The Small Victories of the College Football Season
The Coastal Carolina Chanticleers may have been virtually disqualified from the college football playoff before the season began, but that doesn't mean their season doesn't have meaning.
This year in college football has both been horrific and majestic to behold. The former is laid bare as a microcosm of how the rest of the country has been dealing with the present circumstances. Games have been cancelled left and right, and teams are barely filling up eligibility requirements to compete for their conference championships, as if a conference championship is something that is worth playing for when scores of unpaid laborers risk their health for the amusement of millions and enrichment of thousands. I guess Ohio State just needs the revenue it will stand to earn from embarrassing Michigan and then playing Northwestern in the Big Ten Championship Game. College football really is sleazy at times.
It can also be beautiful, as seen this year with the way things have unfolded. Iowa State clinching a berth in the Big XII Championship game and Indiana emerging as a real, honest-to-God contending team have both been quirky developments that make following this monolithic sport worth following. They don’t happen often. The last time a season as weird as this one happened was in 2007, when Missouri was ranked number one headed into conference championship weekend, Kansas was ranked as high as number two, and teams that ended up ranked number two at some point, including South Florida, lost seemingly every weekend. For as weird as the teams that gained prominence that year were, nothing really matches teams scheduling games on the fly thanks to cancellations from COVID-19 precaution.
Perhaps the weirdest game but most satisfying and interesting game of the bunch took place this past Saturday as the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers took on the Brigham Young University Cougars in a game that wasn’t on the schedule until mere days before kickoff. See, Coastal Carolina was supposed to play Liberty University, but the far-right safety school was afflicted with COVID-19 enough that they saw it prudent not to play the game. BYU, not affiliated with any conference in football, had spaces to fill in their schedule anyway, and they spent an entire year looking for teams to play them, pickup sandlot football style. There were talks of them playing Washington when the Apple Cup game the latter plays every year against in-state rival Washington State had to be postponed, but they never materialized. This cross-country trek for the Cougars, however, came together without a hitch.
The game felt like a fever dream, two at-that-time undefeated titans of the cruiserweight class of college football, coming together to play just because both teams were healthy enough to do it and because they wanted to. It was unheard of, especially in an age where teams make a big deal to show off their big-name out-of-conference tilts years in advance, when no one knows who the powers will actually be. The contest itself lived up to the billing, a chippy and competitive affair featuring a near-brawl that erupted when two Chanticleers defenders more than gleefully blocked BYU quarterback Zach Wilson after he threw an interception, driving him (legally) to the turf. Coastal Carolina played the bully well enough to eke out a 22-17 win, another touchstone in an improbable season where people are talking about them as fringe playoff contenders. Obviously, they have to beat Troy State and Louisiana-Lafayette to close out the undefeated frame, and no game is guaranteed no matter who you are and what team you play. But the Chanticleers have a good shot at finishing this year without a blemish and thus having a nominal claim to being included with the rest of the contenders to win it all.
The wrinkle is that no matter how many people talk about Coastal as an outside playoff contender, everyone knows they’re not getting into a situation where they could claim supremacy over any number of the big boys of realm. Central Florida couldn’t. Boise State couldn’t. Texas Christian and Utah couldn’t, at least before they were able to join major conferences. The game is rigged, and it always has been. The great lie of college football is that the regular season matters here unlike in all these other sports and subdivisions, where a season’s worth of work can be flushed down the drain because of a Johnny-come-lately that got hot at the right time. Never mind that traditionally strong teams often get the benefit of the doubt when they lose compared to even the ne’er-do-wells in major conferences, or that late season losses are often punished much differently than early season losses are. There’s no objectivity in how a season is judged compared to the supposed arbitrary nature of a postseason tournament, but that doesn’t stop purists from claiming it does.
You could argue then that BYU/Coastal, by design, did not mean anything, but that’s reductionism of the worst kind. The argument takes the blood, sweat, and tears of nearly 200 student-athletes who play in front of cameras for adulation and an audition to make real money in the National Football League and shuttles it into a wastebasket because they’re disqualified from taking part in a painfully exclusive tournament before they take their first snap of a given season. The real tragedy is that these young men don’t get paid for their efforts; don’t get it twisted. However, that tragedy applies to everyone, from the best player on the presumptive National Champion, which this year tracks as either Ohio State, Alabama, or possibly Notre Dame, down to the deepest bench player on the lowest rung of the sport, at least theoretically. I don’t know what kinds of payments go on behind the scenes, and quite frankly, I don’t want to know, not because I’m a fan of bullshit amateurism, but because I don’t want my testimony to be used against these young men who are just getting some form of money for their hard work.
If the players can’t get paid, and if they aren’t savvy enough yet to realize that they could tomorrow unionize and cripple the entire infrastructure of the NCAA, then the consolation is that their work should mean something, even if that something isn’t in the least bit tangible. The Cougars and Chanticleers agreed to play in a game on less than a week’s notice, a game that for a week held the imagination of the entire college football world. They were center-stage, and maybe it’s the wrestling fan in me that is able to look at a competition and respect how good the actual back and forth action can be regardless of outcome, but they delivered on that promise. The play wasn’t sloppy. Chippy, yes, but not sloppy. They acquitted themselves well, and people are going to remember this game for more than being a COVID-19 season anomaly.
College football has never had wide-sweeping probability for championship glory even in the “mythical” days before the BCS and the playoff. For 100 or so teams, the endgame is lesser than the whole bag of Tostitos, and so the players and their fans and alumni always need to settle on other goals to gauge success for their seasons. Those goals can be generic like winning ten games, making a New Year’s Day bowl, or having a positional award finalist on their team. Those goals can be specific like South Carolina needing to beat Clemson (the inverse isn’t true anymore now that Clemson is one of the “big boys”) or Oklahoma having yet another quarterback get the Heisman Trophy finalist invite. While it doesn’t change the fact that it’s patently unfair that a team can win all the games put in front of it and still be shut out of the process to crown an ultimate winner in their nominal subset of teams, Coastal Carolina can still hang its hat that they were able to successfully hit on the equivalent of a “you up?” text and win a game that outshone even the marquee SEC matchup of the weekend. Granted, LSU taking a nosedive this year and shitting the bed against Alabama was expected, and those circumstances cost that game a lot of luster. Still, one would think that another Power 5 game might take the cake for the weekend. It didn’t. No matter what, I’m not sure you can take that feat away from the Chanticleers, no matter how the rest of their season plays out.