Heresy

The following is Part One of a three-part series by guest contributor Pat Downes.

I’m about to make an outrageous claim:

College football is superior to pro football.

I know my timing is a bit odd. I’m blasting this heretical opinion on the eve on pro football’s highest of holy days, seemingly dissing America’s most popular sport as it continues on its relentless ascent to unprecedented levels of popularity.

And I’m making this claim on the heels of a college football season that began with a rash of agent-driven rule-breaking, saw the deaths of players and student managers at Mississippi State and Notre Dame, and ended with the Heisman and national championship trophies being awarded to an essentially professional team financed by a comically corrupt cadre of crackers.

But even now, with the NFL at its zenith, and college football arguably at low ebb, I’m making this claim: college football is superior to pro football.

I’ve got nothing against pro football. I love the game, watch it regularly, and, like all other right-thinking, patriotic Americans, will be rooting heartily against the Packers on Sunday. And I’m not suffering from any delusions about the relative levels of play. The typical NFL athlete – at any position – is a rare physical and mental specimen in peak condition, and every game is an intricately choreographed wonder. College athletes, on the other hand, are teenagers. Athletically, their skills vary, and ideally (outside of the SEC) they’re part-timers. Moreover, some programs have substantial financial resources and an institutional commitment to the game, and some don’t. You’re simply not going to get the consistently refined product at the college level that you get in the NFL. (There’s also an element of corruption in the college game that threatens the whole enterprise – a subject for another day).

But college football has vast reserves of three things that the NFL lacks: history, variety, and passion.

I’ll deal with the first one today, and tackle the other two in separate posts next week and the week after.

History

College teams were selling out the country’s most important stadiums, inspiring Pulitzer-worthy literature and uniting millions of Americans when the professional game consisted of a handful of dubious characters bumbling their way around near-deserted cow pastures. (I exaggerate only a little).

In the first half of the 20th century, there were four American sports that mattered: baseball, horse racing, boxing and college football. Along with baseball, college football was the most popular. Along with baseball (e.g., Jackie Robinson) and boxing (e.g., Joe Louis), college football had the most significant impact on the culture at large.

The first football game ever played was a college game. It was played just a few short years after the Civil War, on College Field, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Rutgers beat Princeton, 6-4. The eastern teams, especially the Ivy League, dominated in the early decades. The game moved west as the 19th century progressed and blossomed in popularity.

A squad from the University of Michigan taught the game to a team from a Catholic school in South Bend, Indiana in 1887 and, in short order, the latter team became so powerful, regularly taking on and beating the WASP-dominated teams of the elite eastern schools, that it formed a rallying point for millions of urban ethnic immigrants (and their children) and became a meaningful part of the story of those immigrants’ assimilation into the American culture.

In every part of the country, even in places where the population was relatively sparse, college football programs developed a following beyond their alumni base and formed a focal point for the development of a regional identity. For many people in many parts of the country, for at least a century, college football was the game.

That history matters today because it stays with us. It forms a thread in the narrative of today’s games and connects our experience with our parents’ experience and their parents’ experience. Pro football may, in some ways, connect us with our fathers, but college football connects us with ancestors we never even knew.

When Alabama plays Auburn next year, the game won’t just be about the matchup of two elite modern-day squads, it’ll be about Auburn’s inaugural victory in 1893, and about Alabama coach Doc Pollard infuriating Auburn coach Mike Donahue with his elaborate formations and shifts back in ’06 and ’07. It’ll be about Joe Namath’s furious comeback in ’64. It’ll be about ’71’s titanic battle of undefeated programs, or ’72’s “Punt Bama Punt” classic. Those stories are as much a part of the game as Saban or Fairley or Newton or Chizik.

In the NFL there are a few games like that, but they’re largely of more recent vintage and they’re rarely incorporated into the narrative of this year’s game. The 1958 Championship Game between the Colts and the Giants is one of those games. They called it The Greatest Game Ever Played. Your father may even recall watching it on TV when he was a little boy. But when the Colts play the Giants these days, you probably won’t hear very much about it – the tabloids will be too focused on whether the Manning brothers exchanged text messages that week.

Terence Mann’s soliloquy from Field of Dreams is one of the great passages in film history: “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.” This sentiment applies with nearly equal force to college football. Does it apply to pro football? Eh, maybe... get back to me in a century or so and we’ll see.

Check back in next week for Part Two of Pat's "Heresy" series, "Variety."