I sat down at noon Saturday with a sandwich and a notepad, the way a man does when he’s been told there are three College Football Playoff games on the same day and somebody’s expecting a column out of him by Sunday. The opening kickoff was scheduled for 12:00 sharp. I saw a football at 12:34. In between, I watched a flyover, a coin-toss ceremony involving four people I could not identify, a ‘hype film’ narrated by an actor whose voice I associate with car insurance, and a corporate partner being thanked twice before anyone in pads jogged onto the field.
This is the 12-team playoff we asked for. I want to be clear about that. Somebody asked. It might have been a committee. It was not me.
The format is that the top four seeds get a bye and everybody else plays first-round games at the home stadium of the higher seed, which sounds charming until you realize the home stadium has been rented out, sponsored over, and rebranded for the occasion by a credit-card company, a sports book, and a streaming service that exists primarily to advertise itself during games on other streaming services. By the second commercial break I had been pitched a parlay, a pickup truck, a heated mattress topper, and the next round of the same playoff I was currently trying to watch.
Coach DiMaggio used to say the only halftime show worth watching was the one where the band played and went home. He coached me in 1974, when halftime was twelve minutes long and consisted entirely of a man with a clipboard yelling at a defensive end. Saturday’s first game had a halftime that ran twenty-four minutes by my watch, featured a ‘special performance’ by a country singer I have never heard of, and ended with confetti cannons that fired during a dead ball in the third quarter because someone forgot to unplug them. Coach is dead. I don’t know whether that’s a mercy or a missed opportunity.
The football itself was fine. That’s the part nobody wants to admit. Underneath the eleven hours of branded scaffolding, there were actual eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old men playing a hard sport extremely well. One quarterback in the second window — I will not name him because he’ll be at a different school by February — threw a corner route into a four-inch window in a snow squall and I watched it three times. That was a beautiful thing. It lasted six seconds. Then we went to a sideline reporter who asked the head coach what his team needed to do in the second half, and the head coach said ‘execute,’ and we cut to an ad for a different network’s pregame show.
Ray Kowalczyk called me during the third game. Ray was a guard at Bucknell in ’68 and now mostly calls me to complain about pickleball. He wanted to know why the kicker in the night game was wearing a single black glove. I told him I didn’t know. He said in his day, gloves were for the wide receivers and only because their hands were cold. I said in his day kickers were Romanian. He said that was a good point and hung up. This is what passes for sports analysis between men our age now.
The third game went to overtime, which used to be a reward and is now a scheduling problem. By the time it ended I had seen the same insurance commercial eleven times, watched a coach get a Gatorade bath that the broadcast cut to in slow motion from three angles, and listened to a former player in a studio explain that the losing team ‘just wanted it more, but the other team wanted it more-er.’ I wrote that down. I’m not making it up.
There’s a kid down at the Y named Petey Corrigan, late twenties, plays in a Sunday flag-football league and watches every snap of every game like it’s going to be on a test. I asked him Monday what he thought of Saturday. He said it was ‘a lot.’ I asked what that meant. He said he loved it. He said he watched all three games on his phone and his TV at the same time and posted thirty-one times about it. He said it was the best Saturday of the year. I believed him.
I think that’s the column. The kids are fine. The sport is fine. It’s the eleven hours around the sport that have gotten away from us. Denise is bringing chili tonight. She says it’s a recipe she got from a podcast about football.