The season that will always be remembered for the emotion off the field
It’s that time of the year when for the population at large, things just seem a little bleaker than usual. Perhaps it’s the cold weather, the seemingly never-ending snow and ice, or the higher than usual toxicity circulating current events, but this stormy present seems to be taking a toll on almost everyone. For the college football fan, it’s exponentially so, as we begin the long cold offseason and it’s a long and windy road to August. Sure, you’ll get transfer portal pops, a spring game, maybe even a coaching search or an NIL breakthrough, but overall, it’s a slog to the fall, and it’s a slog that is still in its infancy stage.
This season on a macro-level was unique in many ways. There was the inaugural twelve-team playoff, the pending House court case, the increase of NIL operations, transfer portal explosions, and just a whole host of storylines that made this season more enthralling than usual. Maybe it was the fact that the SEC relinquished a bit of its hold on the football universe. Maybe it was the return of programs like Texas and Notre Dame to consistent prominence. Maybe it was just the right time.
For me, this season was about change as well. But in my tiny little universe, the changes that were most impactful were occurring off the field. This was the first season since I was 17 that I didn’t attend or work for a college. Maybe getting that space and distance from the sausage factory and knowing how it’s made let me actually enjoy it again. Or perhaps it was losing my mother in December that made me desperate for an escape, three hours at a time for each of the playoff games. It’s funny the things you grab onto to avoid dealing with the things you have to. After several years of drifting, perhaps that’s why I found my way back to college football this season. It was like an old friend that you didn’t know you needed until you reconnected. And like all the best connections, no matter how much time had passed, you fall back into a comfort that envelopes you like a warm blanket on the coldest of days. You feel home.
There’s no better example of that than Ben Herbstreit. Kirk Herbstreit, he of College Gameday fame and ESPN’s lead college football color commentator, lost his golden retriever that over the last year or so had become a staple in the football world. It was the story of the month, really, and a watershed moment for the 2024 season. I’m a dog guy. Always have been. Have a golden also. So for me, it’s hard to describe the grief I felt for a dog I’d never met, as silly as that sounds. It was as if a small part of innocence and purity died with him. When Gameday ran their piece on Ben, I cried. When I saw Kirk breaking down, I cried harder. Dog people get it. Trust me on that one.
I think it’s easy to lose sight of the humanity of someone. How many people online were rude, or hateful, or awful to Kirk because of one of his hot takes or projections. For just a moment everyone except the most truly awful of the lot could see that at the core of all of it was someone who was human. Who had emotions like all of us. Who just lost his best friend that he shared with the world. And now had to grieve him in front of millions of people.
So this week, when Kirk got emotional when his alma mater won the national championship, the internet trolls were out in full force once again. They called him a homer. Asked for his removal. Indicted his character and his ability, you know, just being general awful humans. So when Kirk shared on Pat McAfee this week all that he’d been going through (son’s health issues, wife’s cancer diagnosis, dying dog) and how that was just the release of emotion, it was a good reminder that I try to carry with me… each of us is carrying things that are both significant and heavy and the rest of the world knows absolutely nothing about. Kindness is free to give out, and it’s still in shocking short supply.
Maybe it’s foolish of me to ever expect a change, and the world may continue to get callous and cynical, and generally unforgiving for the people that reside in it. But I hope that our deficit of decency and the lack of general humanity can actually improve. I mean hell, we’ve got until August to figure it out and we’re back to hating someone because of their jersey.