Diane RobertsHard rain falling here in the land where college football is the élan vital.
First, the very large, very detailed, story in the New York Times: seems the Tallahassee police habitually cut Seminole football players some slack — a lot of slack — when they vandalize property, steal, and assault women.
Fox Sports News had its own 16-ton anvil to drop: the university may have impeded the investigation into whether Jameis Winston, our Heisman-winning quarterback, raped a young woman back in December 2012. FSU may have given documents to Winston’s lawyer before the state attorney ever saw them.
A website called racingtoaredlight.com, reports that Winston may also have illicitly signed memorabilia now for sale on eBay and elsewhere. This is the same alleged infraction that has got University of Georgia star Todd Gurley suspended indefinitely from the Bulldogs. He was a top Heisman candidate; this could wreck his chances.
In the weird kingdom of the NCAA, it’s OK if other people profit handsomely from selling a player’s image, his jersey, his name. The player himself must not sully the immaculate game with grubby money.
So how do the fans react in Tallahassee and Athens and every other college town sensing they are living in the last decadent days of college football? We say it’s old news. It’s jealousy: our football team’s in the top five! It’s no big deal: the same stuff happens at all the big-time programs.
Or it’s a conspiracy. Seminoles, for example, muttered darkly about the timing of these new claims, right before the Notre Dame game, the most important game of the year. Dawg fans yelped that the guy who told on Gurley is a Gator.
The fault can’t possibly lie in our worship of football, the way we profit from football, the way we insist football is vitally important –more important than education.
I say “we” because I’ve been going to FSU games since I was 9 years old. I live in Tallahassee. I’m implicated in the mess we’ve all made. The whole town, the whole college football world, is implicated. Donors give more to a school with a top-ranked team. The local economy rakes in between $7 million and $10 million per home-game weekend. Off-duty Tallahassee cops earn $40 or $45 an hour for directing game traffic.
Around here we need and love FSU football so much that the local newspaper, the Tallahassee Democrat, barely acknowledges that the Seminoles are stumbling around lost in a swamp of scandal.
College football intoxicates – seduces –perfectly rational people who, in our saner moments, know that investing our emotional well-being in a bunch of barely post-adolescent boys beating holy hell out of each other on a 100-yard field is not intelligent. Or healthy. The game makes barely-literate 19-year-old boys into heroes and fosters in them a nasty sense of entitlement. The game is brutish. And beautiful.
This is the heart of the crisis. Those of you who despise the game for its misogyny, its multi-millionaire coaches, its violence, the outrages upon the brain which can lead to early dementia and other horrors, the way it reduces an entire university with internationally eminent labs and libraries, scholars and thinkers, to the number assigned to its most prominent sports team in national rankings, are completely correct. There’s no defending college football.
And yet…
Did you see those students at the University of Mississippi flooding onto the field last week, tearing down their own goal posts and parading them through the streets of Oxford in paroxysms of happiness because they’d finally, finally, beaten No. 1 Alabama? Silly, sure. It wasn’t a cure for cancer. It wasn’t peace in the Middle East. But it was joy and it was real.
A week later, Florida A&M finally, finally won a game. FAMU, Tallahassee’s “other” university, the one with a dozen Black College National Championships–probably more titles than FSU will ever win–had struggled all season. When the Rattlers beat the Savannah State Tigers, the community let out a long-held, painful breath. The Marching 100 played “Old-Time Religion,” and the even the moon seemed brighter.
But joy isn’t enough to sustain the game. The corrupt and retrograde NCAA shrugs at sexual violence and academic dysfunction. The “whiff of the plantation” detected by Taylor Branch, has become an ineradicable stench. Players make millions for their universities yet get slammed for selling a signed jersey, while the university, enabled by the NCAA, celebrates the Victorian fantasy of the “Student Athlete.”
The rot has set in. How long before the sham castle falls, breaking all our hearts?
Diane Roberts teaches at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
