Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Jennifer at Synaesthesia and I have engaged in a desultory dialogue about college sports, limited to a great extent by my need to spend Saturdays watching football instead of blogging. She is at a large land-grant university in the Big Ten, and is peeved at the ability of sports to suck economic and psychic resources out of the university, as well as at the boorish behavior it engenders in its fans. I agree with her, and think it’s a weird shotgun marriage between an entertainment conglomerate and a high-stakes public venture charged with educating people and raising the level of discourse and technical competence in our society. It makes as much sense for colleges to sponsor football teams as it would for municipal fire departments to operate waterslide amusement parks. (Actually, that makes a LOT more sense).
But that’s my intellectual side (undernourished and of feeble incandescence) talking. My sentimental side says there’ll be time enough in the bleak midwinter (see below) to discuss this as well as the lunacy of a region (Seattle) that can’t fill potholes, or properly route and fund any sort of non-highway mass transit, spending half a billion dollars blowing up one stadium and replacing it with two. My sentimental side says THIS IS MICHIGAN WEEK, FERGAWD’SSAKE, the 100th renewal of the Ohio State-Michigan football rivalry, and, for another week or so, I’m just gonna go with it.
Thursday night I’ll board a redeye flight from Seattle en route to Charleston, SC, where I’ll join my two OSU-alum brothers and a couple of their less-savory friends for the weekend to roast oysters and bay like Low Country curs at the television during the game on Saturday. This gathering will not be characterized by the angst and interpersonal complexities of The Big Chill (those were Michigan grads, after all), it will be awash in blood lust and gluttony. The explanation of how these OSU fans can spend all that money and travel time and miss the stadium where the game is actually being played by 900 miles will have to await a more lucent and reflective moment.