It’s a popular “take” these days to observe how College Football (CFB) is trending more toward the NFL. Players are now being openly paid and have more freedom to transfer repeatedly. These changes are clearly creating a more equitable environment for the players. They also eliminate any doubt that CFB is more a television inventory product than a component of higher education.

I’m not going to argue here about whether these are good or bad developments.
While the NFL and CFB may be trending together in these and other ways, important and enduring distinctions create a chaotic irrationality to CFB that you don’t find in the NFL. These are also the very reasons that I find CFB so compelling. My wife is a die-hard Chicago Bears fan. Most Sundays, I can’t bring myself to watch an NFL game. On fall Saturdays, though, I not only build my day around watching my Iowa Hawkeyes, I invest an inordinate amount of time in listening to podcasts and scouring the internet for information related to the team and its upcoming game.

In the NFL, there are weighted schedules and a draft-oriented player-acquisition process designed to create parity among franchises. The counterpart to many of those restrictions is they also drive mundane standardization. The “players” at that level are fully-developed adults for whom the practices and games are simply elements of their chosen profession. Ie work. Players often reach the pinnacle of their performance levels early in their careers and then gradually taper. All this makes it relatively straightforward to predict the level of performance you’ll see from teams week to week. While there are always some surprises, fans tend to know early in the season, or even the pre-season, which teams will perform at what level. It’s still a human endeavor, which leads to occasional mistakes or unforeseen inspired play, but overall it’s a pretty apples-to-apples exercise.

In contrast, CFB, even with the recent changes, is still fundamentally different and much more chaotic than the NFL. First, there’s very little inter-conference play between teams and the higher level conferences themselves have grown so large that even teams within the same leagues play schedules that are vastly different in terms of level of opponent. So even in early November, 75% into a season, a whole industry of experienced “analysts” struggle to figure out who’s any good.

Further, football requires intense and coordinated focus among 11 players on typically 100-150 distinct plays per game. While there are coaching staffs playing the roles of “adults in the room”, CFB teams are composed primarily of 18-22 year old males. The only thing less focused than 18-22 year old males are 2-17 year old males. These kids, (let’s face it, most of them are kids) are recruited to these programs at ages 16-18 on the assumption they’ll follow a certain development path and emerge from the program five to seven years later as significantly better players than they entered. Sometimes that works out and sometimes it doesn’t.

The third thing that makes CFB relatively unique is the combination of the number of “Division I” teams and the institutions they represent. Granted, the ties to the university are becoming more tenuous in the age of transfer portal and pay-for-play. However, the players are still enrolled in class and still living and engaging in over 136 campus communities around the country. This creates connections with not just alumni but also past and present geographical regional residents that far surpass the 32 NFL teams that tend to be based on large metropolitan areas.

All of this creates a CFB fan experience marked by passionate fans experiencing a high degree of chaos and delusion. I’m at the point in the season, as an avid Iowa Hawkeye fan, where I’m leaning heavily into the delusion.

It hasn’t always been this way. I actually grew up a fan of the intrastate rival Iowa State Cyclones. My grandparents both held degrees from ISU and my hometown is only about 40 miles from campus. I went to Central College, where I was on the football team for four years. I then attended law school at the University of Iowa, but was frankly not all that interested in the football team–I guess having carried my adolescent anti-Hawkeye prejudices with me to Iowa City. Frankly, it wasn’t until I was well into my 30’s and left the country that I started to feel any Iowa football affiliation. It’s a bit hard to explain, really. Maybe it had something to do with living so remotely from the place I grew up that drove me to seek ways to identify and reconnect with my home state. For better or worse, the Iowa football program has been one of the most nationally visible manifestation of the state’s identity.

So now, after starting the season a sluggish 3-2, my Hawkeyes have ripped off three consecutive wins. Yes, those wins have come against opponents ranging from mediocre (Minnesota) to objectively terrible (Wisconsin), but that’s where the delusion comes in. Saturday, the nation’s attention (or at least the CFB-nation) will focus on Iowa City where the Hawks will host Oregon, the #9 ranked team in the country. Both teams are going into the game with 4-1 conference records and national playoff implications rest on the result of the game. I’m flying across the country to attend.[ Never mind that my law school apartment was less than a mile from the stadium and I went to one game in three years.]

I have become so invested in Iowa sports over the last twenty years that the outcome of games like this tends to impact my mood and dominate my attention span for up to a week preceding and following. I spend hours every week listening to podcasts and scouring the internet for the latest “insights” on both the Hawks and their next opponent. These are 18-22 year old kids! How did this happen?

When the topic of my “Iowan-ness” came up in conversation with others outside the state, there was a time when I could bring up the public education system that was consistently ranked amongst the top 5 in the country. I would also talk about the political diversity and associated civility of the state that for 40+ years happily sent liberal Democrat Tom Harkin and conservative Republican Chuck Grassley to represent it in the U.S. Senate. Or the unique retail politics and technocratic competency represented by the Iowa Presidential Caucus process. There was a time where all those elements felt like a part of my identity, long after I stopped living in the state.
Now, all of that has been largely replaced by Iowa Hawkeye football and women’s basketball (which hopefully I’ll get to in a future post).

All of that seems kind of sad.

Unless, of course, Iowa beats Oregon.