When you’re stranded you think about difficult things. Dark thoughts of disappearing horizons, daunting ifs and thens, promises you made to yourself during sleepless nights. And the same was true last week when a snowstorm delayed my return home from vacation long enough to cause me to miss recording the podcast. “If I ever go back home preparing a podcast,” I promised myself in the very comfortable hotel room where my wife and I ended up staying for two pleasant nights, longer than expected. “I promise to have Spencer Hall on my podcast.”
This is the kind of promise you make when you don’t know if you can make it, when you don’t know what the value of the promise is. But look:
I’ve talked very briefly about my somewhat annoying but not at all shocking stranding experience, but there was a lot more to talk about. That means I had to save my meal-by-meal breakdown of my Savannah experience to a food podcast. Davie’s Shrimp BoatIt’s not currently available where you get podcasts. After briefly talking about the BBC show. between and the importance of unhealthy lifestyles in developing elite sportscasters (which includes Verne Lundquist’s hilarious story of Spencer sharing an email account with his wife). We come to an issue Spencer knows better than most people: college sports fucking.
Our starting point was a damning white paper published by three administrators at the University of Louisville. This shows how clearly untenable and economically punitive the current state of college sports is, even for elite programs. This report is actually pretty damning and accurate insofar as it assesses that whatever the future of college sports is, it probably won’t involve the NCAA and won’t be easily achievable for non-elite institutions in an increasingly integrated national enterprise. Spencer ventured to make predictions about the future along the lines of a Super League operating like a multi-tiered English football system, but mostly we talked about how it all works and doesn’t work at the moment. We talked about how Indiana’s national championship season happened in a practical and contextual sense, how difficult it is to know how much money is being spent and where, the tragedy of booster fatigue, and why college sports keep reproducing the same systems and the same workarounds.
After the break, we considered (and ignored) the federal government’s involvement in solutions to this particular problem, as well as Spencer’s vision for a college sports industry developing beyond schools and its implications for the NFL. We also talked about the SEC cities most committed to the Barefoot Is Legal lifestyle. Funbag continued with the question of where we would go to college if we had the chance again. I took that question more seriously than it needed to be, and in the process shared how my 18-year-old self was afraid of college-style parties and how unprepared I was for how great things were in Southern California. This has actually been the podcast I’ve been dreaming of for two and a half very enjoyable years. I’m glad to be back.
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