It’s a frustrating time to be a college football fan

Another pigskin season kicks off, and despite the multitudinous sins committed against the game and its culture by ESPN, university presidents, major conference commissioners, take-the-money-and-run athletes and other votaries of Mammon, I’m once again giving it the old college try. Which is why I picked up my copy of Lindy’s College Football Preview the other day. (Lindy’s ranks my local team, the University of Buffalo Bulls, 85th in nation –we’re movin’ on up!)

It’s a frustrating time to be a college football fan. Tradition is sacked by the almighty buck, as it typically is in the land of the dollar bill, and healthy sentiments and institutional affections are warped, processed and sold back to us in tawdry and expensive packages.

Conference realignments have placed Pacific Coast schools Stanford and Berkeley in the now transcontinental Atlantic Coast Conference. They have swelled the Big Ten to the Big (and decidedly Unbeautiful) Eighteen, stretching that proud and sturdy beast of the Midwest on a rack that runs from Seattle to Piscataway, New Jersey. And they are on the verge of adding Northern Illinois to the Mountain West Conference, even though the highest point in the Land of Lincoln is merely a mound.

Those Krazy Kampus Kut-ups who abolished sex and disappeared free speech are also into repealing geography, though I am reliably told by one who knows that hierarchs at the University of Southern California, which gutted the PAC-12 by defecting to the Big Eighteen, have realized, to their consternation, that there is no Chief Engineer Scotty to beam Trojan teams from Los Angeles to College Park, Maryland, in a trice (or a transporter). But still, I am that most mingy and contemptible thing: a fan. So I put my dudgeon on hold, leafing through Lindy’s and enjoying the names of this year’s gridiron gladiators.

I can report both generational change and constancy, onomastically speaking. White jock names beginning with a C, usually hard – Colt, Colton, Cade, Caden, Cody, Cole, Cam and Chase – still rule the upper-level playground, but among black players there has been a decline in apostrophic forenames. African appellations are on the rise: my favorite this year belongs to Olasunkonmi Agunloye, defensive tackle for the Florida International Panthers. Fortunately for the FIU announcers, he has a nickname: Su.

Other outstanding handles in the 2025 college football season include Cal linebacker Buom Jock; NC State running back Hollywood Smothers; Marshall right guard Jalen Slappy; and the jazzy Utah State running back Miles Davis. Arizona has a Rhino (left tackle Tapa’atoutai) and a Genesis (safety Smith). In the names that fit category, Central Florida’s Gaard Memmelaar is… a guard. Nomenclature is destiny. Finally, Pitt wide receiver Censere Lee’s full name, spoken without an intermediate breath, makes the classic epistolary valediction redundant.

There are more Deuces – or even Duces, presumably born to Mussolini nostalgists – than Bills. In fact, I found not a single Bill in a starting lineup of any of the 136 major-college teams. Don’t even ask about Ed, Joe, LeRoy, Warren, or any name of the heroes of my youth. The names may have changed and respect for geography gone the way of the dropkick, but college football has been under indictment for more or less the same crimes – commercialism, degrading academics, cheating, broken bones – since the early 1900s, when academic luminaries like Harvard president Charles W. Eliot and frontier-thesis historian Frederick Jackson Turner campaigned for the game’s diminution – or even abolition.

Perhaps the most errant prediction ventured by the critics came in the New Republic from economist Glenn E. Hoover, who prophesied hopefully in 1926 that the rise of professional football would “do for college football what it has done for college baseball, to wit, remove it from the spotlight, render it an innocuous thing and plunge it into oblivion.” Uh, no.

The last nationally prominent abolitionist was University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins, who convinced his school’s trustees to drop football after the Maroons completed an abysmal 1939 season, lowlighted by an 85-0 loss to Michigan. Hutchins rejected suggestions that Chicago merely drop down in class, saying it would be “worse to be beaten by Beloit and Oberlin” than to get trounced by the Wolverines. Not that Hutchins wasn’t open to compromise: he endorsed former Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell’s proposal that teams play only one game a year, and that against their greatest rival.

By the way, the University of Chicago – which refielded a team in 1969 – opens its 2025 season on September 6 against Carnegie Mellon. If anyone offers you the Maroons and 85 points, take the bet.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.