As a kid, I remember thinking it was pathetic. Why did diehard sports fans stick with their teams through thick and thin, despite years of disappointment and grief? Those grizzled, grim-faced Cubs or Red Sox fans tugged at my heartstrings a bit, but they also seemed to be gluttons for punishment. Why not move on already? Nobody says “I do” to a sports franchise.

I did understand from childhood that fanhood involves pain. My father has a long memory for such things. He has never fully recovered from watching the Utah Jazz lose to the referees, I mean Chicago Bulls, in 1998. But apparently the apple doesn’t fall far, because I now find myself in middle age, having stood by my team ever since the afternoon of September 5, 1998, when the Fighting Irish beat the defending-champion Wolverines, with a young Tom Brady quarterbacking for Michigan, and a young Rachel Smith in the stands. That’s a quarter-century that I’ve been cheering, cheering for old Notre Dame, without ever having the pleasure of watching them hoist the crystal football. 

Here’s the strange part. It’s not as bad as I expected. Absolute victory, it turns out, is not the most important thing in the world. Who knew? 

Don’t get me wrong: I’d still enjoy it immensely if the Irish won it all. Most likely I’d spend a day or two in shock, pinching myself and double-checking headlines every ten minutes to make sure it wasn’t a dream. Then I would get very happy, and probably purchase a commemorative t-shirt. But I don’t spend much time thinking about this. I do still watch and cheer for the Irish, but the emotion is more tempered now. Partly, I’ve channeled some to my own boys’ (middle and high school) football games. It is really a different level of investment when it’s your kid trying to make the tackle. Beyond that though, my enthusiasm is blunted by broader concerns about the trajectory of college football. It’s on a death march, and I’m not sure there’s any way to save it. 

The evidence is glaring. Attendance at college football games has been declining precipitously for years. Viewership is a bit more complex, but worrisome enough that the suits are in a state of constant anxiety, looking for new ways to juice their ratings. I think the problem is simple. Amateurism was the magical ingredient that made college football awesome. But it’s become unsustainable in our era of professionalized sports: neither players nor fans will accept the constraints necessary to maintain it. (The courts aren’t helping either.) Without that distinctive ingredient, there’s really no reason college football should be the kind of sport that draws millions of viewers and sends entire cities into a frenzy of excitement (or gloom). Sports fans like excellence. They like to see the superstars. It’s really quite remarkable that college football fans still give love and loyalty to teams that even in their best years would be annihilated by the lowest-ranking NFL team. What else, besides amateurism, can explain it?

There was a time when amateurism was valued highly in sports. A century or so ago, our friends across the pond were somewhat contemptuous of the American eagerness to embrace professional sports. The English surely love their sports. It is not an exaggeration to say that they invented team sports, or at least all the ones people around the world still like to play. However, Englishmen were long of the general opinion that sports should be played for love, not money. It does not seem like a coincidence that team sports were invented by people who viewed the matter in that way. 

Team sports are a spirited form of group innovation that interweaves cooperation and competition in a complex balance. There are obvious parallels to representative government and free markets. Team sports are the thumos of ordered liberty. For the English, they came to be seen as salutary training for the battlefield, the board room, or life generally. But to people who thought this way, it only seemed right that the cooperative element of team sports would reflect organic ties and attachments. You battle with your little platoon for your school, village, or club. Professional sportsmen are athletic mercenaries.

Mercenaries can actually have their charm though, as modern sports franchises have proven. If the contest is exciting enough, people don’t necessarily mind if competitors are making serious bank. Perhaps it is not strange that here, in the land of commerce, there are fewer inhibitions about bringing dollars onto the gridiron, rink, or court. Can we say that this hasn’t worked out? Creating virtuous cycles between love and money is the American genius, and it’s hard to argue with the spectacular success of the NFL, the most profitable and popular sports league in human history. Still, it’s clear enough that you can lose things when you take steps to turn the little platoon into an ever-more-efficient corporate enterprise. This is obviously the case in team sports, where we do value sheer athletic excellence, but also some other things: teamwork, discipline, ingenuity, courage, loyalty, and perseverance. 

Sometimes those goods come into conflict, and we have to make choices. Free agency, for instance, gives players more options and helps teams to shore up weaknesses in their rosters. It raises the level of play. But it also undermines the integrity of the team itself. Players don’t have quite the same sense of being “in it together,” and fans have to live with the possibility that they’ll buy their kid a jersey for the player he absolutely loves, only to watch that same player suit up for an arch-rival two weeks later. The perfect balance between cooperation and fruitful competition can be hard to find. 

The frustrating thing about football is that, to a great extent, we could have had our cake and eaten it, simply by making different choices at the collegiate and professional levels. Different goods could be prioritized in each one. The NFL showcases all the excellences of football to a superlative degree, basically functioning as a ruthless meritocratic machine. It’s “mercenary football” in a shameless and unadulterated form, which turns out to be great entertainment. College football, by contrast, used to show us more of the heart and spirit that we once valued in amateur sports. The players were young, and still felt the victories and losses more keenly. The teams had a visible sense of fraternity that one doesn’t really see on the NFL sidelines. 

College football maintained deeper roots in history and tradition, along with organic connections to real American communities. In contrast to the NFL’s relentless mechanization and quality control, the collegiate game presented a bumpy terrain populated by a wide range of characters: old blue-bloods, tiny upstarts, habitual spoilers, and regional rivalries. It had variety and eccentricity, like human society itself. That enabled it to preserve the “little platoon” feeling that professionalized sports inevitably lose. Obviously, cities and regions do care about their professional sports teams, but it never seems quite the same. I’ve noticed that people still often refer to their beloved college teams as “the boys,” as though they still see them as the community’s kids. Nobody refers to pro athletes that way. 

The decline of amateurism was gradual, and people can argue about the relative significance of different changes: changing bowl systems, enormous coaching salaries, conference realignments, the player transfer portal, and looming over all of this, the monster that is NIL. The effects of this last change are still playing out, but I can only assume they will accelerate the same trends. This too frustrates me, especially because the suggestion that it is wrong to exploit college athletes by not paying them has always seemed ridiculous to me. No one is forced to play college sports. A large number of good-but-not-spectacular players surely benefit from a system that enables them to pursue their education while still exploring their athletic potential; they can leave multiple options on the table instead of making the agonizing choice of whether to forego a more reliable career path for a high-risk-and-reward attempt to become a professional athlete. Only the athletic superstars really have cause to complain, but won’t they get their millions soon enough anyway? Must we dismantle something beautiful for the sake of the poor little super-athletes? This has got to be one of the least-compelling social justice causes out there, and that’s saying a lot in 2024.

In the end though, I see the playoff as the mortal wound that put college football on the road to extinction. This has been my settled position for fifteen years, but the reality has reinforced it a hundred times over. It is preposterous to try to funnel the delightfully irregular, beautifully marbled landscape of college football into a streamlined postseason. Inevitably, once a playoff is established, people come to view the regular season as an ongoing competition for playoff spots. Games with no playoff implications attract less interest. That change, in turn, gives rise to a host of demands that cannot be met, and that we can only attempt to meet through aggressive efforts to smooth and level the very irregularities that made the sport worthwhile. 

This year’s playoff controversy illustrated the problem very well. The Florida State Seminoles went undefeated, but lost their quarterback to injury late in the season. Based on their regular-season record, they obviously deserved a playoff berth. It was equally obvious, however, that the Seminoles couldn’t really be competitive in the playoff without their quarterback. The committee opted for the more interesting playoff, with many commentators aggressively arguing that there was no injustice in denying Florida State a berth, because the selection committee’s exclusive mandate was to choose the four best teams. 

I would not say that the committee made the wrong choice, only that there was no right choice. The committee was right to worry that another boring playoff game would further sap Americans’ interest in college football. They surely feel justified now, because the semifinal games were both thrilling. But their choices only exacerbate a different, but equally serious, problem: fans are starting to worry that the regular-season games hardly matter anymore. They do seem awfully trivial, if we start looking on regular-season performance primarily as fodder for a first-week-of-December debate about which four (or sixteen) teams among 133 are most superlative at that precise moment. Why even bother to play the games? A computer simulation could give us a pretty good estimate, and we’d have a lot fewer injuries that way.

Remember when the regular season just was college football? Did those games feel like they mattered? 

I don’t expect college football to collapse immediately. It may well enjoy a short-term bounce in popularity next year when the new playoff system debuts. But that same system will only hasten the erosion of the things that once made college football lovable. There will be more desperate attempts at defibrillation, but the ratings will continue to slip, as aging fans like me seem increasingly quaint to the juniors. If I’m alive fifty years hence, I may still be able to watch the Rose Bowl from my retirement home, but I’m guessing that I and my fellow residents will be the prime audience. “What’s a Rose Bowl?” may be the great-grandkids’ only question.

Maybe that’s just life. Maybe you can’t have amateurism anymore, once the money is flowing so fast. Sports fanhood is a via dolorosa, as my father taught me in childhood, and I know that some tragedies are unavoidable. Some part of me still believes, though, that it didn’t have to be this way. Couldn’t we have treated college football with a bit more love and care? Did we have to insist that “a clear number one” was the only thing that mattered, as though we didn’t all know that every team in the NCAA was just vying to be the thirty-third best in the world?

Nobody says “I do” to a sports franchise, but the bonds can be strong. Even if the Rose Bowl no longer exists, I’m pretty sure the walls of my retirement home will still feature a belligerent leprechaun. Maybe that’s pathetic. But age and experience have taught me that there are worse things than being a fool for something you really love.