A CFP Lazy Reader | GRUFF, Vol. 7
Entertainment media have outsized influence on who to root for in the newly expanded College Football Playoff. An incomplete but definitive list of what you can read and watch pertaining to each team.
Please consider this a preview for those who live in our heads.
The chance to get a hate-on for, or bandwagon a team, for 3½ to 4 hours in college football never loses its appeal. The sport is so, please do not be a Canadian doing amateur sociology, enmeshed into the everyday that you can project all sorts of dislikes and likes on to these groups of young football people. Is anything about fair or objective? Hell no!
There are plenty of places to go for nuts-and-bolts breakdowns of the four first-round games on Dec. 20 and 21, and the potential quarterfinals taking place 10 and 11 days afterward. This preview bases rooting interest on media relating to each team and its lasting lessons. However, it is a lazy reader. We all know, or have grudgingly accepted, that movies and television can be just as insightful as nonfiction books and novels, and in no way is that because of social conditioning geared to make us believe productivity is all that matters.
The form calls for some nuts-and-bolts football, true. ESPN ranks all 134 teams in efficiency in defence, offence, and special teams. Here is a handy colour-coded chart ranking the three phases of each CFP contestant.
Nine of the 11 most proficient offences are in the dance. And that does not include the No. 1 offence, the Miami Hurricanes. The top four defences and seven of the top 12 are represented. The special teams phase looks fraught for someone to have their season wrecked by missed field goals and fumbled punt returns.
Either way, authors are the unacknowledged prognosticators. The CFP tournament’s hard bracket is on the Internet.
Indiana Hoosiers at Notre Dame Fighting Irish (8 p.m., Friday)
Indiana reader: Just as quarterback Kurtis Rourke can fit passes into tight windows when his throwing hand is healthy, the Hoosiers’ rise came in a tight window for coach culture. Their 11-1 regseason came while 89-year-old Lee Corso was sentient but after the death of despotic hoops coach Bob Knight in late 2023. Nope; not the least bit sorry for pointing that out.
Corso, who coached the football Hoosiers once, will live forever in fandom. He was the resident funny grandfather on ESPN College GameDay. Knight is an atavism from a time when there was this godding up of abusive coaches.
Knight was good copy in his heyday. Find the Frank Deford profile “The Rabbit Hunter” for the definitive character study. It was five years ahead of John Feinstein’s book A Season On The Brink.
Parks and Recreation was set in Indiana. The workplace sitcom never mentioned college football, but for grins, let’s imagine how the series’ characters would have chosen sides for this game:
Indiana: Leslie Knope, Ben Wyatt, Ann Perkins, Andy Dwyer, April Ludgate (but she bet the Notre Dame moneyline)
Notre Dame: Ron Swanson, Jerry Gergich, Coun. Jeremy Jamm, Tom Haverford (is dating a Notre Dame grad)
Selling knock-off merch for both teams: Jean-Ralphio Saperstein
Neutral: Chris Traeger
Notre Dame reader: Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist on Netflix underscores how high achievers, such as early-2010s Notre Dame defensive star Manti Te’o, can be so incredibly dim. Seriously. In the long view, it was just high-larious that Te’o never questioned the line of bull he was being fed, and how the Notre Dame publicity machine, which is threaded throughout mass media, ran with it.
The Irish are a needed nuisance. The fact that they have a 30-season drought of major bowl game victories can be read as a tacit confession that they understand their place in the sport’s elaborate media ecosystem. Get a place high up in the polls, foment fierce debate among the talking heads, and get torn apart in a postseason game. One suspects that, like Toronto Maple Leafs fans, much of the fanbase is in on the joke. They know they’re gonna lose, but they know the trade-off is eternal relevance.
Any heretic with a knowledge of history can respect their steadfast football independence. And Joe Montana played there! The Big Ten, a century ago, turned the Irish away due to anti-Catholic bigotry. Channeling a grudge into building something bigger, put some respect on that. But Rudy was offside and got nailed for financial crimes.
Also, the women’s basketball Fighting Irish are ranked No. 3 right now. They play with clear eyes and full hearts, with Hannah Hidaldo and Olivia Miles leading their four-out attack. A Canadian, Cassandre Prosper, is also their energy off the bench. One cannot hate all of that.
Awaiting the winner: 2-seed Georgia Bulldogs
Athens, Ga., the Bulldogs’ home base, bills as the classic city, a haven for myriads of poetic types. That whimsy has extended to their new low-minor pro hockey team, the Athens Rock Lobsters.
Will Leitch, the editor of the OG Deadspin, lives in Athens, and he has a newsletter, and a new novel. That seems like an easy place to start. You could also take an hour and listen to some REM and some B-52s. Both 1980s-’90s bands formed in the city.
There is probably much more. Georgia is the go-to filming location for anything grim and set outside of a major city. Looking for an excuse to begin an Ozark rewatch? It was filmed there.
11. SMU Mustangs vs. 6. Penn State Nittany Lions (12 noon, Saturday)
SMU reader
It’s deep, perhaps unlike the pass protection the Mustangs have given quarterback Kevin Jennings against better competition. Remember, SMU is Southern Millionaires University, and accordingly, there is benefaction and beneficence that has endowed programs in creative writing and the performing arts. Their alumni roll call of actors and authors is impressive. Lauren Graham from Gilmore Girls and Bad Santa went there! The school is in Dallas, and for all the awfulness that Texas creates — like your children’s school textbooks, Google it — it is a good-sized market for novels, films, and TV shows.
And, of course, there is plenty of contact relating to the shutdown that set SMU back for a good two to three decades. One book worth finding is The Pony Trap: Escaping the 1987 SMU Football Death Penalty by David Blewett (Abe Books, 2012). Blewett, a Dallas-area businessman, played defensive line for SMU during the seasons before the shutdown, and he further firms up what it was like to be a young athlete in that environment, and how much the NCAA enforcement reeked of a selective prosecution.
The death penalty saga was also covered in the ESPN 30-for-30 Pony Exce$$ (2010, directed by Thaddeus D. Mattula).
Penn State reader
If you prefer to stay presentist, Penn State is 1-18 against teams ranked in the top 5 under head coach James Franklin. As a content warning and trigger warning, please feel free to skip to the next section if discussions of sexual assault cause intrusive thoughts. Please practise self-care.
Outside of investigative journalism related to the 2011 sex abuse scandal, there is nothing else to entertain about Penn State, evermore.
For the long-memoried troubled by pretensions to morals and ethics, there will never be any getting over the sex abuse scandal. It does not matter it was 13 years ago. It does not matter that the predator is going to die in prison.
One can be a realist and understand how much Penn State football generates for the rich people’s boat money, locally in State College, Pa., and for ESPN shareholders. However, all one needs to go back to how monstrous it was is to read Charles P. Pierce’s column, “The Brutal Truth About Penn State.” In the current climate of media outlets being awfully acquiescent, it is amazing this is still up on ESPN.com. Pierce averred that powerful people who could have stopped the predator, including Joe Paterno, showed the “moral backbone of ribbon worms.” And it just gets more scathing.
The Penn State child-raping scandal is miles beyond anything that ever happened with the Ohio State football team over the past five years, miles beyond anything that happened with the SMU football team in the 1980s, and miles beyond anything that happened with the point-shaving scandals in college basketball. It is not a failure of our institutions so much as it is a window into what they have become — soulless, profit-driven monsters, Darwinian predators with precious little humanity left in them. Penn State is only the most recent example. Too much of this country is too big to fail. (ESPN.com, Nov. 14, 2011)
There have been other scandals since, of course. There is only so much space, but Penn State was out front in downplaying the horrific and fogging minds. Onward, shame.
Awaiting the winner: 3-seed Boise State Broncos
First off: Ty Benefield, the Canadian free safety for Boise State, is one of the most versatile pass defenders in all major college football. Any time one watches Boise State and they are on defence, the eye seeks out what space No. 20 is assigned to the Broncos will put the sophomore starter anywhere. The serious knowers of ball have pointed out that Benefield has a rare versatility as a hybrid defensive back.1
The state of Idaho has ginned up some literary tourism since Ernest Hemingway had a cabin in Ketchum, about 2½ hours away from Boise by highway. Napoleon Dynamite was set in Idaho, although it is better in the long run to let that remain in the moment of 2004 and ’05.
Sometime between the SMU-Penn State affray and Jan. 1, watch the video about Boise State’s “3 Plays That Shocked The World” in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl against Oklahoma. That triumph was the catalyst for the CFP.
12. Clemson Tigers vs. 5. Texas Longhorns (Saturday, 4 p.m.)
Clemson reader
Anything that Rob Huebel — “premier d-bag character actor of his generation” — acts in. That seems apt for Clemson.2
The list of Clemson people who have made it semi-halfway big in arts, entertainment, and media seems thin. Worry not, since avatars of early-2000s mediocrity — a member of Creed and an actor who had a recurring part on Friends — are represented. No hate; people work hard to make that content, and we miss Matthew Perry terribly.
Now, could Clemson coach Dabo Swinney be any more of a conjurer of the character Andy Griffith crafted for A Face In The Crowd? Clemson can ball out, beat the pants off a team, and then their coach sucks all the fun out of it by mentioning God a half-dozen times in a 90-second postgame interview. There is a force in the universe one has to try to get into touch with, but it is unlikely to be in the image Swinney imagines and it doesn’t care about ACC teams. Then again, maybe Bill Belichick joining that conference is a test of such faith.
Texas reader
Channeling the Between Two Ferns segment with Longhorns superfan Matthew McConaughey and Zach Galifanianakis, of all the national championships there are to win, how surprised is Texas that it has one title in football in the last five decades since full racial integration?
Next year will be the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby. Someone more talented will get a thesis out of explaining how the novel was allegorical for the past half-century of Texas football. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s passage that “they were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness,” might as well be a scouting report.
Texas could easily go independent in football à la the Fighting Irish. They have that kind of reach, and that much lack of competition for the live sports dollar in Austin, which is becoming a top-25 MSA.3 The lazy dead-arse way out, though, is to just ruin a conference.
Texas trashed the Southwest Conference (1915-1995) by snitching on every other school for paying players, as if they were not doing it too. Whether it should have been Baylor or TCU in the four-team group that joined the new Big 12 in 1996 is answered by pointing out TCU has finished in the top 10 of the season-end AP poll seven times since (one fewer than mighty Texas) and Baylor has done so just twice. And, of course, it wasn’t even 20 years before Texas threw the Big 12 into havoc, and now it stretches from Arizona to West Virginia to Orlando. By 2033, the Big 12 will have an official meth supplier.
Getting back to Texas. They had a chance to win the SEC on their first go-’round. Yet they could not get by Georgia even while Georgia was jogging in place. That is total Toronto Maple Leafs energy.
The Friday Night Lights TV adaptation was filmed in the Austin area. Did you notice that the producers put Dillon’s amorphous opponent in Texas burnt orange in the state championship games in seasons 3 and 5? That was not an accident.
Awaiting the winner: 4-seed Arizona State Sun Devils
Seek out any media that reminds you of what Pat Tillman stood for and the fog of war that claimed him at age 27. That never stops being infuriating.
Tillman played for the Jake Plummer-era Sun Devils in the mid-1990s. The team from that era has personified what one hopes to see from Arizona State. Basically, a team of under-ballyhooed and undersized recruits who make life miserable for the powerhouses.
Arizona State’s rushing-receiving dual threat Cam Skattebo gives off some of that lost renegade spirit. So there is that.
9. Tennessee Volunteers vs. 8. Ohio State (Saturday, 4 p.m.)
Tennessee reader
Let’s confine this to a couple of college basketball memoirs. One is the life story by a badass woman who built an empire from scratch. One is by a white man who milked being a benchwarmer into notoriety and a platform. If that ain’t an illustration of how the patriarchy is still here, then what is?
The late great Volunteers basketball coach Pat Summitt (1952-2016) has a superb autobiography entitled Sum It Up: A Thousand and Ninety-Eight Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective (Crown, 2014, with Sally Jenkins). It just beat the buzzer, coming out only a year or two before Summitt’s dementia diagnosis.
Ohio State reader
The other book is Mark Titus’ Don’t Put Me In, Coach: My Incredible NCAA Journey from the End of the Bench to the End of the Bench (Anchor, 2013). That is right. A dude who scored nine points in four seasons of high-major D1 ball had a book deal before Pat Summitt.
Now, Don’t Put Me In, Coach is a laugh riot and even though everything that happens in it is associated with Ohio State, you can read it without fear of being pepper-sprayed. One quibble is that humour in a jocular vein should probably go straight to glossy paperback. We have a crisis largely since people do not read books. Physical books are heavy and cumbersome. More titles should be released in a 6-by-9-inch paperback, so they can be read during lunch and coffee breaks.
Awaiting the winner: 1-seed Oregon Ducks
Crois-moi, this came up organically. Need a read that touches on the human cost of all this conference re-alignment that was set in motion by the chase of media-rights money? West Coast teams such as Oregon jumping to the midwest-based Big Ten is wreaking havoc on athletes’ sleep hygiene, which has knock-on effects on mental health, not that anyone bothered to consider that.
So, then, curl up with The Price She Pays: Confronting the Hidden Mental Health Crisis in Women's Sports ― from the Schoolyard to the Stadium (Little, Brown and Spark, June 2024). Co-primary authors Dr. Tiffany Brown and Katie Steele each have U of Oregon ties, and they were on SportsLit this summer.
If that is not your jam at the moment, well, read anything about the rise of Nike, since founder Phil Knight was an Oregon competitive runner.
The energy of Donald Sutherland returned to the earth in 2024, and the Maritimer-Quebecer actor’s oeuvre included two films set or shot at Oregon. One is National Lampoon’s Animal House. The other is the Steve Prefontaine biopic Without Limits (1998), where he played opposite Billy Crudup. The film came out not that long before the latter was in Almost Famous.
Happy consuming. That is what we were put here to do.
Friendly reminder
My marginalia on other topics are posted in Notes. Hopefully, this is enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.
Dec. 18-19, 2024
Hamilton, Ont. : on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.
Versatility was also a hallmark of Benefield’s father. Daved Benefield was an end-linebacker defender and multi-time CFL all-star, who also played in the NFL with the 49ers.
Various, “The 33 best TV episodes of 2022,” Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 9, 2022.