Northwestern might find the big time has its risks
Northwestern will relearn a lesson this weekend: Nothing can dumb down a distinguished American university like big-time college football can.
One risk of this sport is that all of a sudden the campus begins crawling with athlete-students instead of student-athletes. As far as we know this hasn’t happened at Northwestern yet.
Another risk is TV will move a game traditionally played on a glorious autumn Saturday afternoon to a gloomy Saturday night. Yes, like this weekend’s Ohio State game at Northwestern.
Another risk is that in matchups of good vs. evil like Pat Fitzgerald vs. Urban Meyer, evil is likely to prevail. The best example is the SEC winning the national championship every year.
But the two biggest risks of big-time college football will come into play for Ohio State-Northwestern.
The first is that ESPN is bringing its “College GameDay” show to Evanston; the second is that NU fans will begin behaving like, well, like big-time college football fans.
College football media coverage was knuckleheaded enough when only a few dozen knuckleheaded sports writers like me chronicled the sport.
Times have changed, and to paraphrase a famous newspaper columnist, “We used to be a journalists and now we’re just clowns.” Multiply that by ESPN’s channel number on your cable system, put a mascot’s head on venerable football analyst Lee Corso, and you have “College GameDay.”
Helping the program attract large audiences of football fans on TV is the large audience of football fans who show up on location. They pump their fists, snarl their game faces, hoist scribbled signs, scream at nobody in particular, and generally mug for cameras so relatives in Wyoming can cringe.
This is all right — and maybe even can be categorized as good, clean, fun entertainment — because that’s what college students do on weekends to expend the energy stored up from sleeping through weekday classes.
The problem is that many of the fans acting out are adults, perhaps college graduates who went on to become doctors, lawyers and unemployed art instructors.
College football — and college basketball, for that matter — has a way of turning the academically intelligent into the obnoxiously ignorant.
Who am I to make such flagrant observations? Nobody, really, except somebody who has lapsed into such embarrassing behavior.
Trust me, there’s no living down returning to Champaign to cover an Illinois football game, having a few beers the night before, standing on a chair in the middle of a crowded restaurant bar and playing the Illini fight song on a kazoo.
Pretty professional, huh? Hey, give me a little credit. At least I didn’t moon the table in the corner where a couple wearing Michigan colors was sitting. I don’t think I did anyway … but thank goodness there weren’t cellphone cameras back then to let me know for sure.
(My excuse for being an idiot is I attended public schools all my life. What excuse will Northwestern alums have?)
Anyway, here NU is, back in the big time, which these days is confirmed by “College GameDay” returning to campus for the first time in nearly two decades.
For a day, Northwestern will go from being a distinguished university to a theater of the absurd. Faces will be painted, homecoming floats decorated and wagers made on “my college is better at football than your college ever was.”
As fans act out the roles of cartoon characters, however, they should be aware that the biggest risk of big-time college football these days is cameras recording everybody’s every move.