A casual fan's take on college football anarchy

Tis the season of what I call the "East Armpit Bowls." These are the contests between (mostly) unheralded college football teams which have winning, but undistinguished, regular season records (think 6-6 or 7-6) often played before Christmas or immediately after in warm tourist spots. This is college football for the unserious and I revel in it. The high class serious Bowls come later. I consider having the space and time to watch the East Armpit batch a great seasonal pleasure; this doesn't prove convenient every year but it sure is a good way to unwind after a election campaign season.

It used to be the distinguishing characteristic of the best of these seasonal bowl games that, in one their one chance of wide TV exposure, both the college in question and its gladiators took the opportunity show their stuff, to strive violently, and sometimes skillfully, to demonstrate their passion for the game. 

(And they still do. Yesterday I saw a contest between Pitt and Toledo in the "GameAbove Sports Bowl" that went to 6 OverTimes and ended with scores in the mid-forties.)

The changing structure of college athletics, the demise of enforced amateurism, and of enforced penury for the "student" athletes, is changing all that, even at the lower levels.

A series of legal rulings have released college football players from what was a sort of indentured servitude. Once recruited and signed by a college's football program, and often its domineering coach, young men were awarded a scholarship and perhaps a small stipend, while losing their freedom. Including the freedom to decide they should play somewhere else. No more. Now college football is shaped by the "transfer portal." Moving between school and football programs is constant, though regulated.

ESPN explains:

At the FBS level [the Bowl stratum of college teams], more than 25% of scholarship players transferred after the 2023 season. Thousands of players becoming available each offseason is forcing programs to adapt and rethink how they construct their rosters to stay competitive.

The NCAA transfer portal is an online database that lists student-athletes who are interested in changing schools. In major college football, players can enter their name in the portal during transfer windows in the winter and spring. For this 2024-25 school year, the winter window is Dec. 9-28 and the spring window is April 16-25.

When a player puts their name in the portal, schools can immediately begin contacting and recruiting them. ... once a player enters the portal, their school can decide to cancel their athletics aid and remove them from the roster. ...When programs go through head-coaching changes, their players are granted an immediate 30-day window during which they can enter the portal. However, players are not allowed to play for multiple teams in one season.

There's no more penalty to the athlete of having to sit out of football for a year when jumping to another college. An increasing number of players jump every year. And football programs can accumulate as many transfer players as they can recruit with no limiting rules. Concurrently, when popular and successful coaches jump to new jobs, the players they've accumulated can jump along with them!

The disruption has been huge -- and it is complicated by court rulings that the college athletic association (NCAA) cannot enforce amateurism (and poverty) on the athletes. A scholarship that comes with an obligation to the football program is not fair compensation for many athletes. Collectives of rich boosters and the colleges themselves can contract with the athletes for the use of their  "names, image, and likeness" (NIL). The best players, usually quarterbacks, can earn serous money.

Many coaches feel they are having to navigate a new world:

"You're not building a program anymore," Coastal Carolina coach Tim Beck told reporters Thursday. "This isn't a program. Each year, you just build a team. You try to find the best team that you can put out there every year, and you know the team is going to get hit by free agency."

Some make the case that the new wild world of unfettered college sports will teach athletes new skills:

The portal process has evolved into a sophisticated professional development opportunity. Athletes gain real-world experience in personal branding, contract negotiation, and business relationships.

Well, maybe. But for many of these young men, this may be a dangerous opportunity. There are a lot of sharks out there, wanting a piece of the new money that comes with the new freedom.

Naturally, with all that money floating about, there are moves to try to organize college football players into something like the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) at the professional level. Some coaches have even encouraged this effort -- a union would simplify and clarify a very murky and potentially exploitative situation.

[Last May University of Alabama Birmingham] football players say their entire roster ... signed up for Athletes.org, making them the first Division I football team to publicly join the players' association. They were introduced to the group by an unexpected source: their head coach.

[Former NFL quarterback] Trent Dilfer gathered his team for a voluntary meeting in mid-April to encourage them to prepare for a future when college athletes might be able to negotiate for a larger share of their sport's revenue.

"They're going to have a seat at the table," Dilfer told ESPN. "I wanted to make sure I helped pour gasoline on something that is going to happen no matter what. I might as well use my influence to help it happen faster on behalf of our players."

A union to protect the majority of players seems like a necessity. 

All this is unsettled, changing every year as colleges struggle to organize themselves to grab the largest possible TV broadcast contracts, winning coaches command ever higher salaries, and players demand their piece of the pie. Football truly is the all-American game.

A great excuse for how I while away Sunday afternoons

Unionized professional football players supporting hospitality workers. Maybe they actually do realize that stadium workers and concessionaires deserve some cut of the money that slooshes around their sport. Also hotel workers. Most of these football guys know that, however well they are doing today, they aren't on the side of the bosses. Great to see.

When workers fight, we all win.

Caltrans is ready for the Superbowl

These signs dotted the I-5 all the the way from the Central Valley.

Here in the Mission, bus traffic for tomorrow evening has been re-routed. 

Many experts doubt whether our 49ers can win the game, but the powers-that-be want to be ready. The celebration if we win will be wild. One year, an inebriated sports fan managed to climb and then fall off our roof. No serious damage done, but it could have been bad.

I intend to enjoy the show. The 49ers have given us another year of delicious fandom, win or lose.

Football championship aftermath

Waking up to news that some Americans think their national sport is rigged because one of the players in the winning team is dating a singer who encourages her fans to vote.

What a strange, strange country this is...

— Stu Cameron (@stucam7771) January 29, 2024

 

The fireworks marking the victory of the other winning team went on until 2am in the San Francisco Mission District. Go 49ers!

NFL Conference Championship weekend

I intend to enjoy this. Two games between competitive teams for the chance to go batter each other in the Super Bowl. For all the consumer nonsense, this is my idea of fun.

And just for fun, I'll post this defense of my preferred spectacle from a highbrow-oriented philosophy blog, Crooked Timber.

Why you should watch American Football

...  It’s an extremely intelligent game.

I am not remotely kidding.  Football is probably the most strategically deep game of any major sport.  The rules are designed to encourage it!  Meanwhile, teams are unusually equal in terms of quality of players — see below — so they must rely on cleverness to win.

Football is regularly compared to chess, and that’s fair.  But really it’s more of a high-speed physical game of rock-paper-scissors.  The core of it is correctly guessing the other side’s play.  If you can do that consistently, you’ll win.  If not — and if they guess your plays consistently — you will lose.  And like all guessing games, it immediately becomes recursive (if he knows I know he’ll call a blitz, he won’t call a blitz, except he’ll also know that I know he knows, which means he will) and involves bluffing and deceit.

And not only is it a very smart game, it’s smart on a sliding scale.  That is, once you have a basic familiarity you can grasp the big strategies and understand what’s happening.  But as you learn more, you’ll understand more, and you’ll see the little fractal side-strategies — the operational and tactical levels, if you like.  It rewards attention no matter how much or little you know.  

A big part of the fun of watching it is trying to outguess the guys on the field.  “Armchair quarterback” and “Monday morning quarterback” are American idioms for a reason.  It’s also why football fans are perhaps the most likely to yell at a screen.  “He knew you were going to call a blitz!  Why did you call a blitz?”

The author adds much more if you are interested.

My two cents: these freaks of nature (a true description for all who succeed in any world class sport) are simply incredible athletes. They do things with their bodies and brains which seem impossible. One measure of this is that, since myriad rules changes designed to prevent the worst injuries, they have largely learned how to tackle opponents without depending either on crashing a runner with the crown of their helmets or hitting contorted legs. How do they do that? 

I'm looking forward to a delicious weekend of intelligent mayhem, whoever wins the games.

College football bowl season begins

Here we go again ... once again I'm giving myself a break from the horrors of the world watching a surfeit of obscure end-of-season contests. Yes, the whole thing is full of hypocrisy about education and character-building while young men break their bodies to raise the profile of some institution. At least the money in the game is a little more transparent in this time of the overthrow of the conferences and of the corrupt NCAA. 

Sure, there are some engaging, well-played games. Florida A&M defeating Howard was gripping. And there were the marching bands ...

But it is the matches between what I think of as E. Armpit again W. Hangnail that often produce the more entertaining struggles. Whoever heard of some of these colleges? Players and spectators often care about something more than individual stats. And very few are playing solely to try to catch the eye of professional scouts.

Of course, watching live means seeing a deluge of ads. This Amazon offering so far wins the prize for the season. Having seen it at least 20 times, I still smile.

 

May we all be open to so much joy.

Believing the hype?

About a week ago, I wrote disparagingly about charisma in politicians. I find myself pondering this quality further.

The dictionary definition of charisma is all about the word's origin in theology. It is not until the fourth listing that the manner in which I commonly think of it comes up: charm, magnetism, presence. A usage I encountered this week catches how I commonly think of the quality: "[Sarah] Palin’s telegenic charisma." Yeah, right. She's a flashy, shallow phony -- exactly what I think of when charisma goes sour.

Two events involving charisma -- not from politics, and neither sour -- grabbed me last weekend. What might be dismissed as "just charisma" can turn out to have more, or additional, meanings.

The first was a visit to the Kehinde Wiley show, an Archeology of Silence, at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park (til October 15). It had been much praised and several friends had been blown away by Wiley's giant paintings and intricate bronze cast figures. As the artist intended, the pieces overwhelm the senses through their scale and audacity. But if you get a chance to see them, don't miss the details, such as the small bit of a huge figure that I've posted above. This show is deeper than its immediate grandiosity, its charisma. I suspect this artist's work will be even deeper as he ages.

That same weekend, I watched the Colorado University football team triumph (barely) over Colorado State University. This is a traditional rivalry game in the collapsing Pac12 conference, but in the curious economy of big-time farm-team football on TV, it is not a big deal. Except that this year it was. 

Colorado University hired Deion Sanders, the former NFL star receiver and TV football commentator known to admirers and detractors as "Prime," away from a head coaching job at the HBCU Jackson State. Sanders got rid of most of the poorly performing existing CU team and imported transferring players, including his own talented sons as a receiver and as quarterback. He promised to overturn a pretty dismal past football record and to deliver wins and excitement. This was not just winning football games, but his promise, according to CNN , amounted to "audacious Blackness." Would this work as sport as well as charisma?

I have to say, once the fray supplanted the pregame hype, this was one hell of a football game. It required two overtime periods, but CU came through in the end.

In this contest Deion Sanders, his sons, and his team delivered both charisma and substance.

And I should mention that there was another novel feature to the game. CSU's coach, Jay Norvell, is also Black. How often does it happen that two major football colleges meet who both have Black coaches? 

Sometimes it is worth staying up late to catch West Coast football.

The college football season is underway

The Orange Man visits an Iowa football game.

Historian Kevin M. Kruse reminds us of a Trump claim:

“Big strong men, big burly football fans, with tears in their eyes, coming up to me saying, sir, I’ve never told a former president to fuck off before, sir, but …”

It's going to be a long season in politics as well as strange, semi-pro football.

Via Xitter.

Colin Allred takes it to Ted Cruz

Want to feel good about an upcoming election contest? Maybe it will take a former NFL linebacker to break through for Democrats in Texas.

"We don't have to be embarrassed by our Senator. We can get a new one. Someone like me was never supposed to get this far. I've taken down a lot tougher guys than Ted Cruz. ..."

Allred will be as viable a challenger as anyone who could run. Texas is a tease but let's hope for Texans' sake, this is the time the state makes a change of direction.

Not my kind of encounter with Jesus

If you watched the Stupor Bowl live, and didn't silence the commercials as you might ordinarily, you were treated to slickly produced ads from something called HeGetsUs.com. 

I figured I should suss out who is selling what kind of Jesus and pass the information on. Here's what CNN reports:

In between star-studded advertisements and a whole lot of football, this year’s Super Bowl watchers are being taken to church.

“He Gets Us,” a campaign to promote Jesus and Christianity, is running two ads during the game as part of a staggering $100 million media investment. ...

The chain of influence behind “He Gets Us” can be followed through public records and information on the campaign’s own site. The campaign is a subsidiary of The Servant Foundation, also known as the Signatry.

According to research compiled by Jacobin, a left-leaning news outlet, The Servant Foundation has donated tens of millions to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group. The ADF has been involved in several legislative pushes to curtail LGBTQ rights and quash non-discrimination legislation in the Supreme Court.

... While donors who support “He Gets Us” can choose to remain anonymous, Hobby Lobby co-founder David Green claims to be a big contributor to the campaign’s multi-million-dollar coffers. Hobby Lobby has famously been at the center of several legal controversies, including the support of anti-LGBTQ legislation and a successful years-long legal fight that eventually led to the Supreme Court allowing companies to deny medical coverage for contraception on the basis of religious beliefs.

It hurts when Jesus is used to belittle and repress people. I do not trust these sponsors.

Oh, I'm not not being entirely fair calling the big game "the Stupor Bowl." I just didn't have a horse in the race this year. But it was an entertaining game, unlike so many such contests.

A fan's guide to what is shaping college football bowl games

When I need to restore my soul, I've long watched massive numbers of these made-for-TV college athletic spectacles. There are something like 41 of them this year beginning December 16. Most are pedestrian, but a few are delights. All offer their moments and their quirks. 

But the structures that set the terms for them have changed pretty radically since I last indulged one of these seasonal bowl binges. I thought I'd share some observations and definitions of terms.

Of course, Division 1 NCAA football has long been a business, a Darwinian contest among sports administrators to showcase teams that will excite alumni donors. For decades, that meant attracting promising high school athletes with "scholarships" which rendered them something like indentured peons under all-powerful coaches, subsisting on the favor of their masters (almost all men) -- and perhaps their talent. This might lead to a continued athletic career at the professional level for a very few. And college degrees for about 73 percent of high level players -- slightly higher than their non-athlete peers. These graduation rates are something like 15 percent higher for white players than for black ones.

Legal challenges during last decade have reduced the power of college athletic administrators to keep players in penurious servitude and allowed some direct compensation to athletes from the schools, but even more from booster collectives. But it's the conferences that control the TV money and rake in big bucks.

And it's the NCAA and the conferences that shape post season (bowl) play. Over the next few years, all the accreted anarchic bowls will be sucked into the College Football Playoff National Championship. Forget iconic bowls like the Rose Bowl serving as contests between regions of the country. Which schools play where will be determined by "national standings," not accidents of history. This may make economic sense and even for some less-mismatched, but more exciting, contests, but something is lost.

Something else that has gone bye-the-bye is the expectation that college football players will give their all for their schools in post-season play. Players with strong NFL prospects routinely choose not to risk injury (or have their weaknesses highlighted) by "opting out" of bowl play. Just about every bowl game I have watched this year has begun with a recitation of a list of absentees "preparing for the NFL draft." This is understandable; football is these guys' ticket, not that degree in sports management.

And besides, coaches are doing the same -- jumping to the next job before the post season finishes. This might be one of the most surreal outcomes I've run across:

Wasabi Fenway Bowl - Cincinnati vs. Louisville, December 16
Cincinnati: Head coach Luke Fickell left for Wisconsin and won't coach in the bowl. Kerry Coombs will remain on staff under new coach Scott Satterfield and is the interim head coach for this game. ...  
Louisville: The Cardinals lost coach Scott Satterfield and a couple of assistants to Cincinnati. Deion Branch will work as the team's interim coach for this game. ...

College football players, their peon status newly loosened, play their own game of musical chairs. In theory, the NCAA has long defined eligibility for its athletes as four seasons in their sport, plus a "red shirt" year when they play little or not at all. Teams red-shirt (hold out) players for development or major injuries and sometimes can squeeze an additional year out through administrative legerdemain; this is why I keep hearing of "six year players." Also why one hears that some athletes are in graduate school for academics while still playing undergrad college sports.

And currently the newly implemented "transfer portal" allows college football players to jump from one academic institution to another, perhaps for a better deal, or better TV exposure, or to follow a preferred coach who made a move. The portal is a database of athletes hoping to make a jump. Until this was put in place, transferring students had to sit out a year at their new digs. No longer. The transfer portal rules are somewhat intricate and evolving. Players who have entered the portal can play in bowl games with their old college, but mostly don't. That's another list of opt-outs announced at the beginning of this year's games.

There's a heck of a lot of money in college football and its post-season. And so long as we don't, as a society, conclude that American football is too lethal to continue to attract masses of customers, there'll be young athletes who want in. I will miss the less blatantly commercial version of the college football post-seasion. But the new one will undoubtedly put on a grand show. Guess I'll have to learn all the new rules. It's more fun when I understand them, at least superficially.

Holiday amusements

On my break from compulsive blogging, I'm doing what gives me great delight at this season: recording and watching at least part of most of what we call the East Armpit college football bowls. These are contests between teams, obscure to me if not to themselves, that match moderately successful mid-range squads where very few players can have legitimate professional aspirations. The players and their fans care so much -- and enjoy spending their pre-holiday break in exotic locations: the Bahamas, Hawaii, Boise. 

Yes, that means Idaho on the blue "smurf turf". That one is the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl -- formerly the Humanitarian Bowl and the MPC Computers Bowl. I like the current sponsor better. Take a look at what they are selling:

Good fun from this sponsor.

Not good fun for San Jose State, but hey -- the guys got to travel to Boise ...

North Beach is rooting for a favorite son

Go 49ers!

Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

For your Super Bowl weekend

That's Hard Rock stadium, the Miami venue for the big game, as it is likely to look quite frequently in the next few years. Grist spells out the prospects:

... Floods are inundating low-lying cities like Miami even on sunny days.

A new report from Climate Central — an organization that analyzes how climate change affects the public — shows that Hard Rock Stadium, between 4 and 6 feet above sea level, is likely to experience some of this flooding in the coming century. It’s not just the football field that’s at risk of getting swamped by climate change. Local roads, the stadium’s $135 million training facility, the tennis center, and parking lots will face higher odds of being submerged.

... The Hard Rock Stadium property has at the very least, a 1 percent chance of being submerged by rising seas every year by 2070 if the world continues emitting greenhouse gases business-as-usual. By 2090, the risk of the stadium experiencing serious flooding each year rises to 10 percent.

Remember, this is likely an underestimate...

...

Meanwhile, the National Football League continues to strive to erase its most socially useful recent player according to Samer Kalaf. Kalaf denounces the league for trying to substitute an anodyne advertising campaign for Colin Kaepernick's fierce protest against police killings of black and brown men.

Inspire Change is a shameless strategy for Commissioner Roger Goodell and the league’s owners to pretend that they not only supported the movement to bring attention to police violence and systemic oppression all along, but that they were really the progenitors of the whole idea. Any player who accepts the deal on these rotten terms is welcome. The painfully obvious tell is that former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick is nowhere to be found — not in the Inspire Change materials, not as part of the Players Coalition, of which [Anquan] Boldin is a co-founder, and not on an NFL roster, as his former team plays the Kansas City Chiefs for the title Sunday.

Kalaf is certainly right about what the NFL is trying to get away with. But they are playing with fire here -- highlighting police violence now matter how hypocritically can lead to unexpected results. And I don't think we can be disrespecting former 49er Anquan Boldin's real pain over the killing of his cousin by a Florida cop. Sure -- the powers-that-be will co-opt and pollute anything to hold on to their power. But it's time to stop the killings.

Meanwhile -- GO 49ERS!

Race, avarice, and entertainment in bowl-ville

Among the glut of year-end college football bowls, I figured the Cotton Bowl in Texas between Penn State (ranked #10 in the country) and Memphis (#16) was just another ho-hum match up. Players eligible for the NFL draft would strut their stuff optimistically for any scouts present; students and alums who managed to make it to the game would cheer their home gladiators; coaches would flaunt their worth to watching athletic directors as advertisements for the schools. This might even amount to an entertaining athletic display -- a good game.

Well the Cotton Bowl was all those things, but it turned out to be more.

I got my first inkling there would be more when the ESPN announcers felt they should explain the "WT" decal on Penn State helmets. The school was proudly calling out the fact that, in 1948, their squad had included African-Americans Wally Triplett and Dennie Hoggard. Previously the team had assented to Southern segregation rules by not bringing their African American players along to games in the old Confederacy. This time, Penn State said no, everyone comes, even though the team had to stay at a US airbase, as no hotel would have the integrated group. Triplett scored in the game and was later drafted into the NFL. He died in 2018 at age 92.

It turns out that James Franklin, the Penn State coach, insists on talking about race when necessary. In October, he stood up publicly for a player who was being criticized for choosing to wear dreadlocks.

And, despite the fact that there only 12 Black coaches leading teams at the top college level, Franklin has announced that he intends to be the first Black college coach to lead his team to a national championship.

That's ambitious -- the game Franklin's 10-2 team played against Memphis was a kind of consolation match for also-rans in the cut throat College Football Playoff system. When the most affluent conferences -- the Power Five: Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), Big Ten Conference, Big 12 Conference, Pac-12 Conference, and Southeastern Conference (SEC) -- created the current national championship structure, all the other football-playing schools were left out in the cold. Even if schools had perfect records, there was no way in for them to the high-paying, high-attention bowl games. So, they were given this one sop: the highest ranked non-Power Five school would get to play in one highish-profile bowl game against a high-also-ran from the rankings. That's the game that Franklin's Penn State dominated in the Cotton Bowl on Saturday.

The situation of Memphis' team and coach illustrates the crazy cut-throat nature of college football. The Memphis team won its place in the Cotton Bowl with an 11-1 record under head coach Mike Norvell. After the season but before the bowl game, Norvell was able to parley their success into a new, more prominent, job for himself at Florida State. So the Memphis players had to compete in the Cotton Bowl under a new coach, Ryan Silverfield, who'd never before been in charge during a game.

Penn State won 53-39, but the contest was no beat-down. In fact it was an enjoyable game to watch. That's college football for you.

When we were very young ...

A new season begins. GO NINERS!

Take it from a sports writer

This is resistance. Sally Jenkins, who covers sports for the Washington Post, explains how to resist President Trump.

The Philadelphia Eagles beat President Trump. They slipped the punch, and he wound up swinging so hard at the air that he fell on his face. It’s a useful lesson, a timeless one even.

When you’re up against a crotch-kicker and an eye-gouger, what do you do? NFL owners confronted that question and decided the best strategy was to try to placate, and they got leg-whipped for it. It was entirely their own fault for deciding that a president who called their players sons of bitches somehow would play by their rules. The Eagles were smarter. They understood that an eye-gouger counts on an adversary who will come in close.

A crotch-kicker needs an opponent. Without one, what is he? Without a race to bait, without someone to accuse, without a target to lash out at, what can he do? When there is no one to scapegoat or to scream spittle at, then what? He has to stand there and try to look and be presidential. That’s what the Eagles understood when most decided not to go to the White House and shake his hand ...

... most people aren’t Steph[Curry] or LeBron [James] or [Muhammed] Ali. So when confronted with someone who practices startling, uncalled-for aggression, they don’t know what to do. When someone comes at you harder than they should, the critical thing is not to break the rules yourself because you will break the game. It’s among the most immortal and true principles of any contest: Overreacting will cost only yourself, and all will be lost.

True excellence is not just about the vicious deployment of force, but the control and parrying of it without losing yourself, your honor, your conception of what’s most important and who you want to be in this contest and this world. Don’t let someone else’s breaking of the rules break you down. Don’t let them turn something ugly that shouldn’t be and that you don’t want to be. Step out of the way. And wait.

[As Muhammad Ali demonstrated while fighting George Foreman,] ... the rope will take the strain.

The G-7 leaders might learn from this. If Trump wants to trash the system that brings them together, politely meet without him. He needs a time out. He won't like that.

Read and enjoy the entire Jenkins column.

Does Trump hope to be hailed as "Slayer of American Football"?

Yes, yesterday's game was a truly great Super Bowl and we enjoyed it immensely.

But I haven't been watching much football this past season and not feeling much deprivation. When I think of the sport, I can't get out of the back of my mind that these magnificent athletes are probably damaging not only their bodies, but also their brains, for my entertainment. I know I'm not the only one. NFL ratings were down this season. Perhaps David Remmick's wistful musing which echoes my misgivings is correct.

Parents are asking the question once asked of boxing: Do you want your kids to play football?

This will not be the last Super Bowl any more than Ali–Frazier III was the last heavyweight-championship fight. But, just as boxing inexorably shifted to the margins of American life, this might be, for football, the start of the long eclipse.

Perhaps the POTUS sees the trend and amalgamates it with his own longstanding grievances, and sees a chance to grab credit for something that was going to happen without his intervention.

You see, for all his chumminess with some NFL owners today, Trump has a longstanding beef with the league. Thirty years ago he owned the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League. USFL owners shelled out enough money to sign some quality football players. (San Franciscans should know that was where Steve Young got his start.) But they weren't the big time and could never be since they played in the spring, not the traditional fall season. Trump persuaded these rich men to sue the NFL. CNN tells the story:

Trump's plan? Convince his fellow owners to move the USFL's season to the fall.

But he also wanted to do something even more daring: Sue the NFL itself, alleging its stranglehold on stadiums and TV rights violated anti-trust laws.

The trial became a national sensation, with Trump himself taking the stand.

The NFL "portrayed him as the big powerful guy who was trying to take advantage of the poor little old NFL, you know: These guys are suffering. Donald Trump is beating them up. And that's the message that they got across to the jury," [former USFL Executive Director Steve] Ehrhart recalled.

But as the jury returned its verdict, it appeared Trump -- and the USFL -- had prevailed. The jury found against the NFL. But then the USFL owners read the entire 26-page decision.

The jury awarded them just $1 in damages.

Trump had been humiliated; the USFL went out of business like so many Trump businesses.

So perhaps when Trump blusters that football is "boring" because it has outlawed helmet to helmet hits -- and when he teaches his followers to think of players as uppity unpatriotic black billionaires -- he's just trying to position himself as the colossus that struck down what was once the dominant league in the dominant U.S. sport.

Since he has taken office, despite his unforeseen election, I think we can say that we've learned that Trump has not repealed the laws of political gravity. Responsible institutions and organized people continue to impede his whims.

Maybe his true talent has been to sniff out shrouded undercurrents and claim authorship. He intuited that racism and nationalism were ripe to be inflamed -- for his benefit. Might the NFL's decline be another such shocking, already ripe, opportunity to claim credit for something he merely latched onto? If so, this is far from the most significant of Trump's transgressions, but still an instance of a pattern worth noting.

Back to watching football

After a season of not watching brilliant athletes risk their brains for my entertainment, the bowl season has drawn me in again. At the college level, these young men are so graceful, so smart in their particular accomplishments ... most of them will never get anything out of football but injuries and proud memories, but I relate to their passion for their peculiar game.

Meanwhile, the current generation of professional black athletes are carrying on proud traditions of standing up for themselves. This video history is well worth a quarter of an hour of your time.

Just when I was weaning myself off football . . .

This was last year. Now the Cheeto seems to have declared a culture war on the brave athletes of the NFL standing up for themselves, free speech, and Black lives. Guess I'll have to pay attention to the national game again. Thanks Colin!