WATCH GRID: Here comes my second book

Also, how to fix bowl games

Before the universe began, football was predestined to be invented in 1869.

• We know this because it was invented during that year by Calvinists: Princeton (Presbyterian) vs. Rutgers (Dutch Reformed). The sport’s first-ever victorious player-coach would even become a leading figure within the latter denomination.

• Two years later, faculty disapproval of the sport’s violence would prevent a whole year of intercollegiate football from happening. So the 1871 season’s only known football pitted Princeton University against Princeton Theological Seminary. Now there’s a metaphor.

• Soon, the sport’s power was Yale (Congregational). One player — a teammate of football godfather Walter Camp’s — would become a Yale Divinity professor and regularly published theologian. Along the way, Camp (Episcopalian) and company turned football from Mutant League Soccer into a game we’d recognize, partly so that those faculty libs would stop complaining about the sport killing people. After all, banning the sport would prevent young men from gaining the heroic powers of Muscular Christianity favored by football guys like Camp and Teddy Roosevelt (raised Presbyterian) and current Senator Tommy Tuberville (Church of Christ) and so on.

Here’s a thing people like to say about that sport:

“Down south, college football is like a religion!”

Sure, but here are the two ways in which that sentence doesn’t go far enough:

1. Whatever behavior is being described in this way, it is a behavior that is not, and has never been, limited to the South. (Are you hearing Ohio State fans right now and/or always?) There is nothing that has been neatly quarantined inside the South or anywhere else.

2. It’s never necessary to describe something as being “like” a religious experience or gathering or practice, partly because there is no such thing as “secular.”

College football is religion because everything is religion, just as everything is college football. You cannot tell a complete story of football without including a story of American religion, sure, but here’s the surprise: It’s actually tricky to tell the full story of American religion without mentioning college football a time or two.

What, you’re gonna skip the Fighting Irish’s effects on American attitudes toward Catholicism … and the most visible religious movement of the 1990s being founded by Colorado’s football coach … and a kingmaking pastor being America’s designated spokesman at Arkansas-Texas 1969, football’s biggest game to that point, even though President Richard Nixon was in attendance?

“There have been a lot of presidents,” Texas lineman Bob McKay said to Sports Illustrated. “There’s only been one Billy Graham.”

At that first football game 100 years prior, a Rutgers professor is said to have protested the brawl by shouting, “You men will come to no Christian end,” because football has been a theological argument since literally day one (because everything is), since long before Jerry Falwell got so mad about Brown v. Board of Education that he founded a university with the explicit goal of using Notre Dame-style football branding to help build the kind of platform that could get Roe v. Wade overturned.

I hope that title sticks, because I like it, but we’ll see where that part lands. Either way, thank you to Erik and Dan for giving this project a home where it can become itself. Now I get to read so many books written by Bobby Bowden.

(Yep, there will also be another novel at some point, if I live that long, but writing that one’s gonna be way more of a convoluted ordeal than the first one was, so I might not. The college football book will likely not be the thing that kills me, at least.)

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How to fix bowl games

“How to fix bowl games” is a title that has been affixed to numerous arguments over the years, even in the days when there actually weren’t any problems with bowl games, other than the thousands of laborers having to work for Best Buy gift cards and Belk hats.

One idea that I blogged in the 2010s: Move all bowl games to the following season’s Week 0. That was a great idea, but also pointless, because bowls were mostly fine.

But now that the playoff is huge, I think bowl games will soon need fixed for real. For one thing, FBS playoff games now begin before Christmas, the time that used to be the attention sanctuary of pizza-company bowls starring Directional Michigans.

In a time such as this, here’s an idea even better than moving bowls to Week 1: Replace conference championships with bowl games.

Conference title games are weird fits for the current era, since there’s zero reason for many of these teams to even be in the same leagues, let alone leagues that are so huge, so many contenders miss each other along the way. (See: the Big 12.)

We could replace conference championships with another playoff round, but then we’d be killing bowl games even harder.

Instead, we’ll use bowl venues as hosts for frantically booked games during the final weekend before the playoff. It’ll be a mix of a Bracket Buster weekend, a one-day sprint through bowl season, and professional wrestling matches hastily conducted on the other side of a commercial break right here, right now, in the great city of Shreveport, Louisiana.

For example, this week, we’re doing the following on make-believe Saturday:

Colorado vs. Boise State in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl: The Broncos have been the better team, and deserve to host the game that can function as the Heisman race’s finale. Sure, while Travis Hunter plays offense, Ashton Jeanty could play defense. If you were a quarterback, you’d be scared to see a linebacker doing this:

Absolutely, I know this image is grainy. If I’d wanted a clearer one, I would’ve chosen a clearer one.

Oregon vs. Washington State in the Pear Bowl: Oregon’s already beaten Ohio State, and the new Big Ten is fake. Instead, the Ducks (a Pac-12 team) should face the Pac-12 champion, but they’ve also already beaten Oregon State, so they’ll play the Pac-12 runner-up.

We’re reviving this 1946-51 bowl game, the only FBS bowl ever played in Oregon, formerly at small-school stadiums. (The top two states in pear production are Washington and Oregon, so the name of this rejuvenated rivalry is now the Pear Bowl.)

Tulane vs. Navy is the AAC title game, but that matchup sounds like a mid-tier bowl anyway, so it’s cleared to remain on the schedule. Navy’s stadium can even host this event, as long as we call it the Military Bowl Brought to You by Weyland-Yutani or Whoever.

Notre Dame vs. SMU at First Baptist Dallas’ football stadium (they gotta have a football stadium in there somewhere): Some people try to argue that these are both ACC teams. Obviously, that’s not canon. Miami and Clemson or whoever can do the ACC Championship in the Mayo Bowl.

I am here to give Notre Dame a 13th game, and I am also overruling the committee’s requirement that only conference champs can earn CFP first-round byes, though I worry this will ruin my summer bet that the Irish will become the first team to ever lose an FBS playoff game at home.

Southern Miss vs. Kent State in “the GameAbove Sports Bowl”: Each year in my system, whichever bowl has the silliest new name has to host the last-place showdown between FBS’ two worst teams.

Apparently, this is the new name of the Detroit game that spent its debut decade as the Quick Lane Bowl. There are other new Silly Bowl Names (the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl and Salute to Veterans Bowl, mainly), but this one is the silliest because everyone’s just gonna call it “the Sports Bowl,” which sounds like something made up by Jon Bois.

For more on my bona fides as a judge of Silly Bowl Names, see my ranking of the 63 silliest ever at that time. If I can blog like that while colossally depressed, just imagine how much I already know about Silly Bowl Names during normal times.

Alabama vs. Ole Miss in the goddamn SEC West where they belong: We have a CFP rankings dilemma involving two teams who haven’t played each other despite previously being in the same division for 31 fucking years. Put shit back where it was.

Texas vs. Texas A&M in the Texas Bowl: You two have a lot more catching up to do. Snuggle back up!! We’re gonna sing one more verse:

Additionally, we will be revamping this weekend’s traditional Dr. (with period) Pepper scholarship toss. Going forward, it will pit Ivy League legacies against each other, and both the winner and the loser will be sent to person schools instead.

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1. If you buy a copy of my (frankly well-reviewed) book before December 7, and send jasonkirkbook at gmail.com your new receipt and your address, we’ll send you an autograph sticker that will turn your copy into an author-signed copy — along with other stickers, while supplies last. (U.S. only.) We’ll send in time for Christmas, so you can give these copies as gifts. 😉

2. Two recent HIAWWY reviews that I really liked, both coincidentally here on Substack: Noah Grand’s very personal autobiographical review, and Benjamin Rose on the power of fiction to say things non-fiction usually can’t.

3. If you happen to be making a Best Books of 2024 list at Goodreads or wherever, I think HIAWWY should make the cut, but I’m biased. Here are some Goodreads lists it’s on atm, in case that’s useful!