College Football

Admittedly, I am not much of a football fan. Here is my experience with football:

When I was seven, I played in a peewee league for a few weeks. My mom yanked me after finding that the football parents were a bunch of riffraff. Lots of denim jackets with KISS patches on the back. I played soccer instead.

I played flag football in a Coast Guard league when I was 26. I played defensive end, which is the easiest position to play: kill the quarterback. I was actually pretty good at it. That was about the peak of my physical fitness, and I ended up with more sacks than Mark Gastineau. Teams were constantly forced to double-team me. It was fun.

But I haven’t faithfully watched it on TV since I was in grade school. The last season I remember was the one where the Giants won the Super Bowl over the Bills, when Scott Norwood shanked a field goal from 19 yards out. I am much more of a baseball fan.

I live in the South. College football is pretty big around here, to say the least. If you watch the local news, it is nothing but college (and high school) football. Even in the offseason. Everyone has a Gamecocks or Clemson sticker on the back of their car. The funny thing about college football fans is that they have no knowledge of any other sport. Back in the 1990s, when the Atlanta Braves were terrific for a decade, people used to make fun of Braves fans who couldn’t even manage a sellout crowd during the World Series. We all thought they were spoiled. It had nothing to do with that. Nobody cares about baseball in the South! I live in Braves territory, and trust me, there are very few people who have any interest in what the Braves are up to, especially during football season.

I have no idea whether college athletes should be paid. I mean, the libertarian in me thinks so, but it would severely undermine the educational process, if you have a multimillionaire sitting in your classroom. I have taught in college, so I know. I have taught football players. I flunked one football player, and gave a B to another. The guy that got a B approached me one day before class, and told me that he sustained a concussion playing football and he might not be at his best for class. “Flag football?” I asked him. “No,” he said, “Varsity football.” This was an MBA class, so I was a little surprised that he was playing on the varsity team. “What position do you play?” I asked.

“Quarterback,” he said.

I had no idea. He was a good egg, and not a bad student.

Football is also a big deal at Coastal Carolina University, which is located in the vicinity of Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. Keep in mind, the team hasn’t been around all that long. This is the twentieth season. And keep in mind that South Carolina already has two huge entrenched fan bases with the University of South Carolina and Clemson. There wasn’t really room for a third football team in the state. Nevertheless, they persisted. You might recall that former Ameritrade CEO Joe Moglia was recruited to coach the team. Moglia made about $700 million in the financial world but also wrote an insightful book about football strategy in his spare time. He lived about an hour from campus and caused a bit of a stir among the faculty when he expressed an interest in landing his helicopter on the field. He did a great job with the team, though. Not only did they get better, but he instilled some pretty good values in those players, where college football players have a reputation for being a bunch of miscreants. They stood up straight, looked you in the eye, and called you “sir” or “ma’am.” Even the guy that bombed my class came up to me and shook my hand and said “thank you, sir” before he left. That was all Moglia’s doing.

The team outperformed for a few years and the school had designs on moving up to a bigger conference. To do so, they had to make the stadium bigger, which was going to cost a lot of money. I disapproved. This was my thinking:

First of all, the attendance at the games was embarrassingly low. Why? Because even people in and around Conway, South Carolina didn’t care about Coastal. They cared about USC and Clemson. CCU had no natural fan base. It’s not like plunking down the Nationals in the middle of Washington, DC and having 35,000 people show up for the game. There is a lot of history around here. The capacity of the stadium was about 8,000 and the games were regularly averaging around 1,000 in attendance. To take the stadium from a capacity of 8,000 to about 20,000 seemed quite insane, even delusional.

Pretend you’re in an MBA program and you’re taking a strategic management class. As president of the university, you have two possible courses of action: you can take on USC and Clemson and try to beat them at their own game, or you can play a different game. You can try to compete on academics rather than athletics. Just think: Coastal Carolina University could have been the Harvard of the South, over two to three decades of investment. But instead, CCU got caught up in the football arms race. Seeing how a handful of teams like Alabama and Clemson pull in billions a year from athletics, the lure of riches was too tempting. There was even a period of time during the pandemic when resources were being diverted away from academics and towards football, culminating in a small pay cut for professors. That went over like a fart in church among the faculty, and there is lingering resentment about that move to this day. Coastal Carolina University bet it all on football. If the bet failed, the future of the university would be in doubt.

Incredibly, it paid off. The team finished with only one loss in 2020, the pandemic year, at the bowl game. At one point in the season, they were ranked eleventh in the AP poll. The team followed up with another near-undefeated season the next year. Money from TV deals and sponsorships is rolling in. It was the equivalent to putting it all on 00 on the roulette table and having it hit.

A lot of decisions are judged ex-post, by the results, and not the process. The thinking is that since the gamble paid off, it was a good decision. It was still a terrible decision, based on hopium and flawed assumptions. In 50 other alternate universes, that gamble does not pay off, the school goes bankrupt, and has to be rescued by the state, and is no longer Coastal Carolina University, but USC-Conway Extension. By all rights, that is what should have happened. But it didn’t, so the outgoing president and the Board of Trustees are considered oracles. I would consider them to be lucky. It was the longest of long-shot bets.

Even given the success of the team over the past few years, recognition has been hard to come by. If you watched the local news broadcasts, they would report on the results of Clemson and South Carolina games, even though they were unranked, and ignore Coastal, even though they were ranked. As of last year, the 20,000-seat stadium remained difficult to fill, which makes sense, because Conway has a population of 7,000. It’s still a giant boondoggle. The only way this really works is if CCU finds its way into the ACC or the SEC someday—at which point they are going to have to build a much larger stadium, and an even bigger bet on the roulette wheel.

There are very few Alabamas and Clemsons. That business model only works for a handful of teams, and there is significant first-mover advantage. I read somewhere that only about ten schools are meaningfully profitable on their athletic programs. I would add that those ten schools don’t tend to reinvest the proceeds of athletics into academics. I have heard from some folks that have taken a tour of Clemson’s facilities, and have said that they are more luxurious than any professional team they have ever seen. We’re talking about stupid amounts of money here, and the players don’t get to share in any of it. Unfair? Perhaps. But if you pay college athletes, that is some toothpaste that you’re not going to put back in the tube, and not even the smartest people I know can predict the unintended consequences of that, and it could be ugly. It is one of the few times that you will see me defend the status quo.

I recently went to CCU’s opening home game versus Army. The stadium was packed, with an attendance of over 21,000—the first sellout crowd. Thousands of people tailgating, drinking beer and playing cornhole. The student section was bursting at the seams. People were going nuts. I suppose college football is the thing we all do together. Not only did they build a winning football program, but they brought the community closer, and gave an identity to a part of the state that previously had none, a county full of subsistence farmers, Trump supporters, hucksters, and con men. That is worth something. I assure you that the program is nowhere near being profitable or self-sustaining, not at $100,000 for one chartered flight for the team. I suppose I could be the Grinch and wax philosophically about what the purpose of higher education is, but I will let it go. The game was pretty fucking cool.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music Recommendation: I played this live last week at my party. Reset Robot – Bust. One of my all-time most danceable tracks. It makes my laptop speakers rattle.

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Please forward to whoever you like.