I spend too much time driving back and forth from work listening to college football podcasts. They're fun, and since Michigan won the national championship last year I've obviously been basking in the glow, but I sometimes wonder why I worry about a sport that is still often stuck in the 1970s (maybe early 1980s) in a lot of key ways.
One of the podcasts I listen to is Split Zone Duo. I started mostly because I enjoyed the insidery joke of running both split zone and duo, which would be difficult for even the best of lines, but I stayed because the hosts are careful to include the entire college football landscape, and because they actually seemed to share my politics, at least for the most part.
After listening for a bit I'm not quite as enamored, but their approach is still interesting, and the podcasters take a different look than almost every other college football podcast, which concentrate on narratives and otherwise not-that-interesting of crap as well as glorify the big conferences and their domination of the vast amounts of money that gets fed into college sports.
What's been troubling lately is the way that this podcast values access over analysis and narrative over lived experience. It's refreshing that the podcasters call out the narratives in a lot of ways, but it often feels that in calling out the prevalence of narratives they fall right into them. That fall can be difficult to avoid - it's sports after all, which doesn't really have a ton of complexity to it. Still, one of the joys of sites like Fire Joe Morgan, the old Deadspin, and Awful Announcing was pointing out just how detached from reality these narratives often were.
I also struggle with the glee that the hosts show in having access, to players, coaches, athletic directors, and so on. Without that of course most sports journalism doesn't get written, and access can absolutely clue us as spectators into aspects of the games we love that we otherwise wouldn't get. Nonetheless, the constant refrain of "'oh, but what they're saying in the building is..." reeks a bit of that old time sports journalism that quickly became just an ancillary of an organization's PR department.
Am I going to stop listening? No - the good stuff that they offer is very good. Do I occasionally grit my teeth and think, "get over your fucking selves"? Yes, and I am guessing that that will not stop.
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