By james art 
Scott Davis has followed South Carolina athletics for more than 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter throughout the year (the following is his most recent) and a column during the football season that is published on GamecockCentral.com. To receive Scott’s newsletter every Friday, sign up here.
I promise we’ll get to this South Carolina men’s basketball season eventually.
Seriously, it’s going to happen. Maybe next week. Or the week after. Or in 2037. – whenever I feel ready. We’ll get there.
But while I muster up the courage to write about this lost campaign, let me take a moment to give you a confession.
I didn’t watch the College Football Playoff finale between Ohio State and Notre Dame on Monday night.
And by “I didn’t watch it,” I don’t mean that I wasn’t laser-focused on the game, or that I had it on in the background while I napped and read a magazine, or that I checked into it while flipping back and forth between it and reruns of ” The office.” I mean me never turned to it – not once – and in fact I still haven’t seen a single highlight from it.
The next time I see any broadcast footage of this game at all, it will be the first time I’ve ever seen it.
First, some caveats: I traveled last weekend and was tired, and it was freezing cold where I live, and I’m not a fan — or even a mild enthusiast — of either Notre Dame or Ohio State, so we could make a plausible case. that this is a one time thing where I took a year off, recharged my batteries after an extremely long college football season and a tough winter and that I will be making a rare return to sports this fall.
And we might add that I was not alone.
The game’s viewership — while still huge — was down 12.5 percent from last year’s title game and finished as the third-lowest viewership of the last 11 CFP Finals. Perhaps many of us were not particularly a feeling Buckeyes-Irish. It happens.
Still, I think it’s worth pondering: How did we get to the point where someone like me—a lifelong college football obsessive who reveres the game’s tradition, spectacle, and history—felt no impulse to tune in even for second biggest game of the year (which took place in my city)?
Year after year I may hate the game (especially if it involves a certain upstate university), but I always tune in. I always pay attention.
This year I didn’t. And I’m not sorry. If I had the chance, I would gladly not watch it again.
why
Is my passion for my favorite sport waning? Could this really be true?
Believe it or not, I have some thoughts.
An alienated nation
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There’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few years writing for GamecockCentral.
From 2020 ever since, whenever I’ve written something about the state of college football, the massive and chaotic change it’s undergoing, and the shattering earthquake the NIL and transfer portal have caused the sport, our readers will respond in droves.
A few weeks ago, I put together a newsletter about the incredibly low level of interest I had in watching this year’s non-playoff games, sent it off, and promptly forgot about it until my inbox was flooded with readers sharing similar stories.
The last time I got this much of a response was about a year earlier…when I wrote about the frustrating Juice Wells saga and the uncertainty the transfer portal has caused.
We seem to have entered a dizzying period where no one is sure if the ground they are standing on is solid – not the players, not the coaches, and especially not the fans. And what seems to frustrate most of the game’s backers is that no one seems to be responding.
Take this year’s College Football Playoff selection, for example. In the first year of a 12-team playoff, the committee tasked with selecting the participants seemed completely unable to articulate what they were looking for or why certain teams were selected over others.
If someone could tell me why SMU is in the field, I would listen. But no one did. In fact, no one even tried. We’ve had years to plan for this overhaul – and yet somehow no one created a ready list of characteristics the committee was looking for in playoff teams.
Meanwhile, NIL payments and the transfer portal seem to have simply landed on top of the sport overnight. There was no supervision, no game plan, no rules or regulations, no nothing.
As a result, what I sense more than anything else from the fans I speak to is a deep sense of alienation from the sport they’ve always loved the most: they don’t recognize it. It doesn’t look like the sport they grew up watching. At what point is too much change more harm than good?
Feelings, vibes and perceptions are more important in college sports than in professional sports. College sports are all feelings, all the time.
And when fans watch this sport right now, the feeling they seem to get the most is this: I’m not as keen on it as I used to be.
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For most of the past two years, economists have continued to insist that the United States is not in recession. The main economic indicators did not show that we are in one.
Yet for ordinary Americans, it just felt like the country was in one. Inflation was up and job growth wasn’t exactly roaring and things just seemed kind of dingy. The term coined to describe this strange state of affairs was vibecession.
As for the economy, the mood was not good.
Maybe we weren’t actually in a recession by the letter of the law, but it felt like we were in a recession to a lot of people, and eventually that feeling overcame everything else.
I’m sure the leaders of college football — whoever they are — could point to a host of statistics to tell you and me that the sport is healthier than ever. More people are watching sports than ever before, they will tell us.
Schools and networks make money. And the coaches too. And now, so are the players.
How can something that doesn’t work be flooded with money?
But it doesn’t matter to me what all the leading indicators and charts and graphs tell me.
What matters is how I feel. What matters are the vibrations, and they seem bad.
What matters is the simple fact that I’m not as passionate about the game as I was five years ago.
That seems sad to me. I hope someone in the upper echelons of the sport cares about my feelings.
I hope they care about yours too.
Let me know what you think about the state of college athletics by emailing me at [email protected].
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