The gridiron and Gotham City

Every friend group has the guy in it who likes to send emails about college football realignment and how to fix the conferences. In my case it’s my best friend from college (now middle-aged), and his son (a young adult), with whom I’m on a group chat. Whenever they send a realignment-related message I respond with the John Nash “A Beautiful Mind” meme, which is both a way to honor their effort (and their sweet, innocent naiveté in thinking they can fix college football) and a way to highlight how ridiculous it is that they’re doing this.

A quick definition of “college football realignment” for the non-sports-conversant reader: This just means the process of colleges leaving their geographically-reasonable conferences in order to join different, less-reasonable conferences for financial reasons. By “less-reasonable” I mean it makes sense for Indiana and Purdue to be rivals, but it makes no sense for Illinois and Oregon State to be rivals.

This week it was leaked that Stanford and Cal—both schools which reside near the Pacific Ocean—may join the Atlantic Coast Conference. “This feels like something satirical out of ‘Infinite Jest’,” I texted to my friend, about a college-football realignment journey that reached its nadir (for me) with USC and UCLA joining the Big Ten. By way of context, Penn State has been in the Big Ten for 30 years and I still refer to them as “new.” I’ve never acknowledged Rutgers and Maryland (and its criminally unwatchable uniform) as members of the conference.

Of course, feeling apocalyptic about college football is just a convenient way to avoid feeling apocalyptic about the actual world, where there are far more depressing things at hand than imagining the UCLA fan base traveling to West Lafayette, Ind. for an exciting November matchup at Ross-Ade Stadium. Two of these depressing things include the fact that you can legally change your gender in California in two months, and you can also steal up to $950 before the police are even interested. This also feels darkly satirical.

In Infinite Jest, novelist David Foster Wallace wrote prophetically about an indiscriminate future (but pretty much like now) where entertainment and marijuana were both available nonstop. In Wallace’s world, this (the entertainment, the zonk-out) ended the world … not an atomic bomb. We now live in that world, and are raising kids in it. “It feels very ‘Gotham City,’” my son explained, having obviously missed how super-enlightened it all is! (Satire mine.)

Wallace has, I think, been cancelled but I’m not exactly sure. It’s hard to keep up.

Wallace was writing about a world where nothing mattered, and where the naming rights to years on the calendar were auctioned to corporate entities (example: November, The Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment). Because if the name of a year on a calendar doesn’t matter, it also doesn’t matter if I ever leave my home or ever show up to my job or ever stop entertaining myself to death. As it turns out, the runway to nihilism was shorter than any of us bargained for.

“They should just end the pretense of academics altogether,” my friend texted when presented with the idea of actual ACC teams crisscrossing the nation each week to play Pacific Coast ACC teams.

The phrase “it’s not the end of the world” was probably made for moments like Stanford joining the ACC or UCLA joining the Big Ten. It really doesn’t matter. But if the idea of conferences aligned around geography doesn’t matter, and the academic side of university life doesn’t matter, and playing in your bowl game doesn’t matter because you might get hurt and lose your potential NFL payday … what does actually matter?

It occurs to me that for decades, college football hung together on geography and the very loose pretense that it mattered. Now it hangs together on legalized gambling. I worry about this for myself, but I’m old and cynical and can pretty quickly compartmentalize it. But what about kids? Games not mattering to them is just emblematic of a whole bunch of other things (their gender, the Judeo-Christian ethic of “Thou shalt not steal”) not mattering either.

We need things to matter. We need our lives to be about more than hurrying home (or never leaving) so that we can zonk out. We need to glorify God and enjoy him forever—and really mean it.