College Football in Print
If it’s late November, another college football season must be hurtling right on schedule toward utter B.C.S. chaos and bowl season insanity. One valuable place to look for answers in between consulting computer rankings, strength of schedule logarithms, and Bob Stoops’s astrology chart is Sports Illustrated columnist Stewart Mandel’s 2007 book Bowls, Polls & Tattered Souls: Tackling the Chaos and Controversy That Reign over College Football.
Mandel is an opinionated but basically rational observer of college football who maintains an excellent blog and mailbag on Sports Illustrated’s website. In his first book, he takes on ten of the most confounding issues in the sport chapter by chapter, from the controversial history of the B.C.S. to the inscrutable workings of the bowl system.
Mandel devotes an entire fascinating chapter to the various polling systems, and he reveals the struggles and somewhat subjective methods he uses to assemble his own weekly AP ballot. Another chapter considers the very special (if you’re a fan), endlessly infuriating (if you’re anyone else) legacy of Notre Dame football. Mandel also calls for a major overhaul of the Heisman voting system, and in one of the very best chapters he tells the amazing story of the realignment of conferences over the last two decades; a.k.a., “How Boston College and Clemson Became Neighbors.”
Ultimately, Mandel argues that it’s the chaos and controversy that make college football special. If the conferences and schedules were rigidly standardized with a logical playoff system and a homogenous national structure, well, as Mandel points out, then you’d have the N.F.L. It might be a hard argument for fans of whichever team finishes second in the Big 12 South this season to swallow, but maybe all that unpredictable, political, ambiguous, passionate madness is worth embracing for its own sake.
Speaking of madness, Warren St. John’s Rammer, Jammer, Yellow Hammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania is one of the most entertaining, informative, and rather disturbing looks inside the world of college football ever written. St. John immersed himself in the fan culture of his childhood heroes, the Alabama Crimson Tide, for a season which saw him invest in a rickety $5,000 RV to travel the highways with some of the most die-hard fans in the nation.
Among his observations on the psychology of hard-core fans is the interesting contrast between students of the school and the often even harder-core fans who may never have attended a class. St. John befriended a group of the latter who persuasively argue that their fandom is much more pure, as they chose the team with which they live and die rather than taking it on as a byproduct of paying college tuition for four years.
Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer is an excellent travelogue of the American south and a penetrating look at the passions and obsessions that drive college football fans season after season. Its title also answers the age-old question of what the hell Crimson Tide fans manage to rhyme with “Give ‘em hell, Alabama.”
