I'm trying not to doxx myself, but this entry's gonna be pretty hard to avoid disclosing certain details about where I live.
That having been said, I think I'm the only one in this whole state who doesn't care about Huskers football. We don't have a pro team around here, so we throw our support behind an otherwise small-time NAIA team belonging to the University: the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Or NCAA... NCEA? WKRP? I don't know. Right, I don't care. The fact is, Huskers football is a bigger deal here than any pro team in their home city or state. The University of Nebraska makes millions every season on Huskers shite, from mass-produced kitsch sold in tourist traps to broadcast fees from the networks that actually show the games, and certainly the white-supremacist bourgeoisie who buy season passes gets them quite a bit of money. "Go Big Red" means big green.
So, you can imagine that this college team's inconceivably huge local fanbase gets particularly upset when they lose a game. So far, this year's team has won both its games, so people are really stoked about that; but the last 3 or 4 teams lost so badly, they didn't even get to play in the Loser Bowl (whatever it's called). The fans blame the coaches, and UNL pays the head coach as much as any NFL coach would make, so there's been a substantial turnover in coaches lately. What no one ever takes into account is, the players. These are 19, 20, 21 year old kids who accidentally performed well at the homecoming game one year in high school and their dads started pressuring them to go to UNL on a football scholarship. After all, the celebrity-level bragging rights that would bring—"well, Dale, you may have been promoted to assistant 2nd-level middle manager, but my son plays for the Huskers"—are positively legendary. The problem is, the teams are often composed of kids who never wanted to play football. I knew kids like that at high school. This is a step below UNL, the time when you either become the school MVP, or you don't. For anyone not familiar with the American athletics system, you must play ball in secondary school—any kind of ball—in order to play that sport professionally. Parents know this, and a lot of them project their own passion for the sport onto their child. The number of kids in my high school who could write HTML, who could write essays, who could draw manga, who could paint like Bob Ross's protégé, who were compelled into playing varsity football on the slim chance that they would get into UNL on a football scholarship and play for the Huskers was absolutely staggering. One kid in the orchestra, he could play the trombone like the jazz greats, but his dad made him play football. One kid in my AP English class, he could play chess better than the chess team captain. His dad made him play football. One kid from my theatre troupe, his parents gave him a choice to either try out for the football team or go to the trades boarding school. They didn't specify which part of the football team he should try out for, so he became my school's first male cheerleader. Absolute king shit. We laughed at him mightily, not knowing any better.
The point is, there are too many kids who go to UNL and play for the Huskers who have no business being there. They should be acting or writing music or doing science or preparing for law school, but they're playing football like good little Nebraskans, giving it their all which is never enough for the coach, getting screamed at and humiliated at practise, and thinking boot camp would be a better place for them. I used to wish the Huskers would lose. Everytime there was a game, I used to say, "here's hoping they lose". Once I realised why they were losing, I couldn't say that anymore. I stopped seeing a unified, generic football team, and started seeing individuals acting the same. These boys and men make themselves into generic figures who are forgotten as soon as the new team comes in next year. On several occasions, Husker players have been arrested for drunk driving, reckless endangerment, sexual assault, this, that, these, and those—they're acting out. They're having their wants and needs ignored, so they're acting out as a young man will do. They're not inherently criminal, they just don't want to play football, so they do something to quiet that voice down. In high school, they would have gotten detention. In college, they're getting arrested. In all cases, they got kicked off the team, so I guess it worked. However, their newfound criminal record also makes them unsuitable for continued enrollment in UNL, so they get kicked out of there too, and their dads are probably pretty pissed so they aren't welcome at home anymore either. Seeing a pattern here? To me, this is Huskers football. "Go Big Red" means about as much as "Make America Great Again" or "Punch Nazis"—it's a meaningless slogan, robotically parrotted by a society more interested in its leisure activities than the actual kids whose hopes and dreams for the future were discarded like an empty packet of crisps.
Fortunately, it looks like this year's team actually wants to play football. I hope this is indicative of a turning-point in our system, where parents care more about their child's own needs than their own thirst for celebrity.
But, I doubt it.