Alien ground

 Bought one of those college football preview mags the other day, because college football is coming up the street and I wanted to see how the old alma mater, Ball State, was expected to fare this fall.

(Answer: They're expected to suck.)

I also wanted to check out the service academies, and the Ivies, and a few of your random Elons and Holy Crosses and William and Marys. Just to make sure, you know, that college football was still being played in places where actual students did the playing. 

Which is why I did not check out the Incs. As in, Alabama Inc., Ohio State Inc., Texas A&M Inc., all those SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 Incs. 

College football, see, has always stirred the romantic in me, and there is damn little romance anymore in those precincts. These days it's alien ground. These days, it's all about transfer portals and NILs and Nick Saban crabbing about Jimbo Fisher buying players -- which is kinda like Microsoft crabbing about Amazon, or JPMorgan Chase crabbing about Bank of America.

They're all just bloated corporations, in other words, cranking out quarterbacks and wideouts and edge rushers for the WalMarts of the NFL. And thus I find college football at that level less and less appealing, even if I still get excited every year when the days shorten and the light takes on the curious slanting cast of August.

It's an old man's complaint, I suppose, that nothing's the way it used to be, or at least the way we choose to remember it being. But nothing's the way it used to be.

This does not necessarily have anything to do with the fact college athletes now can make money off their image and likeness, mind you. They should have always been able to do that. The athletic programs they enrich long ago shed the illusion they're institutions of higher learning, so why should the kids who generate those programs' gargantuan revenue  keep up appearances?

No, it's more the culture that forced the NCAA to allow NILs -- a culture that pays athletic coaches millions because their programs generate millions, and those millions are the only reason they exist anymore. That's probably always been the case to some degree, but they didn't use to be so blatant about it.

The other day, for instance, a young man named Myles Brennan announced he was leaving college football behind. An often-injured quarterback at LSU, he'd been granted a sixth year of eligibility, and he was poised to be the Tigers' starter this fall, a role he last filled for them in 2020.

Brennan said, nah, no thanks. Five years of college football were enough. It was time to put away childish things, as the Bible says, and get on with being a grownup.

"It is time for me to start a new chapter in my life," he said in a statement.

I found that refreshing. And it seemed to give college football exactly the context it should have in a young man's life.

Until, that is, Darren Rovell tweeted that Brennan had NIL deals with three or four different companies, and he'd be able to keep whatever money they'd paid him. Which made it sound like he was ripping them off or something.

"Bullstuff," I thought. "They agreed, he agreed, it's just business."

And then the college football romantic in me winced.