Three Reasons College Football is Simply the Best

I joined Twitter in March 2011, right as Major League Baseball was getting started, and largely because of this (at least this is my theory), I immediately became accustomed to tweeting a lot about baseball.  And thus a lot of my followers are primarily baseball fans.  And baseball is fine.  So is the NBA.  So is the NFL.  And so on.  But college football is, quite simply, the best.

A lot of people don't really give a shit about college football, but ever since I was eight years old, it has fascinated me.  The stereotypical (white) sports fan loses his mind over college basketball, which I like, but in the end, if given the choice between watching the national championship game or a NBA Finals Game 7, there's no dispute.  Even in the regular season, if my choice is watch Indiana/North Carolina or watch Lakers/Heat, I'm choosing the latter.  But college football is different--when Alabama plays at LSU next week, you could not in a million years pull me away from my television.  And here's a short list of the reasons why college football is the best.

1. Every game matters: In the NFL, you can lose six out of sixteen games and still have a reasonably good shot of winning the Super Bowl.  In baseball, the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals lost SEVENTY-EIGHT games and won the World Series--it is indisputable that one single regular season game isn't going to make or break you unless you've played with a mediocre streak for 150 some-odd games before that.  College football is different.  There has been one national champion, in the history of national champions, who had multiple losses.  Until last year's Alabama team, no team had lost its conference and won the national title.  Ever.  The individual game matters.  In 2005, Texas and Ohio State were both considered national title contenders and in the first half of September, they played a regular season game.  In college hoops, this happens all the time with tournaments, but unless a major conference team loses another twelve games, it won't dramatically hurt their overall success.  When Vince Young finished dissecting the TOSU defense, it was a dramatic blow to the Buckeyes.  In one game.  In September.  It's physically impossible to get that worked up about an NFL game.

2. Eclectic styles of play: In the end, basically every NFL team has the same style of play.  Some run marginally more or whatever, but have you ever seen an NFL team that effectively abandoned the run or the pass (in the last fifty years)?  There's an ideal strategy to offensive success in football (balanced run and pass, play-action to keep defense off-balance, etc), and since all the NFL teams essentially have equal access to build around that strategy, they do.  College football is different, though--it's like Moneyball.  Teams look for a differentiated factor, recruit guys who fit that mold, and they often achieve success.  Look, for instance, at Navy, a football program that doesn't recruit.  The offense they run is a throwback, a triple-option attack reminiscent of Nebraska's attack from the 80s and 90s.  Nebraska would recruit guys to run a style which didn't generally sell them to the NFL because the team would win, but then when the team began to falter, they opted for a more pro-style attack.  And on the opposite end of the spectrum, Texas Tech, Hawaii, and several other schools effectively abandoned the run and just throw it constantly.  But it allows things like Michael Crabtree going to Texas Tech happening--you play a certain style and then players at those key positions gravitate towards the school.  It's a never-ending process.  It's not a matter of watching a bunch of clones of each other.  The divide isn't what it once was--I envy people who grew up watching in the 70s who got to see USC airing it out, Oklahoma running the wishbone, and both teams achieving success by doing whatever they did well.  But it's still unlike any other sport.  It's like watching a team from the Dead Ball Era play against a modern swing-for-the-fences baseball team--it's about execution more than scheming.

3. Different Goals: In some ways, this is the benefit of the bowl system.  If you're an NFL team, whether you root for the Steelers or the Browns, you essentially have the same goal--win the Super Bowl.  If you're a Browns exec who sets his sights on an 8-8 record, you get run out of town.  Even in college basketball, the coach of Rider will always have some pressure to win it all, because he can.  But in college football, more than any other sport, realism prevails.  For instance, my good team of choice growing up was the Miami Hurricanes.  With Miami, especially back in the early 2000s, you expected to win a national title every year. Winning the Big East was a formality.  My earnest favorite team was Missouri--bowl eligibility was considered an amazing fear during the Kirk Farmer era.  And then, when Brad Smith and Chase Daniel happened, they upped the ante.  And in 2007, when the #1 ranked Missouri Tigers lost to Oklahoma in the Big 12 championship and were relegated out of the national championship picture, while many bandwagoners bemoaned it, all I could think was "Holy fucking shit, MIZZOU was the #1 team in the country."  It had to be the equivalent of being a German kid who saw the Beatles play in Hamburg and seeing them become the biggest musical act in the world.  And then in college, I went to Truman State, which quite frankly blows at football.  And Division II at that.  So when Truman got off to a hot start this year, it was exciting.  It was thrilling.  Getting excited about the first few games in most sports is unacceptable, but in college football, it's the name of the game.

The Best and Worst of Parody Accounts

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Similarly, parody can be the most loving form of it.  Things are not worth parodying unless there is some sort of love there.  There’s a line between vitriol and sharp satire.  Look at This Is Spinal Tap.  At times, it’s a brutal and relentless lambasting of heavy metal and music culture but it’s also done with affection.  There’s a reason the songs of the movie became minor heavy metal classics in their own right—there is little doubt that deep down, the men behind the movie enjoy heavy metal (though obviously a part of them, possibly a larger part, finds it idiotic).

This Is Spinal Tap is the zenith of brilliant parody.  Twitter is the low point.

Now, there is such a thing as a good parody account.  The ideal parody account will take an existing person or entity, identify a few major characteristics, and exaggerate those characteristics for effect.  One of the best parody accounts for me is @FakeDanMcLaughl.  For those of you who are not St. Louis Cardinals fans, this is a parody of Dan McLaughlin, an announcer most easily identified by being an enormous homer (not only for the baseball team he covers, but for St. Louis fans and everything about St. Louis culture) and having two DUIs.  Now, an actual Dan McLaughlin Twitter account (there isn’t one) would likely be fairly boring—generally professional observations about the Cardinals or about his life and family.  But Fake Dan prospers by defining a few characteristics and running with them.  He ridicules Dan’s upward-trending speech patterns by using phraseology such as “of carse” and “gaddammit”.  He unleashes tweet frenzies during Cardinals games in which he writes in all capitals letters with excitement about how great the beloved “Cairdnals” are.  He tweets about his love of Mic Ultras.  We don’t even know that the real Dan McLaughlin likes Michelob Ultra, but it doesn’t matter, because Fake Dan became an entity unto himself.  The comedy is relentless, lacking anything resembling subtlety, but that’s not the point.  The point is humor, which Fake Dan accomplishes (for me, and it seems most people who like the Cardinals).

The next class of acceptable parodies include two of my favorites, two accounts I retweet an absurd amount because I find their niche to be brilliant—Old Hoss Radbourn and Tripping Olney.  Old Hoss (@OldHossRadbourn) works defiantly because the real man has been dead since before Babe Ruth was born.  We don’t know what Old Hoss would tweet like it.  All we really know about Old Hoss is that he won 59 games in 1884.  Theoretically, Old Hoss, whose tweets are old-timey observations about contemporary baseball (thinking something along the lines of “Bah! In my day D. Johnson wouldn’t shut down S. Strasburg unless he had conquered 50 wins or 50 harlots.”), could be any pre-World Series baseball player.  It could have been Pud Galvin and likely wouldn’t have skipped a beat.  But the combo of the nickname, being the most old-timey looking person in history, and always being able to reference the most statistically insane season in the history of baseball makes Old Hoss Radbourn work.  Tripping Olney is also, to put it lightly, a very loose parody of somebody, but this time it’s somebody we know (hell, it’s somebody who has Twitter and use to actually follow @TrippingOlney).  But he creates a distinctive personality.  Unlike, say, Faux John Madden, which is more or less a regurgitation of fairly obvious sports jokes (while maintaining absolutely no connection to the actual John Madden—too few references to the Madden Cruiser and too many references to Kim Kardashian’s appetite for black men), Tripping Olney has a style.  Besides all caps, he has a series of hashtags that I (and others) have co-opted.  Tweets like (and these are just imitations of his style) “DANIEL DESCALSO GRAND SLAM. #TRIPPING”, “NOT GIVING UP A BUNCH OF RUNS TO IMPROVE YOUR TEAM’S CHANCES AT THE PLAYOFFS IS TOO MAINSTREAM #HIPSTERCJWILSON”, or “MICHAEL BOURN COMES UP LIMPING SLIDING INTO SECOND, JOE MAUER TO GO ON DL. #JOEMAUERINJURIES” are his trademark.  They aren’t Buster Olney’s personality, but they are the parody account’s personality.  He generates his own memes rather than trying to piggyback off something fashionable.  Anyone could make a joke about being obsessed with Albert Pujols or Roy Halladay or something.  Tripping Olney obsesses with Bruce Chen.

And now on the other end…

I mentioned Faux John Madden earlier and criticized him but I’ll at least give him credit for often having funny jokes.  Twitter is full of parody accounts similar to this but with less humor.  I refuse to give specific handles for these clowns (and also because I don’t recall them because I don’t follow them because I choose not to waste my attention on Twitter), but here’s a few examples.    There is a “parody” account of Happy Gilmore which never mentions golf, never mentions Shooter McGavin (except in its bio), and never mentions being a former hockey player.  This parody of a hockey player turned golfer with anger management issues mostly posts NFL-related pictures on Lockerdome.  In what way is that parodying Happy Gilmore?  Though to Happy’s credit, though he isn’t funny, he’s sporadically original in the same way that John Madden is original—jokes which are generic but not direct theft.  For those, look at the countless parodies of Ted (as in the Mark Wahlberg movie character) which mostly just tweets jokes you can find literally all over the internet.  Though I guess there are some redeeming qualities here—nobody is following Ted thinking “Oh shit, I can follow a talking teddy bear.”  Maybe they think Seth MacFarlane is running it or something (in which case they might just want to follow the actual goddamned Seth MacFarlane) but it’s obviously a joke.

The worst kind of parody account is one in which literally the ONLY mark of the celebrity namesake is the name itself.  These accounts seem to be run by the same people, making the same set of bad jokes over and over.  The most common seems to be Will Ferrell, tweeting unfunny and unclever jokes that the real Will Ferrell wouldn’t do (he might come up with something original and funny and then proceed to beat it into the ground over five movies but that’s a different issue altogether).  Also seen several of Daniel Tosh.  Now, Daniel Tosh has a VERY distinctive comedy style, whether you like it or not.  It’s very confrontational and politically incorrect—it’s not THAT hard to parody.  Yet the parody accounts have him telling the kind of jokes you hear people make up in middle school.  You remember when Michael Richards went on that horrific, racist rant doing standup comedy and then, shortly thereafter, when Jerry Seinfeld was on Letterman, Richards gave a sincere, heartfelt apology?  And the audience LAUGHED?  This is the way we as people are trained—to see what we identify as a comedian (Will Ferrell, Daniel Tosh, Michael Richards) and laugh.  It’s easier said than done—you have to say genuinely funny things to build up that rapport.  Ferrell and Tosh did this on their own.  Screw the people who let them do the hard work and just repeat the benefits.

The absolute low point of low points, though, are parody accounts which do inspirational quotes.  Now, if Michael Jordan had Twitter, let’s be honest—he’d be whoring out for Nike.  If he had fewer followers, he’d be that celebrity who retweets anyone who asks for a retweet.  Yet apparently, in a “parody” of him, he just tweets quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi because THAT’S TOTALLY WHAT MICHAEL JORDAN TALKS ABOUT ON TWITTER.  Probably the most common I’ve seen is Will Smith.  Like, why is Will Smith the one giving advice about self-confidence and other bullshit on Twitter?  What specifically did he do to justify this reverence where people are willing to just fucking accept him as some kind of guidance counselor?  Was it Men in Black 2?  Did someone see Men in Black 2 and think “The black guy should be a philosopher”?

But I go on plenty of rants against Will Smith, who I have explained already I think is a cowardly actor with absolutely no range who is clearly in it 100% for the money and not at all for anything resembling artistic credibility (if he decided he wanted to make an MLK biopic, they’d start filming it tomorrow, but that would be way too “controversial” for Will).  That’s not the point.  Whether you like him or not, most people like him.  He has a generally good reputation.  Racist old people like Will Smith.  The people who parody him are piggybacking off of Will Smith’s sterling reputation.  The bio of one of these accounts, whose title will be “The Will Smith” or something like that, will generally be something along the lines of “Actor and rapper, star of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, film actor, parody”.  Like, parody is just thrown in.  You’d be a fool to not think many of the hundreds of thousands of people following “parody” Will Smith accounts think they are actually following Will Smith.  And they’re following boring, run of the mill accounts because they think they’re actually following Will Smith.

As for me, I’m sure I’d get more followers if I changed my account to “Stan Musial” and quoted a bunch of safe quotes of inspiration (or if I put #TeamFollowBack in my bio).  But what’s the point?  Of my 170 some odd followers, some are legitimately entertained by my insane ramblings (not most, but some).  Some may legitimately be entertained by the same moronic jokes said ad nauseum by people riding the goodwill of established celebrities, and I’m sure they have more truly loyal fans (just by the numbers game), but those people suck so who cares?