Ted Kluck: Is football mindless entertainment?

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, August 25th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next: college football. This Saturday kicks off the NCAA college football season. WORLD Opinions writer Ted Kluck explains why picking your favorite team actually matters.

TED KLUCK, COMMENTATOR: Every male friend group has the guy in it who likes to send messages about college football realignment and how to fix the college football 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 talk about realigning conferences, I respond with the John Nash “A Beautiful Mind” meme, which is a way to honor their effort and their sweet, innocent naiveté in thinking they can fix college football.

Still, some conference swaps are less reasonable than others. What do I mean by that? It makes sense for Indiana and Purdue to be rivals, but it makes no sense for Illinois and Oregon State to be rivals. And it was recently leaked that Stanford and Cal—both schools near the Pacific Ocean—may join the Atlantic Coast Conference.

“This feels like something satirical out of [the novel] Infinite Jest,” I texted my friends.

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 than imagining the UCLA fan base traveling to West Lafayette, Indiana for an exciting November matchup. Two of these far more depressing things include the fact that you can legally change your gender in California in only two months, and you can also steal up to $950 before the police are even interested. This also feels darkly satirical.

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote prophetically about an indiscriminate future– pretty much like now–where entertainment and marijuana were both available nonstop. In Wallace’s world, the entertainment, the zonk out, ended the world … not an atomic bomb.

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

Still, in some ways, we now live in that world, and are raising kids in it. Wallace was writing about a world where nothing mattered, and where the naming rights to years on the calendar were auctioned to corporate entities. For example, 2023 might become The Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment. 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.

It occurs to me that for decades, college football hung together on the very loose pretense that geography 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 not mattering either–like their biological sex and the Judeo-Christian ethic of “Thou shalt not steal”.

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.

I’m Ted Kluck.

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