislators, booster collectives, conference commissioners, coaches, university presidents, court judges, and I suppose the NCAA.
Nobody’s driving the ship, though everyone’s trying to drive the ship. Many aspects get less and less sensible with every passing nudge – For example, the series of machinations that made it necessary for Cal, Stanford, and SMU all to join the Atlantic Coast Conference next year were perfectly sensible when taken in the context of everything that had preceded the move - The two Bay Area schools stood to be left out in the cold when the Big Ten didn’t take them, the ACC wanted to avoid their conference falling apart after a few departures the way that the Pac-12 did (there was immediate speculation that Florida State and Clemson at the very least would attempt to leave), SMU was trying to join the Pac-12 and has the money to offset the costs that come along with the move to a power conference, the Pac-12 kind of had to take anyone they could get, the Bay Area schools match more closely with the ACC schools than the Big XII schools in terms of their academic research priorities and athletic priorities with regards to non-football/basketball sports, so the ACC was the only real rational fit for them, if going to the Big Ten with the other Californian Pac-12 institutions was not an option, and adding three schools would make it more difficult for a small selection of schools to depart given some aspect of the ACC’s governance requiring substantial payouts for anyone departing the conference unless it’s a sizeable enough chunk of the conference departing.
That’s all rational in theory. That’s all explainable in a paragraph of relatively normal length. There’s also a bold-faced irrationality to adding two schools in the San Francisco Bay Area and one school in Dallas to the Atlantic Coast Conference. SMU will travel to both Palo Alto, California, Louisville, Kentucky, and Charlottesville, Virginia for Atlantic Coast Conference football games in this calendar year. Stanford will have to travel to Western New York and both Carolinas for Atlantic Coast Conference games in this calendar year. Cal’s shortest, most manageable road trip for an Atlantic Coast Conference game in 2024 will be to Dallas, Texas! That’s not even considering what will have to happen outside of football.
It’s happening at such incredibly disorienting speeds that it holds a sort of ramshackle logic in the moment, akin to the logic that underlies dreams. I have to figure out whose wheelchair this belongs to, I have to figure out an effective scheduling system that minimizes the travel impact on the Rutgers men’s soccer team when they travel out to Los Angeles to play UCLA in one of their two West Coast Big Ten games this season, the other of which of course will take place in Seattle.
This season featured not just so much of that absurdity, and even if I didn’t enjoy looking at it and really don’t like what’s becoming of it, I found myself fascinated by it. These are not the moves of a structure that is built to last in this form, and I think anyone can understand that, but yet, the moves are made!
It came to an absolutely perfect culmination at the end of the regular season with the reveal of the final playoff rankings. Undefeated Florida State was out, while one-loss Alabama and Texas were both in. This was perfectly rational when considering that the semifinal games would be more competitive with those two in and the Seminoles left out, which would increase television viewership – but as it’s apparently still considered gauche to come out and say as much, the official rationale from the committee deciding the playoff’s participants basically blamed FSU’s quarterback, Justin Travis, for the crime of getting injured in a late-season game and thus tanking their chances at any true potential to compete against the sport’s best come the semifinals.
The extrapolation that one can build off of that logic is vast. Travis’ own extrapolation, which I think is morbidly airtight given the official rationale, was that he should have broken his leg earlier in the year so that the team could have had more games in which they could display themselves as a capable competitor. You can extrapolate it to mean that it’s only rational for coaches to have their best players sit out as many games as they can in order to avoid injury. Why risk a player like that against North Florida of all teams, better to have him skip his senior night, his final home game in Tallahassee after a five-year career, than to risk your perfect season becoming devalued in the eyes of a committee on an unlucky break (and it would only make sense to think that, if he’d broken his leg in a non-football context, the committee’s decision would’ve been the same, so it would actually be more sensible to limit your best players’ movement of any sort). You could also rationally extrapolate that Travis was the most important player in the sport and potentially the most significant athlete in all American organized sports in 2023 – There is no other sporting endeavor at this level in which a single player’s injury would turn a team from championship contenders to ineligible to even compete for a championship. If Lamar Jackson were to somehow succumb to an awful season-ending injury off the field this week, it would probably spell doom for his Ravens team’s championship odds, but the NFL wouldn’t come out and say that they couldn’t accept the Ravens into the playoffs because of it.
Nothing else in sports is like this. This snub will likely lead to Florida State University trying as hard as possible to get out of their current situation in the ACC, the changes in the playoff beginning next year will keep this from happening to anyone in the Seminoles’ exact situation from happening (as the five highest ranked conference champions will have automatic bids to the new twelve-team playoff format), but will push the parameters of this incessant debate into squishier and squishier territory (re-sorting this year’s standings by next year’s conference makeup with next year’s auto-bid rules would have both Arizona (Big XII) and Liberty (C-USA) getting into the final bracket, which would the final at-large bid to #10 Penn State, edging out #11 Mississippi. If you thought it was an impossible task to try to nitpick the subtle differences between the fourth and fifth-best team in the country off of 13 games of evidence, can you imagine how much harder it’ll be to discern between the tenth and eleventh-best?). Every new change will create other new changes, and we have no way of knowing exactly what that will look like until we get there!
It is, and it will continue to be, fascinating to me to watch how this sport contorts itself. However, fascination is a neutral term, as though I am fascinated, it does leave me a bit sick.
The Local Level:
I think that I accidentally did my best job at putting my enjoyment of the 2024 Kansas Football season into words in a Reddit comment — a response to the question “What do you still love about college football?” I will include it, with some slight edits made for the sake of readability, here:
As I expected, I've probably been the most checked out of the sport in terms of overall hours watched this year that I've ever been. I don't sit down to pay attention to any games other than those involving the teams representing the two schools that I attended, I don't keep up with what's going on here too much, I listen to Split Zone Duo because I find the social/structural aspects of the sport this year perversely fascinating and they do very well with that aspect of it, and I read Bill Connelly's column, but that's the extent of my interaction with the sport outside of KU, which is far from how I used to be with it.
There's something paradoxical that I notice, though, which is that I feel a much more active sense of 'love' particularly for Kansas football than I did when I was at the peak of my interest in the sport as a whole. I live in Lawrence, within walking distance of the stadium, I'm an alumnus of KU, I was in the marching band for five years at KU, and I've been an employee of the school. I have attended every KU home game this season. I've woken up early, stayed out late, braved weather, left games because of that weather, and came back for the game’s conclusion. We -- me, my family, and our friends, some made in college and some even afterwards -- tailgated beforehand, had to get to the parking lot hours before kick, and made sure we were in our seats for the band's pregame show. I've begun those days excited and I've ended them exhausted, but I've lived fully in every conscious hour in-between on those Saturdays, and I've loved every one of them in victory and loss. I even, on a spur-of-the-moment Friday decision, traveled with friends down to Stillwater for the game against Oklahoma State, and despite it being all for a loss, that day is one of my most cherished memories of this calendar year.
It's an effortful dedication. It's a walk up and down the hill before and after games, wrangling and organizing friends for the tailgates and the away game watch parties, showing up when it's still dark out for the alumni band registration and rehearsal, making a point to seek out old friends who have come into town for a game, and taking the time to stop and talk with people I run into for the first time in a long while during the festivities. It's effort that pales in comparison to what I put into the band as a student, and especially to the players and coaches down on the field and the event staff who make sure everything runs, but it's more of an effort than I ever put into observing from afar, and as a result, I've felt more connection than ever to this school, this program, and this community than I even had as a student. I had these emotions as intensely for games against new opponents like BYU and UCF as I did for traditional opponents like Oklahoma and Kansas State. Though things are changing, many of which are changing in ways I don't like, I chose to love the sport that is right in front of me, and it's presented me with one of the most halcyonic autumns of my life.
The emotions I felt at the KU/K-State game this year -- Sitting next to my mother, who's come to the games for 50+ years, 25 of them with me, first seated next to me as a child, then across the field to watch me in the band, and now next to one another again; celebrating the senior class who had joined a program in disarray, stuck around through a difficult patch, and ended up orchestrating one of the greatest turnarounds in modern college football; watching what might be the final time the marching band runs on to the field down from the concourse stairs for the pregame show, something that she and I both did as students; with a stadium as full and intensely focused as I've seen it since I was in middle school during the days of Reesing and Talib, having gone through five years of helping to keep the Marching Jayhawks tradition alive, playing to empty stadiums and watching losing teams -- were so wonderfully layered. I had a friend call that game 'meaningless', because it lacked playoff and Big XII Championship implications, really the difference between a Guaranteed Rate Bowl and a Pop Tarts bowl for us, but I don't think I've ever wanted to see KU win a game more than that one. I shed tears afterwards, both of us did, but I'm glad that something can still mean that much to me.
I would not have had that from the comfort of home, I would not have felt those connections grow through posting about it online. It took dedication over a span of years to get that. I had to love it like this.
That is my recommendation to others looking for this -- You have to take it. Put effort into finding what you love about it. It may not be glamorous — it was years of abject misery in football for us to get to this point, but being at this point is truly amazing. I recognize that I'm privileged in that my local team plays relatively big-time football, but realistically, I know that I have as little of a chance of watching a national championship contender in that stadium as anyone at our level, and I get this out of our women's basketball team and the third-division pro soccer team that plays in my city too. If you have a local team that needs support, whatever the level, you will get more from being there providing it than you will from trying to beat back the tide of the apparatus that currently moves and shakes the sport. It might not even be college football that does it -- Maybe you can get in the supporters stand for a lower division soccer team, or be there for a minor league baseball team, or go support a lesser-beloved sport played by your school.
—
I will remember this season as the season in which my priorities shrunk in breadth, but grew in intensity. There were so many interconnecting undercurrents to the year: Different senses of finality with the impending stadium renovation and the conference’s reconfiguration, the tumult caused by the quarterback injuries, the diverse set of fashions in which this team managed to win games, the heartbreaking set of fashions in which this team managed to lose games, the upset of Oklahoma, the saga of Jason Bean, who followed his disastrous finish to last year’s bowl game in Memphis by culminating a career and legacy resurrection in Phoenix. It was a wonderful odyssey of a year, each Saturday providing a big event to look forward to throughout the weeks between.
I know that some things about next year will be different. There are four more new in-conference opponents to play, I have no idea what the stadium situation will be, and I don’t know that I’ll get to be in attendance at each game the way that I was this year. Rather than letting myself fall into cynicism about that, I want be grateful that I did everything that I could to appreciate and cherish this one while I had it and commit to doing what I can to enjoy the next one as much as I can.
Hello and Welcome to Joe’s SDSU Minute: Brady Hoke’s second tenure at SDSU was a wonderfully frustrating enigma — His teams had all of the stout defense of Rocky Long’s best, with none of the running game prowess. 2021, the peak of the second Hoke era, was downright hilarious to watch as a fan. The Aztecs played Ferentzian football in front of nearly nobody at the house that Pescadito Ruiz built two hours North of campus, and just kept winning games! It was like watching one of the nights in which Shawn Marion would catch fire with his odd shooting form, a rare melding of logical and aesthetic inexplicability that made the experience singular if nothing else. When it stopped working, it stopped fucking working, though, and that really highlighted the incongruity that the Aztecs, in the beautiful new stadium, located in the beautiful city, with an alumni list featuring names like Faulk, Coryell, and Madden, men whose efforts helped meld this sport into one of the most beautiful American endeavors, played such an ugly and sluggish brand of college football. I believe that SDSU owes it to the hallowed ground in East Mission Valley upon which the stadium stands, where Tony Gwynn nearly hit .400 and great quarterbacks like Dan Fouts, Alex Morgan won a golden boot, and Drew Brees, and Philip Rivers redefined passing in the National Football League, to put the ball into the air every once in a while and prioritize scoring points. Sean Lewis got a 3000+ yard passing offense and two bowl games out of Kent State. Winning at Kent State is as Herculean a task as any in FBS, and SDSU should be a much easier job in terms of recruiting talented players. I really like this hire. Thank you for reading Joe’s SDSU Minute.