Lee Corso helps us close a long, fun chapter

The opening weekend of college football gave us a rare and spectacular finale. Coach Lee Corso wrapped up his 33^rd football season with ESPN on the opening weekend.  Corso not only correctly donned (THE) Ohio State mascot’s headgear for his final Gameday pick, but went six for six on his weekend picks.

He wasn’t always a revered personality.  ESPN was still somewhat of a fledgling concept back in the fall of 1987 when he made his first appearance on the Gameday program as an analyst and I began my freshman year at the University of Georgia.  

A lot has changed since then, including the public’s adoration of a former coach with a bit of an “in your face” approach to sports pontification.  He understood early on that to capture eyeballs and attention, you needed to be either loved or hated but you could not be ignored.  ESPN would not, and can not, be ignored. 

My dad signed up for cable television that year. Younger folks now know cable as something us old folks had. There was a time when you could live a perfectly normal life with three (then four) networks, a couple of independent UHF stations, and a big ugly antenna bolted to the side of your chimney.  ESPN changed that.

When Dad was asked why he finally succumbed to paying for something that had been free, he didn’t mince words.  “If my football games are going to be there, then I’m going to have it.”

And so an entire arc of sports and media has played out before us, with TV changing and the game changing with it. Corso didn’t start his headgear bit for another decade after he began with the network. Gameday eventually became a staple live event. 

It was a fun ride. Money poured in. Everyone made a bit off of it except the players. Stadiums expanded, luxury suites were built. There were campus battles over locker room luxuries and other athletic facilities.  

A few traditions had to go by the wayside to accommodate this “growth”.  Thursday night football is now a thing. You don’t always know on Sunday when your team will kick off next Saturday.  

Geography also has become fake news. I never would have considered Oklahoma and Missouri to be in the Southeast, but some other folks think Berkley and Stanford are on the Atlantic Coast.  That’s okay, at least those guys can count to (Big) ten.

Now so much money has poured into the sport that is became obvious and obscene that tens of billions of dollars were changing hands over the work that college athletes were doing in exchange for a free education. The donors that are already paying thousands for “cheap” seats and millions for sky boxes have been asked to contribute even more so that they can pay high school recruits for use of their name, image, and likeness – often only to see the kids enroll at another school.

That’s ok, though, because it might create goodwill at the end of each season when that same kid enters the transfer portal in search of a better deal.  They can repeat this over and over now, as some of these “kids” are near 30 before they move on to whatever is next.

Not every school will be able to afford this monetary arms race. Luckily for them, a group of the same folks that have made money off of the expansion of technology and streaming entertainment are here with a solution. 

Private equity firms are now pitching ownership of supposedly amateur college athletics departments. Some are suggesting they officially separate from their universities outright, and pay for the mascot and affiliations with licensing deals. I am not looking forward to a world where the Blackstone Bulldogs play the Thoma Bravo Tigers in the NVIDIA national championship. 

A couple of years ago with these events already fully in motion, I wrote a piece about this time of year encouraging readers to enjoy the last season of college football as we know it.  I recall afterward having an online conversation with a friend summarizing the state of the game with the fable about my father’s ax.  

If I inherit my father’s ax, and one day I change its handle, and later I have to change the blade, do I still have my father’s ax?  It looks the same. It mostly does the same thing. But is it still the same ax?

The truth is, as the clips from Lee Corso’s retirement remind us, that the game has been bending this direction for a long time.  My dad’s last practice in Athens was with a leather cap.  Clearly, this isn’t his game anymore.

The changes are now speeding up. Change is like that. So is our fight with nostalgia.

I don’t know where this game is headed. I do know that what us older folks knew of it, and what made it special to us, is a diminishing asset.

Like with most changes, we’ve had our day. We have our nostalgia. 

Tomorrow is for the young. Hopefully they’ll appreciate what they have, before a new combination of money and youth change it all for them, too.