I was born and raised in the South, specifically that most southern of States, Mississippi, which means I grew up longing for Saturdays in the Fall when my Ole Miss Rebels took to the gridiron to battle the likes of Alabama, Auburn, and LSU.  The idea is bandied around so much it has become a cliché, but it is nevertheless true:  In the South, college football is religion, and Saturday is a holy day.  Nothing, and I mean nothing, fills me with more fervor than watching my Rebels play, and if we happen to win (which, if you know anything about Ole Miss, is never a certainty), you better believe I’ll be celebrating that victory with a holy communion of ice-cold beer and some kind of barbecued animal. 

Where’s the hypocrisy in that, you ask?  I’d refer you to a book that changed my views about college football, (but did nothing to change my fervor) Murray Sperber’s Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Has Crippled Undergraduate Education.  A must read for any fan of the sport, Sperber demolishes the idea of amateurism in college football, shows how the billions upon billions of dollars not only gives us a completely corrupt game in which under-the-table deals are the norm, but also how those huge million-dollar coaches salaries and athletic budgets actually drain resources away from the college’s primary mission to educate and disseminate knowledge.  College football is big business, yet the players, the very people on whose backs the entire enterprise is carried, are forbidden from earning one dime.  He completely demolishes the idea of the “student-athlete”, and makes a compelling case that big-time college football is nothing more than a farm system for the NFL.  And, let’s not let pass the racial disparities, how blacks make up the bulk of those players and very few of the coaches, and what you have is a form of particularly disgusting modern-day slavery. 

Add to that, as an instructor at a college that fields a football team, I’m continually frustrated by how much respect is afforded to the sport while academics always seems to get short shrift.  I’m continually frustrated by football players who turn in work they clearly didn’t do.  I’m continually frustrated by the sense of privilege and entitlement, the different set of academic standards applied to “student-athletes.”  I believe in education, in learning and pedagogy, and I think that, in a non-twilight-zone sort of world, college football would be nothing more than an insignificant diversion.  It would be treated as a game.  Education is what matters, what elevates people from poverty and gives them opportunities, not football. 

You see, I know all of this.  I know the sport is corrupt.  I know the players are being paid under the table.  I know that the sport is hurting education.  I know that most of those players are being passed along so they can play, and that in the end, the educations they receive are terrible jokes.  I know all of that. 

Yet, come Saturday in the fall, you can find me in one of two places:  At Vaught-Hemingway stadium on the campus of the University of Mississippi, or parked in front of my television, in either context, cheering my guts out.  I buy, hook-line-and-sinker, the magic, the pageantry, the sense of belonging, of knowing who I am.  The sport may be corrupt and morally indefensible, but on Saturday, I stop trying to change the world and I become a rabid fan of the Ole Miss Rebels.