varn.dev

Tomorrow is the start of another season of college football. This time of year always reminds me of Fall, of shorter days and cooler nights and of course, making your Saturdays revolve around game time.

As most people who grew up in the South can attest, football is a way of life . Growing up in Tallahassee (home of Florida State and the Seminoles), I happened to really come of age when Florida State was not just good, but very very good. I really started paying attention to football around 10-12 or so. I never played myself but my parents had season tickets to FSU games and I would spend many Saturdays with my grandparents (occasionally attending myself), watching on TV, my parents returning later in the evening after attending a game. In the 90s, Florida State was coached by Bobby Bowden, one of the greatest coaches of all time and (debatably) the winningest Division 1 coach ever. He took a team from obscurity into a national powerhouse, routinely winning 9-10 games a season, on the way to two National Championships in 1993 and 1999. In a town like Tallahassee, football was everywhere - stores, restaurants, on tv and the radio and in the paper, and always a topic of conversation. How good we were this year, how much we hated our rivals Miami (FL) and the Florida Gators. Whether we would win “just” 9 games this year or if we had something more. Even if you weren’t big into football, it was really impossible to escape.

I grew to love it by attending some games myself - the feel of 70,000 people cheering and reacting in real time, the heat of summer still lingering a bit into October, the smell of stadium food and waiting in line for the bathroom and all of the typical sports experiences. And going to big games with friends from out of town or just my family, are some of my core memories and some of the best times of my life.

But I also learned to appreciate it by watching it on tv, with more and more nationally televised games appearing every week as college football grew from a niche into a real sports powerhouse. This is also when I started to realize that I love a good underdog story - unlike a lot of sports, any team in college football can really beat any other team, if everything breaks right. Watching upsets and shocking wins, the fans storming the field, all of it just fed into a love of the game.

Of course, no team can stay great forever and since the early 2000s, FSU has had it’s ups and downs (we won another national title in 2013 but its pretty spotty since). Bobby Bowden was semi-forced to retire and we’ve had a parade of coaches since then. While as a fan I never want my team to lose, seeing the team be brought back down to Earth and being more “ordinary” was also informative of what being a fan really means. Where your day doesn’t have to be ruined by a loss, where you watch every game but maybe don’t pay attention to the newest recruiting class or coordinator hire or whatever. It put things in perspective and while I still watch every game that I can, and rarely attend in person, I don’t live and die by it the way I did as a kid.

And college football itself has changed of course. There’s a lot of griping about NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) rights, where players can actually make money for being the stellar athletes that they are - for over 100 years, college athletes were considered “amateur” and weren’t even allowed to have a summer job - from people who followed the sport forever, but to me it’s long overdue. These players literally sacrifice their bodies every week for a few hours; a free education is amazing but they are entitled to more. And because so many watch college football now, that means that the money keeps coming in to the schools and conferences themselves, changing TV deals and making it harder to watch as the sheer inventory of games has to get shifted from cable to a million different streaming services. And since players can also now transfer schools (also a fair move in my opinion), that means they can go where they are going to get to play more or be spotlighted more but it also means you don’t really get to see players grow as an athlete. Rare are the players who actually play at one school for all 4 years. So it’s a different experience, not seeing the same players year in and year out. Lastly, the fan experience has changed - like everything, games are more expensive to go to, there are a ton more commercial breaks and even the TV watching experience is different since you have to either pay out the nose to watch or jump between services if you like to watch more than just your team. And none of that of course touches on the actual physical harms of football, with CTE injuries and the sheer dangerousness of it all.

Still though, even with all that has changed for the team, the experience and the game itself, I still get excited every late August/early September to sit down, turn on a game and just enjoy seeing top athletes perform, be on the edge of my seat for an upset and just enjoy being a fan. It’s a great tradition and something I’m glad I am fortunate enough to experience, year after year.