My Favorite College Football Games: Game 5 redux

October 21, 1989: Alabama - 47 Tennessee - 30

In early 2011, someone professing to be Al from Dadeville called the long-running college football radio show of Paul Finebaum and claimed to have poisoned the historic oak trees at the intersection known as Toomer’s Corner on the campus of Auburn University. It did not take long for police to connect the caller’s nom-de-guerre to that of an Alabama football superfan named Harvey Updyke, arresting him on a charge of first-degree criminal mischief. He would eventually plead guilty, serving 180 days in jail and ordered to pay $796,731 in restitution, though he never came close to fulfilling that obligation prior to his death at the age of 71 in 2020. In the immediate aftermath of his arrest, Updyke provided various hedges, even fabrications, like claiming someone else had told him about poisoning the trees and he merely appropriated the story as his own. Whatever his shifting narratives, the phone call to Finebaum always made it clear to me that Updyke grasped from the outset the gravity of his deed. Because if we accept that Finebaum is something akin to the supreme pontiff of southern college football then, in effect, Updyke’s calling him was a confession in a religious sense as much as a criminal one. And though he would say he did it because of how much he hated Auburn, his beloved Crimson Tide’s archrival, in his 2011 ESPN profile of Updyke, Wright Thompson knew better when he wrote, “He loved a football team so much he ruined his life.”

Almost from the beginning, college football has been compared to religion. John Tunis made the comparison in 1928 writing in Harper’s that college football seemed poised to become America’s national religion. He was criticizing, not praising, but in his negative assessment, he was, nevertheless, concurring that in its customs, fellowship, and belief in something akin to an unseen order, to paraphrase Columbia University Professor Emeritus of Religion Wayne Proudfoot, the sport did, in fact, function as a religion. If it was a problem to Tunis in the 1920s, it has only grown worse, and I wonder what he would make not only of declining church attendance and football’s increasing popularity but modern coaches like Dabo Swinney and the late Bill McCartney seeking to blur the lines between church and state. Yet, if the whole sport might be deemed a religion, no place in America remains more religious than the Bible Belt, and the Bible Belt loves college football more than anyone. There was a reason that the late Alcorn State coach Marino Kasem’s famous regional classification of college football saw fit to ascribe a holy purpose to one sector only: “in the South, football is a religion,” he said, “and Saturday is the holy day.” That’s merely a more lyrical version of the Southeastern college athletic conference’s highfalutin present-day slogan, It Just Means More, just as Wright Thompson’s poetic love letter to southern football, Pulled Pork & Pigskin, innately demonstrates how every southern football fan is but one more bourbon and cola solo cup away from metamorphosing into Harvey Updyke whether they know it or not. I am from, and live in, and root for a team affiliated with Big Ten country but I know it means more down there.

19th century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor argued that “a minimum definition of religion” could be defined as “belief in Spiritual Beings.” The title of his treatise, Primitive Culture, mirrors the primitive cultures that Emile Durkheim examined in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life in which a belief in a god manifested itself in the form of a totem, symbolizing the deity, to paraphrase Michael Serazio, associate professor of communication at Boston College, writing for The Atlantic in 2013, while “also implicitly offer(ing) vessels for fellowship.” Ida Mae Kilgore Bryant, mother of Paul Bryant, nicknamed Bear, wanted her son to go into the ministry, though he opted for coaching college football instead, reasoning that they were virtually the same. Indeed, in coaching his alma mater the University of Alabama from 1958 to 1982, he resurrected it into the premier program of the sport, so worshiped in the Magnolia State that all kinds of unsanctioned art, from decals to postcards, proliferated in the 1960s of the ceremonial Bear walking on water while his signature houndstooth hat turned that two-tone pattern into a totem of team as much as its own school colors. In saving the football program, he also redeemed the Old South, the antebellum mystic referenced in the title card of “Gone with the Wind,” an eyebrow-raising idea advanced by both Warren St. John in his 2004 book about Alabama football fandom “Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer” and Frank Deford in his seminal profile of the coach for Sports Illustrated in 1981. Deford also noted that the Bear scoffed at such water-walking allusions, though that did not mean their prevalence was any less telling. When Deford dared humanize the Bear in that very same profile, he was besieged by letters from angry Alabama fans. Of course, Deford himself was not above religious allegory, deeming Bryant “football incarnate” in the state and noting how hard it would be for whomever was eventually tasked to succeed him.

That happened two years later in 1983 when Bryant retired and subsequently died at the age of 69 from a massive heart attack. Ray Perkins was first into the breach, getting so much flack for decent-enough success that still paled relative to the Bear, he jumped ship of his own volition by going to coach what was then the nadir NFL franchise, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. If Perkins was an alum of Alabama, at least, his successor Bill Curry was not, and if Bryant’s houndstooth hat was the totem of Crimson Tide football, then the brick that was thrown through Curry’s office window early on the morning of October 9, 1988, might have been its most cursed object. It was the day after Curry’s second Alabama team not only lost to the University of Mississippi for the first time at home but lost to them for the first time at home on homecoming. Appropriately, the brick comes with its own conspiracy theory intimating that Curry threw it through his own window in the manner of the speculation that tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand might have put a bullet in his own mailbox, which is just the crimson icing on the white cake, blaming the victim to try and mask the setting of unattainable standards. And yet, the next season in 1989, Curry seemed positioned to, if you will permit me, turn the tide by starting the season 5-0, including a revenge game against Mississippi in which his squad overcame a 21-point deficit by detonating for 62 unanswered points, and ascending to #10 in the country ahead of meeting 6th-ranked and also undefeated Tennessee on, as tradition once dictated, the third Saturday in October.

Growing up in Big Eight and Big Ten country meant those were the games I usually watched, but the Alabama versus Tennessee showdown was nationally televised by CBS, and I happened to be watching, praise be. It was not a dramatic contest, per se, but a fun, high-scoring one with Alabama forging a big lead and Tennessee futilely trying to play comeback. The Crimson Tide asserted itself with one big play early in the second quarter. Leading 10-7 and lined up 75 yards from pay dirt in the shotgun formation, string bean Tide quarterback Gary Hollingsworth received the snap and drifted back a couple steps to intentionally invite the Volunteer defensive line toward him before flipping the ball forward to running back Siran Stacy, previously lined up to his QB’s right. Stacy sliced through a hole opened by that little bit of misdirection and his offensive line, angling at first toward the left sideline before reading a block out wide by a receiver and gently slaloming back to the right. As he approached midfield with one Tennessee defender hurrying to try and catch him from behind and two converging on him from both the right and the left, Stacy accelerated, not so much shedding or even slipping the last desperate attempt at a tackle but surging beyond it, making it look for all the world like Tennessee was trying to catch the wind. He coasted alone into the sun-filled end zone, a 75-yard-touchdown as exultation, echoed in the overwhelming roar of the crowd and CBS announcer Brent Musburger, who no one would accuse of being a man of few words, tingling the spine by shutting up and laying out after just three of them: “Siran Stacy explodes!” By modern-day standards, this touchdown might appear prosaic, nothing more than a little shovel pass. Yet, that underlines its timelessness, living the apotheosis of football since the beginning by transforming the muddle of so much helmeted humanity into the divine.

I had never thought much about Alabama football, or the SEC, until this game, or until this play, really, though in the new century of the sport, I had to think about them a lot as Nick Saban fashioned an evil empire out of his cherished process. If you’re not from Alabama, or maybe just not from the south, you’re not supposed to like them, and I suppose I don’t, though I must confess that this Siran Stacy touchdown caused me to see the light. I have often wondered if in its aftermath, if Curry thought that Alabama fans had seen the light, if he had been redeemed. This victory would spur them toward winning the conference, after all, going to the Sugar Bowl, and inching as high as #2 in the national rankings. But they would lose the Sugar Bowl to Miami and worse than that, they would lose their last game of the season to archrival Auburn, unforgivable, conference title or not, evincing that strange college football version of math where a 10-2 season equals 0-2. In the offseason, like Perkins before him, Curry ditched, taking the Kentucky job and his career never recovered, though maybe it was unrecoverable the moment that brick went through his window.

Writing in 2021 for the most southern-coded magazine ever, Garden & Gun, Tommy Tomlinson surmised that college football in the south was not so much religion as it was spiritual, “the hunger for that rare and precious moment of transcendence.” I think Tomlinson is underselling how the religious-like structure of the sport can help stoke that transcendence, even as he hints at that idea throughout, but I take him at his larger point, ending on a note that might as well be describing Siran Stacy’s touchdown: “(O)ne Saturday night, late in the game, your man breaks into the clear. You rise and shout. Rapture.” Up until then, college football had hinged for me on victory and defeat for my chosen team, whether it was my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers, or my native state Iowa Hawkeyes before that. Stacy’s touchdown, however, made me realize that gridiron transcendence could exist independently of rooting interests, and that the momentary rapture could matter as much if not more than the result. College football has always been based on results, of course, though that sense of the bottom line has only been amplified in the new-fangled 12-team playoff era as athletic directors, commentators, and fans have taken What Have You Done for Me Lately to unprecedented extremes. It’s as if every college football team is fast becoming like 1989 Alabama, destined to suffer spiritually winless seasons no matter how many games they technically win if they don’t make the playoffs. It’s only natural. In sports we tend to overrate the outcome and undervalue the experience. It’s times like those when I want to sit down, bring up YouTube, find Siran Stacy’s touchdown run from that sunny day in October 1989, and get some of that good old-time religion.

 

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 6 redux

October 19, 1985: Iowa - 12 Michigan - 10

In the 1920s when the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team would come to New York for its annual neutral site game with Army, scores of the city’s Irish Americans jammed the train to go see their de facto team, acquiring the nickname subway alumni. Like a great deal of Notre Dame football, it’s hard to know how much of this backstory is mere mythology. Murray Sperber, who has written extensively on the history of the Fighting Irish, once noted it was unlikely many of the first-and second-generation immigrants could afford tickets to the game. But the moniker was evocative, and it stuck, and as the program’s prominence and publicity machine grew, subway alumni became a catch-all for Notre Dame’s national following. Few of these fans were actual alums, mind you, epitomizing former Sports Illustrated writer Rick Telander’s observation that college football is “an entertainment vehicle for people who have nothing to do with the university.” That’s not wrong, per se, but it also strikes me as ungenerous. Even Sperber, no less cynical than Telander, would concede there was something real in the Notre Dame “fan identification of ethnicity and religion.” The esteemed Charlie Pierce pinpointed this sensation to the 1940 film “Knute Rockne, All American” which did much to solidify the Fighting Irish folklore while also demonstrating how the place and the football team represented the purchase on their life in a new country in a real way.

In Iowa, where I’m from, a state with no professional sports teams, people tend from a young age to become supporters of either the University of Iowa football team in Iowa City or the University of Iowa State gridiron squad in Ames. And while some may grow up to attend one of these schools, just as many will not. It’s a Midwestern version of subway alumni, in other words, sometimes referred to as T-Shirt Fans, or Walmart Fans, as in, no, I didn’t attend Iowa, but I bought this t-shirt at Walmart. This, too, strikes me as ungenerous. In my experience, the people wearing these shirts are rarely trying to pass themselves off as graduates, and if the Notre Dame football team stood for a sense of belonging to so many newly minted Irish Americans then the Iowa and Iowa State football teams give form to a state pride for many native Iowans. It’s a state pride, though, that winds up split down the middle, two tribalist subsects, though that fierce sense of loyalty also evokes individual expression. Like any Cubs or White Sox hat resting atop a Chicagoan’s head comes a whole personal history attached, so, too, does every Iowan’s Cyclone or Hawkeye t-shirt. I have my own backstory.  

If you’re a person like me in conformity-minded small town central Iowa, you seek to individuate from your peers wherever possible. And so, when it came to college football, like a contrarian ten-year-old northside Chicagoan rooting for the St. Louis Cardinals, I eschewed Iowa and Iowa State and hitched my wagon to the enemies to our west, the University of Nebraska, and their famed Cornhusker football team. Yoked to educational institutions and extolling the mythical student athlete, college football has always been divided against itself, and in becoming a Nebraska fan in Iowa, I learned a lot about living in the sport’s contradictions. My devotion to the Big Red became so inextricable from my identity that even when I applied to, was accepted at, and briefly attended Iowa, I maintained it. I have even maintained it into middle age, which can admittedly feel peculiar, like I’m a punk at 48 still sporting liberty spikes. I have become good friends with a pair of Nebraskans, and have met more Nebraska fans through them, all of whom come across accepting of my affiliation if a bit perplexed. But what I don’t tell them is that while Nebraska has come to define by college football fandom, it’s not where my fandom started.

Iowa head football coach Hayden Fry confers with his most exalted quarterbacking charge, Chuck Long.

My first college football season as a full-time fan was 1985 and if you were an Iowan just becoming a college football fan in the 85th year of the 20th century, and if you didn’t have family or geographical history with Iowa State, it would have been practically impossible not to be captivated by the Hawks. Were the ’85 Hawkeyes the best Iowa football team of all time? It’s debatable. Several of Kirk Ferentz’s 21st century teams have finished higher in the polls. The 1958 team coached by Forest Evashevski was voted #1 at season’s end by the Football Writers Association of America. The 1985 squad finished 10-2, losing to Ohio State, and to UCLA in the Rose Bowl, but they were also the last Iowa team to win the Big 10 outright. And anyway, whether they were the best is immaterial in the face of what they indisputably were: the coolest Iowa football team of all time. That might sound strange to a modern college football fan who only knows the latter-day Hawks as an offense-challenged joke with a Punting is Winning punchline. But I am here to tell you, kids, that it was not ever thus. In 1985, the wreck of the Titanic was discovered, Marty McFly became the first time-traveler, and the Iowa Hawkeyes averaged 36.7 points per game, second most of all teams in Division I Football.

For much of its football-playing existence, the Big 10 Conference existed in black and white, even after the advent of color television. It was dominated for decades by Ohio State coach Woody Hayes and his dyed-in-the-wool three yards and a cloud of dust approach and his equally atavist protégé Bo Schembechler at Michigan. Through that lens, Hayden Fry, who took the reins of Iowa in 1979, was a breath of fresh air. Unlike Woody and Bo, who stuck to what they knew, Fry was an innovator with a predilection for exotic plays. But it wasn’t just strategy; it was aesthetic. The eponymous character of ABC’s “Coach” was based on Fry, but the real Fry was far more a character than Craig T. Nelson’s sitcom archetype Hayden Fox. Fry wore white pants, snakeskin boots, sunglasses, sported a moustache that seemed plucked from the face of Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud, and had his team dance the hokey pokey after big wins. He was a born and bred Texan, coaching for a spell at SMU in Dallas, and with “Dallas” the hit TV show of the 80s, Fry brought some of that Big D swagger to the stoic Hawkeye state. Not that he didn’t understand his new place. In 1985, with Iowa mired in the Farm Crisis, Fry commissioned stickers for his team’s helmets bearing the acronym ANF: America Needs Farmers. And if we all agree that the Farm Crisis was at least in part a result of political policy, then we can agree that the ’85 Hawkeyes weren’t sticking to sports, and that Iowa Football hasn’t been sticking to sports right there on their helmets for the last 40 years all thanks to Coach Fry.

In his introductory press conference, after the mandatory pledge of fielding a “competitive” and “tough” football team, Fry also promised they would be “colorful,” a guarantee kept by the 1985 team. They were an eclectic intermingling of Iowans and out-of-state players, a defensive lineman from Dyersville, Iowa and a defensive back born in Kingston, Jamaica, white and black, so much so that wide receiver Robert Smith from Dallas, Texas would cite playing for Fry as his “introduction to” - look out! - “diversity, equity and inclusion.” (For all he did at Iowa, Fry’s greatest career achievement was integrating the Southwest Conference.) Consensus All-American Larry Station not only had the exemplar of a linebacker’s name but his own poster, one tacked to my best friend’s basement wall for years. Quarterback Chuck Long sported a regal era-appropriate perm, finished second in Heisman Trophy voting, and gave the whole season a tinge of the hero’s journey by eschewing the NFL draft to return for his senior season which is why he took out a $100 million insurance policy on his body. The latter offended Schembechler and his ostensible tough guy values so much that he openly groused about it in the run-up to Michigan’s epic duel with Iowa that year. But wait, before we get there, we have one more ’85 Hawkeye to discuss. 

If Hayden Fry brought Texas with him to Iowa, then running back Ronnie Harmon brought New York, Queens, to be precise, off the field wearing wraparound sunglasses along with lots of leather and chains, like those other heroes of the same borough, Hollis’s Run-D.M.C. He came to work like a professional, which he effectively was, eventually revealed to have accepted money from agents during the 1985 season with an essentially non-existent academic workload. This complicated (some would say tarnished) Harmon’s legacy, but I found it invaluable, innately impressing upon me the myth of the student-athlete well before I intellectually grasped it, how Harmon’s body was his briefcase, to quote 80s college basketball player Daren Queenan, which is to say he was physically laying himself on the line for his work and deserved compensation. In a 1985 New York Times interview, without even reading between the lines, Harmon was already revealing that truth for anyone who wanted to hear it. Harmon, though, not only impressed upon me the sport’s realities but its subjective beauty. He mixed patience with lateral quickness, a unique running form so that you could see him virtually shifting between gears, like someone in a manual transmission Camaro with a lot of hills and nothing but time; he might have dressed like Run and D.M.C., but he ran like Rakim rapped. In the twenty-tens when football writers would cite Pittsburgh Steeler Le’Veon Bell’s fast-in-slow-motion running style as singular, I always thought, well I’ve seen someone who ran like that before: Ronnie Harmon. For me, he’s the answer to the question, who was your first favorite football player?

Iowa began the 1985 season ranked fifth, swiftly moved to #3, and upon demolishing their in-state Cyclone rival 57-3 at the end of September, ascended to #1, where they remained three weeks later when #2 Michigan and Schembechler rolled into town. Michigan had hosted plenty of big games over the years, but the spotlight was new for Iowa, evoked in how Iowa City’s Kinnick Stadium did not even have lights, forcing them to truck in massive portable ones to accommodate CBS’s primo mid-afternoon kickoff. It might have been 1 v 2, but the showdown failed to merit the sport’s colloquial Game of the Century designation, likely because the Hawks were not considered bluebloods. Whatever. In Iowa, it felt like the Game of the Century. In the week before, it was all I thought about, and all anyone seemed to talk about, even at school, where my 2nd grade student teacher Miss Long, a fellow Midwestern college football fan, and I made a wager: if Iowa won, she would have to draw me a picture, and if Michigan won, I would have to draw her a picture. In retrospect, this was a bad bet. I can’t draw now, so you know I couldn’t draw then. What would I have drawn? A shrugging stick figure? It speaks to my nascent fandom and how I did not yet grasp the brutal reality that my team could lose a big game.

Light cast from the Kinnick Stadium parking lot.

Between the explosive Hawkeye offense and stout Wolverine defense, the game proved a real unstoppable force meets immovable object situation. Points were precious, but Iowa dominated time of possession and did so because of Harmon. He might have contributed mightily to the eventual Rose Bowl debacle, infamously fumbling four times, but he did as much as anyone to help beat Michigan, between running and receiving accounting for nearly half of Iowa’s yards on his own, including several crucial carries on the final, fateful drive in the middle west autumn twilight. Because if the Hawkeyes were robbed, as any Hawkeye fan advise, of a touchdown in the 2nd quarter on a missed call, that was mere cosmic intervention to allow Rob Houghtlin to kick the field goal as time expired to win 12-10 and send the stadium into stratospheric jubilation, the crowd storming the field, semi-illuminated by the eerie glow of those makeshift lights, not strutting and their fretting their hour on the stage but flourishing.

Miss Long made good on our bet and drew me a block I with the team’s Tigerhawk logo in the foreground. I tacked it to the wall of my first bedroom, I remember that clearly, but what happened to it after we eventually moved, I cannot recall. After turning traitor, I probably had to destroy the evidence. I regret it. I wish I still had it, tucked into my keepsake box with my copy of the Des Moines Register the day after Nebraska won the 1995 Orange Bowl and the mythical National Championship, and the Tommie Frazier jersey I have worn so rarely that it smells as fresh as the day I bought it from the Big Red Shop in Lincoln, this one seemingly out-of-place Tigerhawk, the emblem of my college football origin story. 

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 19

November 19, 2005: USC - 50 Fresno State - 42

Why did the Heisman Trophy become the preeminent individual award in college football? Was it merely a matter of timing, created a couple years before the unheralded Maxwell Award was established to honor the same thing? Or was it for no other reason than the name Heisman is more distinct than the name Maxwell? I like to think the Heisman has maintained its unique status for 90 years because of the trophy itself. Modeled after New York University’s Ed Smith, the bronze bust by Frank Eliscu is instantly recognizable. Certainly, it is far more aesthetically rememberable than the Maxwell, never mind the predictably benign NFL MVP Trophy. Though the game has been thoroughly revolutionized, Smith’s pose, the extended right arm to ward off imaginary defenders while safeguarding the ball in his left, remains the premiere gridiron emblem. The image is so potent that 1991 Heisman winner Desmond Howard famously brought it to life, a mimicry that has itself been mimicked by other winners over the years, including last year’s Colorado star Travis Hunter. In this data-driven age where athletic greatness is considered quantifiable and provable, the Heisman can feel anachronistic, even irrelevant. But the trophy’s modern critics have never quite grasped that it was always more about creating an image, something halfway between measured and myth. 

Initially christened the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy in 1935 after the men-only New York social club that awarded it, the moniker was altered the next year not for real-life John Heisman’s gridiron accomplishments as player or coach but because he had been DAC president. And so, the inaugural Heisman winner was Yale’s Larry Kelley, who would recall that upon receiving the telegram of his victory, “didn’t even know there was such a thing,” betraying its paltry origins. Indeed, Kelley spurned professional football and even Hollywood’s offer of a movie based on his life, suggesting the sport’s often fanciful amateur ideals. That quickly changed. 1938 winner Davey O’Brien would sign with the Philadelphia Eagles, 1940 winner Tom Harmon starred in the autobiographical “Harmon of Michigan” for Columbia Pictures, and 1946 winner Glenn Davis would briefly date Elizabeth Taylor. The Heisman’s prominence grew with the game itself, assuming the aura of a gridiron Academy Award, as Dan Jenkins noted for Sports Illustrated in 1969, writing of a “war…waged as earnestly by campus publicity men and by the 1,371 writers and broadcasters who are eligible to vote as by the players themselves.” That’s why Notre Dame’s Joe Theisman literally changed the pronunciation of his last name in 1971 to rhyme with the statue, and why in Hunter’s first game at Colorado in 2023 his coach Deion Sanders was already promoting him in an on-field interview. The Heisman is something to be sold as much as won.

Even as the Downtown Athletic Club remained the award’s stewards for years, eventually giving way to The Heisman Trophy Trust in 2003, it farmed voting out, and at present, there are 928 voters comprised of 57 former winners, 870 media members, and a single vote based on the result of a fan poll. There are probably 928 complaints about voting tendencies too. Accusations of regional and positional bias as well as favoritism toward the game’s biggest brands have existed in perpetuity. ESPN, which began broadcasting the ceremony in 1994, has been charged with promoting certain players ahead of others, typically those featured on their network. Dreaded preseason Heisman watchlists set expectations and narratives that can persist despite evidence while the sheer number of voters tends to elicit a groupthink-induced feedback loop. The hype can become numbing, as it was with Louisville’s Lamar Jackson in 2016, the foregone winner for so long that by the end, certain media members were trying to gin up prosaic lightweights as alternatives. Winners, meanwhile, are often unjustly judged a second time in accordance with their success in the NFL, or lack of it, like judging an apple’s taste by eating an orange. What do I think should define a Heisman winner? I couldn’t hope to explain it, honestly, but I know a Heisman winner when I see one, and as much as Doug Flutie and Barry Sanders are, Chris Weinke and Mark Ingram are not. Reggie Bush of the University of Southern California? He is definitely a Heisman Trophy winner.

A running back, Reggie Bush’s stats were not especially eye-popping, at least, not in comparison to other winners through the years. But that’s why he was the ultimate epistemological Heisman winner, and which is why he remains the ultimate Heisman winner too. How did we know he deserved to win, and how did we know that we knew it? You knew he deserved to win simply by seeing him play, not least because when you saw him play, you could not quite believe what you were seeing. Yet, even if he won the award in what was deemed by most outlets as a landslide, when USC lost the subsequent national championship-deciding Rose Bowl to Texas and the Heisman runner-up Vince Young, so many prisoners of the moment swapped sides and suggested that Young should have won all along. These short-sighted about-faces amusingly and inadvertently epitomized the frequent Heisman critique that it only goes to the best player on the best team but even worse, implied the award should be results-based rather than a matter of taste. And though Young was impressive in imposing his physical will, Bush frequently reconfigured what was physically possible. In other words, Young was inevitable, but Bush was inconceivable. Give me the latter.

Bush was never as inconceivable as he was that year against Fresno State, an indelible 50-42 seesaw. You knew it would be a wild night at the L.A. Coliseum from the first touchdown which occurred when the ball bounced off the helmet of one Fresno State Bulldog and into the arms of another in the end zone. The Bulldogs were at the apex of their Anybody Anytime Anywhere era, the mantra instilled by coach Pat Hill to demonstrate his proletariat program’s determination to battle any willing blueblood. They knocked off a few but taking down #1 USC, the two-time defending champs riding a 32-game winning streak would have been the crowning accomplishment. The two teams slugged it out with a bevy of big plays, and Fresno State’s sustained excellence provoked Bush to go higher than ever before, ending with 513 all-purpose yards, including 294 on the ground, and scoring two touchdowns, though he set up two more with long runs that came up just short of the end zone, demonstrating power, speed, and agility in equal measure. Yet, for all he did on the night, nothing else, and nothing else in his whole career, compared to his 50-yard touchdown run with barely a minute left in the third quarter.

 

As a game predominantly played with brute force in close quarters, football coaches have since its inception sought ways to manufacture empty space for their fastest players. For all the formational and strategic inventions, however, no grand designs can compete with a player creating that space on all his own, as Heisman winners have done time immemorial, whether it was LSU’s Billy Cannon bulling his way to it, Nebraska’s Johnny Rodgers juking it into existence, or Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel forging it via his unique gridiron acrobatics. But no Heisman winner ever did what Bush did on November 19, 2005, when he took a handoff, surged up the middle, and followed his blockers to the left where three converging Bulldog defenders essentially guided him out of bounds at about the 25-yard line. Or at least, appeared to guide him out of bounds at about the 25-yard line. Instead, Bush came to a dead stop on the boundary’s edge, if only for a split-second, brought the ball around his back from his left hand to his right and then ran the opposite direction, leaving dumbfounded defenders in his wake while gliding in for the touchdown. Unlike those other plays, it was not so much exhilarating as it was mystifying, a football player scoring a touchdown by pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Reggie Bush did not merely make some space, he reversed the whole damn space time continuum, and in doing so, transmogrified the facts and figures of his stat line into folklore. In other words, it was his Heisman Moment™.  

That no one has ever been more deserving of the Heisman Trophy than Bush made it ironic when he became the first and only winner to vacate his trophy in 2010 after the USC football program was hit with NCAA sanctions directly related to his receiving so-called improper benefits. In lieu of the Heisman Trust retroactively rescinding Bush’s victory, he gave the trophy back of his own quasi-face-saving accord. He broke the NCAA’s Amateurism rules, it was true, and never exactly apologized for doing so, though even a cursory understanding of the NCAA’s formation and invention of the term student-athlete would reveal those rules as one-sided and cynical, and the NCAA never apologized for them either. In fact, they went to the Supreme Court to try and defend them in 2021, getting skunked 9-0. (“The NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America,” wrote Justice Kavanaugh in his concurring opinion.) The NCAA had sought to make Bush an example, a warning, and it backfired as the argument to return his Heisman marked a tipping point in public perception. Every supposed scandal in the twenty-tens involving a CFB player benefiting from their name, image, and likeness resonated a little less, so that by the time so-called NIL was decreed lawful, it felt preordained. There were other, more influential pioneers in the push for player compensation, like Ed O’Bannon, but in his public pillorying, Bush played an outsized role, nevertheless. He gave up his Heisman so that one day in 2024 he could reclaim it, eating the NCAA’s original sins so they could be cleansed, a fitting emblem of college sports’ great leap forward. 

When you look at it through that light, what Heisman winner’s legacy could possibly compare? 

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 18

November 18, 1989: Nebraska - 42 Oklahoma - 25

The sports ticker was born from the stock ticker which was born from ticker tape that in the mid-to-late 1800s transmitted stock prices via telegraph wire. The first true sports ticker debuted on CNN’s Headline News channel in 1992 and was quickly followed by ESPN2’s Bottomline in 1995 before, eventually, every ESPN channel came equipped with a permanently affixed bottom of the screen scroll. Aesthetically, I never liked it, especially back when TVs were smaller, and it seems much less practical, frankly, in the age when everyone has every score of every game in every sport on their phone. The way the pre-omnipresent ticker on the Big Three networks looked, appearing only occasionally, and showing just a handful of scores at a time in font so big it would block half the screen, was not that aesthetically pleasing either (see above). But spiritually, I found it appealing, at least in terms of college football. Scores of Top 25 matchups mingled with unsung ones like Air Force v Hawaii, Columbia v Cornell, Syracuse v East Carolina, allowing me to imagine these faraway places – Honolulu, Ithaca, NY, and wherever in the world East Carolina was. It was evocative of why college football became my preferred sport – it was bigger than I could comprehend, and every game contributed to its rich tapestry. There’s that line in “The Untouchables” when Eliot Ness remarks, “Some part of the world still cares what color the kitchen is,” and that’s how I think of college football. You could be watching a Game of the Century, or just the game of the week, but some part of the world still cares what the Colgate / Rhode Island score is.

For a while there in the 70s and 80s, the whole college football world cared about the Nebraska / Oklahoma score. Their game almost always decided the Big 8 Conference championship, occasionally including national title implications, and the one in 1971 is considered by some to be the best game ever played. Quite possibly my personal favorite Nebraska game is their 1991 day after Thanksgiving triumph over Oklahoma in resplendently miserable conditions, rain changing to ice, sending them to the Orange Bowl, crystallized in the image of literal oranges being thrown on the field by fans exhibiting the sport’s supreme nexus between joy and insanity. Then there was the 1989 Nebraska / Oklahoma game, essentially forgotten not only because it did not impact the Big 8 title but because almost nobody saw it. I mean that literally.

Their rivalry sadly burning out in the 90s was the result of two factors. The Big 8 and Southwest Conference morphing into the Big 12 was one, the Cornhuskers and Sooners relegated to opposing divisions, meaning they no longer played every year. Before Nebraska went in the tank for two decades-plus, however, Oklahoma went in the tank for its own ten-year stretch, brought on by probation levied at the end of the 1988 season for improper benefits and recruiting in addition to a host of despicable off-field transgressions. A condition of that probation meant Oklahoma was barred from appearing on television for the 1989 season. There was a loophole, in so much as games could be shown on tape delay, but those only aired late at night and even then, only in Oklahoma or areas of local interest. The only people who saw Nebraska beat Oklahoma in 1989 were in the stadium or the ones who watched it in Lincoln, or Norman, after the fact.

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There’s this phrase you will often hear lobbed at college football teams, and it goes like this: they haven’t played anybody. It is deployed to question the credibility of a team with an impressive record and/or high ranking but bearing suspect qualifications stemming from a schedule of weak competitors. Often these perceptions are borne out, and it’s not that winning and losing doesn’t matter, but it’s also true that in reducing games to mere data points, we miss the forest for the trees. “The existence of the monolithic top-level narrative means that everything is constantly evaluated in terms of this long-game tactical play,” Brian Phillips once wrote of the sport, “which we’ve gotten used to thinking of as the only way football should operate.” In the rush to frame every college football game before us in terms of the big picture, we forget that “the story of a season,” as Phillips wrote, “doesn’t have to be the same story for everyone,” that games are not just steppingstones to a playoff, that each game is an event unto itself.

In 1989, Nebraska didn’t play anybody. Their schedule “appeared to have been arranged by a pastry chef rather than an athletic director,” Austin Murphy cheekily wrote for Sports Illustrated. Their only challenge of true merit was undefeated Colorado in the game that ultimately decided the Big 8 champion, and in losing, Nebraska lost the only game that effectively mattered. When they squared off against 7-3 Oklahoma to conclude the season, no championship was at stake, even a bowl game wasn’t at stake because Oklahoma was forbidden from one and Nebraska’s postseason destination had already been set; nothing was on the line beyond one more piddling little check in the win column. Given all this, it seemed from afar like a nonevent. Yet, when I finally watched the game on YouTube years later, I was surprised to learn that was not how it felt. Nebraska manifests joy that seems to come from the freedom of playing for nobody but themselves. 

The teams combine for over 800 yards of total offense and a host of big plays as Cornhusker quarterback Gerry Gdowski belies his Class A kinda name by amassing four total touchdowns, a 8-yard-run, and a 31-yard, 23-yard, and 38-yard pass, while Oklahoma connects on the biggest pass play of all, an 82-yarder to Sooner wide receiver Arthur Guess who taunts the Cornhusker defensive back before reaching the end zone and gets horse collared as he crosses the goal line (neither of which were called as penalties because back then neither of them were penalties). That ties the game at 7-all, but then Nebraska scores twice and nabs one additional point when a gone-awry extra-point kick becomes an improvised 2-point conversion, providing a 22-7 lead that allows cushion each time Oklahoma makes noise. Nebraska coach Tom Osborne doesn’t deploy a fumblerooski, alas, as the Sooners cheerfully do, but demonstrating that he was never a vanilla play caller as his reputation suggested, more like a chocolate and vanilla twist, he calls three double reverses, and one fake double reverse, and on one majestic drive eschews convention by running a triple option on third and eight that nets nine yards and a first down, and on third and one, eschews convention again by calling for a deep play action pass to the end zone that scores a touchdown. This game might be as old as Travis Kelce, but rewatching it again recently, both those play calls and their subsequent execution made me laugh out loud. At the conclusion, Nebraska fans storm the field and tear down the goalposts, which might seem silly since the game didn’t matter. But that’s the thing, in tearing down the goalposts, they decided that it did matter. 

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We are 10 years into college football’s nascent playoff era and already it has expanded from four teams to 12, and it will undoubtedly expand again soon. That’s good. I might be anti-playoff on the whole, wishing the sport had maintained its unique and festive postseason playoff-less mess, but now that it’s here, there should be no appeasing traditions when the playoff has in and of itself devalued those anyway. Even so, I stress about the sport losing its identity entirely. This, the first season of the 12-team playoff, was an enjoyable jumble with so many teams moving up and down the ladder of prospective entry to the expanded postseason, and because of that, you heard the CFB commentariat – announcers, podcasters, writers – repeatedly effuse that more games mattered. And though it might be asking an infinite amount of the ESPN College Gameday crew to think in existential terms, when you say more games mattered, that demands follow-up, as in, how many games mattered before, and what makes a game matter in the first place? Because thinking a game can only matter if ties back to the question of who’s number one is a maddeningly narrow perspective in a sport with 133 teams.

When Cal defeated Stanford on November 23rd, it was merely a 24-21 victory for a 5-5 team over a 3-7 team, hardly earthshaking, and yet it reduced Cal quarterback Fernando Mendoza to tears. “It’s what you play for,” Mendoza said afterwards. What were they playing for, exactly? Nothing more, really, than beating Cal’s chief rival, the only context required to provide meaning, Mendoza and his teammates writing their own story independent of the sport’s overarching one. Indeed, Cal versus Stanford is known as The Big Game and that may as well be a cosmic signifier for every game on every Saturday in autumn. It might be true that in the playoff-era certain games will matter more than ever before, but in this sport, it’s vital to remember that the ones far from the spotlight, the ones you don’t watch, the ones you can’t even see, don’t matter any less.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 8 redux

November 3, 1990: Georgia Tech - 41 Virginia - 38

The best moment in the best game of the best college football season does not occur in the game, per se, but still takes place on the field of play, or at least, right next to it. Five minutes remain. The top-ranked and undefeated Virginia Cavaliers trail the 16th-ranked, undefeated, once-tied Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets 38-35. Virginia has the ball on Georgia Tech’s one-yard line. The Atlantic Coast Conference championship and quite possibly the national championship are at stake. The CBS broadcast cuts to a handheld sideline shot eavesdropping on Cavalier head coach George Welsh and the camera’s invasiveness causes Welsh to break the fourth wall. “Can you move the camera, please?” he says. He sounds annoyed, even exasperated, but as the “please” denotes, he’s polite about it. And it’s that politeness juxtaposed with the appreciable tension in his voice that gets me, befitting a coach, a school, a conference unfamiliar with being on the sport’s grandest stage. College football’s biggest games can be great, even extraordinary, yet in another sense, they are often the same ol’, same ol’, the same teams playing in the same places. That is what infused the tremendous 1990 tilt between Virginia and Georgia Tech with such unique energy, two teams fretting their hour upon the stage, in a manner of speaking. In chatting with Furman Bisher of Charlottesville’s Daily Progress newspaper ahead of the game, Welsh likened it to Virginia’s “15 minutes of fame,” noting that he “never went in for that game-of-the-century stuff,” referencing the moniker traditionally applied to the sport’s most ballyhooed showdowns. And yet, him asking the cameraman to move revealed a man who unexpectedly found himself smack-dab in the middle of one anyway.  

It might seem strange here in the brave new world of 2024, when the Atlantic, underline, Coast Conference improbably stretches from its Charlotte, NC headquarters to upstate New York, to the Ohio River Basin, to the Great Plains, and all the way to the San Francisco Bay, but for the first 50 years or so of its existence, it was a homogenous conglomeration of south Atlantic schools only 300 or 400 miles apart. That is why growing up, I barely ever saw ACC teams on television, as they were generally relegated to games on the Charlotte-based syndicated sports network Jefferson-Pilot. I am almost positive that the first time I ever saw Georgia Tech play a football game was the 1990 one against Virginia. No, the ACC became known first and foremost as a basketball conference, defined by its Tobacco Road rivalries, while its football identity mostly languished. By 1990, Georgia Tech’s sizable football history had languished over the previous couple decades too, while Virginia had no real history post-WWI at all, save for losing 28 games in a row from 1958 to the beginning of 1961. Welsh brought some stability and success upon arriving in 1982, even winning the conference title in 1989, and Georgia Tech had a solid 1989 season under third-year head coach Bobby Ross as well, but this was not a game to normally move the national needle. In the three years leading up to 1990, the Virginia / Georgia Tech game was, indeed, broadcast on Jefferson-Pilot. And when 1990 dawned, JP probably figured they would be broadcasting the game again.

1990 was my favorite version of my favorite kind of college football season, topsy-turvy, not just entertaining but ridiculous, and inconclusive, all of it foreshadowed in the 31-31 tie between eventual co-national champion Colorado and Tennessee that kicked it off. The top ranking changed hands three times in the first six weeks of the season, and many of the expected contenders suffered losses or ties too, save for the Cavaliers, remaining unscathed and dominant in playing generally pedestrian competition, meaning that in week seven, with no other bluebloods for pollsters to anoint, for the first time in history, Virginia ascended to #1. Georgia Tech was not even ranked when the season began, but gradually found their way into the polls and to #11 before a tough 13-13 tie with North Carolina dropped them to 16th. That was how things stood in Charlottesville on the afternoon of November 3rd as a Jefferson-Pilot game in theory became the CBS national game of the week in reality. 

If in retrospect it proved perhaps the season’s most crucial contest given that Georgia Tech would emerge as the other co-national champion, the Yellow Jackets’ more modest ranking in the moment, each team’s meager recent history, and the broad suspicion of the CFB commentariat that neither team was, really, all that good prevented it from being labeled as a proper Game of the Century. But then, the first fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier was billed as the Fight of the Century and that’s not the one anybody remembers. No, they remember Ali/Frazier III, or the Thrilla in Manilla, and as it happens, in the game’s run-up, The Daily Progress deemed Virginia/Georgia Tech as the Thrilla in Charlottesvilla. Occasionally, it turns out, a Game of the Century just isn’t big enough for what transpires. 

As it happened, the Thrilla in Charlottesvilla was almost called off. Maybe endeavoring to make some sort of ill-conceived point about big-time college athletics, or possibly just acting like a dumb kid away at school, someone broke into Scott Stadium overnight and set fire to the AstroTurf, incinerating a chunk around the fifty-yard-line. In an unsightly but effective enough solution, postponement was avoided by removing a chunk of AstroTurf from the Virginia baseball field and sewing it into the football field, rendering a playable-enough surface. The weird-looking two-tone field contrasted with the brilliant fall foliage encircling the quaint stadium was captured in aerial views by the Shamu Blimp that flew in from SeaWorld, all these disparate elements giving the game an almost surreal when the circus comes to town sort of sensation. But if the field did not keep its end of the bargain, the game did, scintillating start to finish.

In a showdown of such evenly matched teams, the similarities between them were appropriate. Both were quarterbacked by a Shawn - Moore for Virginia and Jones for Georgia Tech - and both were my preferred kind of college football quarterback, dual threats more cut out for the CFL than the NFL. Both teams had a wide receiver doubling as a track and field athlete - high jumper Herman Moore for the Cavaliers and sprinter Jerry Gilchrist for the Yellow Jackets - who wreaked havoc on the opposing secondary. Both defenses were lamentable, though Virginia’s resisted enough at first to help twice provide a two-touchdown cushion, first 21-7, then 28-14 at intermission. In the second stanza, though, bright sunshine gave way to long shadows, casting a spell on Virginia as their offense began inhibiting itself with a bizarre rash of turnovers, including a pass ricocheting off running back Nikki Fisher’s hands and into the arms of a Georgia Tech defender and Moore fumbling when his own offensive lineman kicked up his right leg in falling to the ground and with his foot, inadvertently dislodged the ball from the signal caller’s hand. Georgia Tech then twice tied the score, at 28-all and then 35-all, before forging that 38-35 lead, which brings us back to Virginia at the one-yard line with five minutes left.

Boy, I miss the days when during the biggest college football game of the year they would still take a minute to spotlight the Ivy League scores.

By then, night had fallen in full, echoing a palpable sense of festering time, of quickening desperation. Indeed, the Cavaliers would make one more mistake, a procedure penalty at the goal-line negating a touchdown. Rather than go for broke and try for another touchdown, however, on fourth down, Welsh opted to play it safe by settling for three points to merely tie the game, hoping his defense could hold, get the ball back, and give his team one last chance to win. If it was sound rationale, students of the cosmos knew straight away what would come to pass - that is, Georgia Tech coolly driving to the winning field goal, 41-38. Suddenly Virginia’s fight song, The Good Old Song, set to the music of Auld Lang Syne, felt eerily apt. Midnight had struck on their dream season and their dream, in turn, became Georgia Tech’s in so much as this game would be their springboard to the split national title. 

Two years later gridiron powerhouse Florida State would join the ACC, changing the league’s perception but in coming to dominate it for a decade, also committing a kind of hostile takeover. Eventually, as the league continually grew larger, Clemson would become an FSU-like powerhouse in the twenty-tens, and though both Virginia and Georgia Tech have achieved successes here and there since, it’s never been anything like it was during those happy days of 1990. Now both Clemson and FSU are seeking to abandon the ACC, and Welsh, who died in 2019, has been proven right about the fickle, fleeting nature of college football in ways he probably never intended. The reconfiguring of CFB conferences that happens every offseason is typically deemed expansion, but what’s emerging instead is more like consolidation, the game’s biggest brands entrenching behind the castle walls. Though the sport was never a democracy, in its original raggedy confederation, almost any school could have its fifteen minutes of fame, and as a central college football hierarchy establishes itself little by little, soon a whole lot of schools will not even get that.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 11 redux

December 31, 2000 (Independence Bowl): Mississippi State - 43 Texas A&M - 41 (OT)

Despite it being compromised by the modern world and its creep of instant communication and remote work, there remain few things more illustrative of joyful ephemera than a snow day. The surrounding world and all its demands and noise cease, and a little space opens up just for you. You don’t even have to seize the day; if anything, it’s preferable to let the day slide right on by. My favorite snow day was January 26, 1996, my senior year of high school, when Des Moines, Iowa was engulfed with 13.7 inches of snow, still a single day record for the state capital. School was called off, of course, and my most vivid memory of that Friday is looking out my upstairs bedroom at some point during the afternoon and seeing the lights of our neighbor’s red pickup truck crawling down the street from the east through whiteout conditions. He finally reached the edge of his driveway, blocked by such a sizable snowbank that it appeared virtually impenetrable, and stopped to size up the situation for a moment before gunning the engine. He had to reverse and then hit this snowbank, I don’t know, nine, ten, eleven times before he broke through and reached his garage. I had a front row seat for the whole show, and it was riveting, watching someone else brave the elements while I enjoyed the elements without having to go out in them. Nothing is better than watching snow falling through the window; nothing is worse than digging your car out from the snow and realizing someone is watching you do it through their window.

“From the start,” Dan Jenkins wrote in Sports Illustrated of a snowy Bengals and Steelers showdown in Cincinnati in 1976, “it was one huge argument for playing football under a roof.” “It was like a nightmare,” Ohio State halfback Vic Jankowicz said of his team’s 1950 Snow Bowl against Michigan, played during that year’s so-called Great Appalachian Storm. “My hands were numb.” “It was the kind of day,” said Michigan’s Chuck Ortmann of the same game, “you wouldn’t even open the door to bring in the newspaper.” Many years later, Baltimore Ravens wide receiver Torrey Smith unceremoniously deemed football in the snow as “trash.” Undoubtedly this view stemmed from his team’s game against the Minnesota Vikings in 2013, played in a blizzard and, later, on a sheet of ice. It was the same game, however, prompting Old Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky to argue that the sport was best in blizzardy conditions, at least for viewers at home, “where football is meant to be enjoyed,” Petchesky wrote, “snuggled up with their snacks and their heat and root(ing) for slippery chaos,” like me watching my neighbor duke it out with a snowdrift.

But Petchesky wrote something else about snow in that blog, calling it “evocative of only good things, like canceled school and Christmastime,” and how “(i)t invites play.” That’s a word worth lingering over, that last one, play. Because the more competitive football becomes as it moves up the ranks from amateur to faux amateur to professional, the more it invokes terrifying words like violence, and war, and life. It ceases to be something you would play in the backyard with your friends. And if snow often becomes a conduit to cozy nostalgia, to holidays and snow days gone by, so does it soften the brutal nature of football, a simultaneous convenient and inconvenient truth that Marvin Newman saw for Sports Illustrated all the way back in 1958, writing, “A snowstorm softens the usually vibrant sounds that rise from a stadium on an autumn afternoon and lends a dreamlike quality to the action on the field. Clouds of snowflakes blanketing the players seem to lessen the impact of the tackle, tug at the pace of action until it seems to occur in slow motion.” Like King David pleading to be made whiter than snow, so many white flakes on the gridiron has a similar effect, cleansing us of our complicity in the game’s savagery, even if that absolution is always short-lived.

If there have been several versions of colloquial Snow Bowls, making it difficult to pinpoint the precise criteria to determine the preeminent one, we can still establish the 2000 Independence Bowl as unique on account of its two participants, Mississippi State and Texas A&M, hailing from below the Mason Dixon Line and facing off in a place, Shreveport, LA, where winter weather tends to occur as rain or sleet. Demonstrating both good cheer and wicked humor, the weather gods conspired for a winter storm on December 31, 2000, to not only take the form of snow but to begin right as kickoff of the Independence Bowl approached, transforming Independence Stadium into a winter wonderland, a phrase ESPN play-by-play announcer Mark Jones uses straight away, predictable, perhaps, but pertinent, nevertheless, innately foreshadowing a game deserving of the label. Snow accumulates on the brims of the coach’s caps, and a grounds crew accustomed merely to managing rain struggles to keep the hashmarks clear, meaning the field vanishes for large swaths of the game, causing touchdowns to seemingly appear from nowhere. Mississippi State disappears, too, inadvertently getting into the spirit of things by busting out their rare all-white uniforms at just the wrong time.

Appropriately, the first play from scrimmage is a Mississippi State fumble, foreshadowing myriad ball-handling problems for the Bulldogs, while the game’s most crucial play is Texas A&M quarterback Mark Farris heedlessly tossing an interception into the wind and snow near his own goal line toward the game’s end, allowing Mississippi State an easy route to tie the score and send the contest to overtime. Not to sell Farris short. He also hits a 42-yard touchdown pass just before halftime, evocative of a game in which scores are not eked out despite the adverse weather but ripped off in big, glorious chunks, Mississippi State’s Dontae Walker with 40 and 32-yard runs and Texas A&M’s Bethel Johnson with a 35-yard catch and run. His six-foot, 275 lb. Aggie compatriot Ja’Mar Tombs, meanwhile, en route to MVP with 195 yards and 3 touchdowns on the ground, barely seems bothered by the conditions, Bulldog defenders looking like little kids on ice just learning to skate and struggling to keep up with this maroon-clad polar bear gliding toward the end zone, again. Indeed, if so many snow bowl accounts suggest how the games were hardly games at all, this feels like a game and a half, living out the wacky weather rather than being constrained by it, evoked in that idiosyncratic score, 43-41, that comes about because Mississippi State converts an ultra-rare 2-point conversion by way of blocking Texas A&M’s extra point attempt in overtime and running 98 yards the other way, complete with a madcap midfield lateral.

If at another time, on a different day, in some other place, a game pitting the third-place teams in the Big 12 South and the SEC West with identical run-of-the-mill 7-4 records would be forgotten, the 2000 Independence Bowl proved unforgettable, certainly more rememberable than the dreary national championship game played three nights later, a testament to the symbolic transformational nature of snow. In that way, its New Year’s Eve evening time slot was apropos. After all, the 2000 American Electoral fiasco had only been rectified, in a manner of speaking, a couple weeks earlier, and snow falling on a bowl game literally named for the birth of America, christened in the year of the United States Bicentennial, felt like a new beginning. Then again, the year 2000 naturally beget the year 2001, a bad one in America and one from which America still has not quite seem to have recovered, as present events both home and abroad suggest, as if we are trapped, the invaluable culture writer Molly Lambert has surmised, glitching back to 2001 forever. Sometimes it makes me think that college football’s leading trivia master Matt Brown had it right when he called the 2000 Independence Bowl, not altogether unseriously, the peak of civilization. Or maybe it was something less profound than that, a snow bowl as a snow day, a stolen three and a half hours of perfection, and as ephemeral as the snow itself.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 4 redux

Loyal frustrated followers might recall, or more likely chose to deliberately forget, that back in 2019, before the hourglass flipped and the world burned, this mostly movie blog started blogging about its favorite games of its favorite sport college football. The goal was to write those posts fast and keep them short, to appease people who probably did not want to read them anyway, stupid, stupid me, and I only wound up truly happy with four, maybe five. I have been meaning to go back and get the wrong ones right, tough luck, and begin today in order to eulogize the Pac-12 Conference ahead of its suddenly final season.

September 25, 1999: Oregon 33 USC 30 (3OT)

My favorite Bruce Springsteen concert is still my first and so, too, is my favorite Michigan/Ohio State game. It was 1986, the same season as college football’s inaugural Super Bowl, in a manner of speaking, when the stars aligned and #1 Miami played #2 Penn State in the Fiesta Bowl, though then and now I would tell you that Michigan and Ohio State felt bigger. It was the raucous atmosphere born of a deep sense of history, embodied in a rivalry game so grandiose that it is known as, simply, The Game. As full of itself as Michigan quarterback Jim Harbaugh who guaranteed victory, a la Super Bowl III, and made good only after Ohio State missed a field goal at the end to lose 26-24, sending their nemesis to the Rose Bowl back when going to Pasadena meant as much as finishing #1. I remember the thought of who they would play in the Granddaddy of the Bowl Games barely occurred to me. One of the Arizona schools, State, the Sun Devils, whatever, undoubtedly Wolverine roadkill. Except on New Year’s Day Michigan would lose, 22-15, in a score not as close as it sounded. I lived in central Iowa, after all, Big 10 country, and though that technically meant the Midwest, this was my introduction to East Coast Bias.

In a sport that for most of its existence had no playoff, relying exclusively on polls to crown so-called mythical champions, perception counted for a lot. You needed to be seen, and if you played on Pacific Time, it was only natural that east coast media would you see less. It’s absurd, I know, Who’s Number One? hanging on a time zone. But in this unfair absurdity you could see the sport’s overarching identity as regional rather than national, too vast to be housed under a single umbrella, conflicting swaths of country spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Once upon a time, myriad east coast schools eschewed conference affiliation to remain independent, reflected in how they all competed for their own year-end prize, The Lambert Trophy, while Texas echoed its Everything Is Bigger mantra and sense of honorary independence by essentially having the late Southwest Conference all to itself (Arkansas was the interloper and, appropriately, never felt at home). And then there was the Pac-10 cum Pac-12, its counterculture vibes (never forget man of letters Brent Musburger whining about Berkeley tree-huggers) and flashy aesthetics a welcome counterpoint to entities like the stodgy Big 10 (in that 1986 Rose Bowl, Michigan’s ancient, winged helmet clashed against the cheeky Sparky the Sun Devil on Arizona State’s), so geographically isolated from the rest of the college football world that it seemed to be played somewhere over the rainbow, or maybe after dark.

Pac-12 After Dark was a term born in the social media age, referring to the conference’s football games airing in extremely late-night windows on ESPN that tended toward wacky affairs such as UCLA upending Washington State 67-63 in 2019. Preeminent modern CFB scribe Spencer Hall has comically, if not altogether seriously, defined the term as “(t)he random and possibly scientifically valid correlation of Pac-12 games to a general atmosphere of chaos entirely independent of the execution of the game by the players and coaches.” For ESPN, Chantel Jennings pinpointed the birth of Pac-12 After Dark as a Twitter hashtag to October 11, 2014, though in a way this nomenclature has been around much longer, evinced in Rick Reilly’s contemporary Sports Illustrated piece about the 1986 Arizona State team noting how the desert heat necessitated that many of their games literally kick off after dark. It’s an anecdote evocative of the Pac-12’s eternal struggle for television exposure, one that contributed directly to its recent demise, even if simultaneously it gave the conference its charm. The Pac-12 was on its own clock and some of its grandest moments could be lost to time if you were not willing to stay up late to watch, like I did on September 25, 1999, or September 26, 1999, Central Time once the whole shebang concluded.

If some great college football games are all about high quality of play, some are just the opposite, infused with what Hall deems “a wild, wandering spirit.” If Y2K did not come to pass, Oregon and USC would pick up the slack a few months early, compelling in epitomizing best laid plans, rife with penalties, turnovers, and missed field goals. But there was more, something akin to that independent chaos described by Hall, a prank, perhaps, by a cruel cosmic deity, given how both teams lost a critical offensive player to injury before halftime (USC’s quarterback, Oregon’s running back), and most apropos of all, upon converting the game-tying field goal that ushered the game to overtime, Oregon kicker Nathan Villegas was hurt in the celebratory scrum. At that point, with no social media app to disseminate my thoughts, I remember thinking to myself, inadequately but accurately, “This game’s nuts.”

Nowadays, people tend to say a game is drunk, but for ‘99 Oregon/USC, the college football gods got drunk, went to bed, and then drunkenly sleepwalked, issuing nonsensical dictums with their eyes closed, brought home in how that game-tying field goal came to be in the first place. That is, USC going up 23-20 on a touchdown with a couple minutes left but snapping the extra-point attempt over their own kicker’s head to keep the score within three, Oregon fumbling the ensuing kickoff back to USC, USC missing a field goal, and then Oregon driving down the field to tie. And though I am anti-overtime, believing that most games ending regulation all knotted up are meant to conclude that way, whether because extra time will be a spiritual letdown, or because it would be cosmically inappropriate to carry on, it felt proper in this case, because in the moment it really felt like the game might truly never end and that hypothesis deserved testing. And though both teams missed a field goal in the first overtime, further foreshadowing endlessness, after USC missed another field goal in the third overtime, Oregon’s backup kicker converted his, finally bringing the merry-go-round to a stop.

A never-ending game would have been fine with me. I had left my movie theater management job a month before and was set, that very Monday, to begin my foray into the 9-5 working world. I was less excited than anxious, and if the game stretched into eternity, maybe the world would go along with it, suspended in Pac-12 After Dark animation, infinitely delaying my own inevitable. It was a transitional period for the teams, too, Oregon in the infancy of its Phil Knight-funded ascent to the top while traditional power USC was mired in a valley, the brief, lamented Paul Hackett era, before Pete Carroll rode to the rescue a couple years later. This stripped the game of any broad ramifications supplying the sort of long-lasting impact required for those sometimes-short-sighted 100 Best College Football Game lists, underlined how in the age of YouTube, when so many old games are readily available, little footage of this one seems to exist, like it played out on the dark side of the moon and unless you were figuratively there, the transmission got cut. That’s what I like about it. Eight years before Twitter and 15 years before the documented use of Pac-12 After Dark, this improbable Oregon/USC game not only played out under the cover of darkness, but it also virtually disappeared into it, there, then gone. Like the Pac-12 Conference itself, nothing lasts forever.

My First College Football Game

September 16, 1989: Iowa vs Oregon

I had just started sixth grade when my friend whose parents had season tickets to University of Iowa football games offered me their fourth for the Hawkeyes’ 1989 kickoff against the Oregon Ducks. Getting into the spirit, my dad used our hot, new Macintosh Classic to create a dot matrix banner with a rudimentary graphic that I’m pretty sure was a roasted turkey but still looked enough like a roasted duck to emphasize our chosen slogan of “Roast the Ducks!” My friend and I unfurled this banner exactly once, early in the 4th quarter when Iowa quarterback Matt Rodgers sauntered into the end zone from 5 yards out. That rendered the final score: Oregon – 44 Iowa – 6. I seem to remember a running play that Iowa dialed up several times to no great effect, always ending with the running back haplessly sprawled on the ground having gone nowhere. After one of these woebegone displays of offense, someone sitting behind us dryly lamented in the general direction of Iowa coach Hayden Fry something along the lines of, I think they’re on to that one, Hayden. Yet, the result didn’t much matter, and not just because by 1989 I had already contrarily declared my allegiance to Nebraska Football.

I see images of 1980s college football games on YouTube now that I remember seeing live back then and if, say, the image of the 1988 Rose Bowl set down in the Arroyo Seco looks fuzzy and primitive by our contemporary standards, I swear that in the moment it was spine-tingling. Still, if you’ve ever wondered how a faded Polaroid from the 1950s might have looked through your own eyes, that’s what it was like to finally be in Kinnick Stadium for real. Japan technically began High-Definition broadcasts that same year, in June of ’89, but the first time I saw my favorite sport in HD was that September Saturday. It’s virtually impossible to remember everything in full, just flashes, a once-finished puzzle in my head now disassembled, but I can still sort of call to mind how the natural grass (new in Kinnick that year after transitioning away from the evaporating AstroTurf fad) and the black and gold uniforms of Iowa and the pre-Jean Paul Gaultier era green and yellow classic uniforms of the hitherto untrendy Oregon were so bright and vivid in the mid-day, pre-autumn equinox light. And if Keith Jackson was the sound of college football, here I just had the soundtrack au naturel, of the marching bands and omnipresent murmur of the crowd, like seeing a documentary without any narration. No one was there to give me context; the context manifested on its own. Everything felt bigger but simultaneously more intimate.

But crucially, the experience was not just the game itself. This might sound strange, but in those Athlon College Football annuals of the 80s that I would read and re-read every August, there was an ad for Kessler Whiskey with a few tailgating fans gathered around a grill jubilantly raising glasses of their preferred brown liquor. I had just turned 12 and had not so much as thought about drinking; that the ad was for alcohol didn’t even really register with me. No, it was more about this image fusing college football and celebration in my mind. (I am now 44 and have never bought Kessler Whiskey. The ad worked on me without working on me at all.) And as we walked to the stadium from downtown Iowa City, across Burlington and over the Iowa River, down Grand and then on to Melrose, I remember that Kessler ad coming to life. There were cars, grills, coolers, and revelers, most donned in black and gold, stretched as far as the eye could see. I’m sure there was drunken revelry too, though like the young Marquis de Lafayette first arriving in America and naively believing everyone to be a liberty-lover like him, no debauchery registered. After the game we trekked back downtown to the Ped Mall and ran into a few of our middle school teachers eating ice cream. I had never seen them outside the classroom. It was a small world moment merged with a big one, the sense that the world as I knew it had just entirely uprooted itself that Saturday and moved 100 miles east.

If having seen college football exclusively through TV meant that I only possessed a national frame of reference, this experience gave me perspective. Neither Iowa nor Oregon would finish the season ranked just as Iowa State and Tulane would both finish the season unranked when I went to see them play three years later at the University of Iowa’s land-grant rival in Ames. These games left no national imprint and didn’t need to because they were gloriously, perfectly self-contained. As it happened, a game of extreme significance, the earliest encounter ever between the two top-ranked teams, #1 Michigan and #2 Notre Dame, took place the same Saturday as Iowa and Oregon. I had been looking forward to that game for months and it’s why when my friend initially invited me to Iowa City, I briefly hesitated. At some point when we were wandering in the Ped Mall, I insisted to my friend that we find a place to check in on #1 vs #2, finding what my memory tells me was a hotel lobby. 

Back then, standing there watching long enough to see Michigan fail to complete a 2-point conversion pass to future Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard, I didn’t realize I was missing the forest for the trees.