Last episode, we took a look back at what it meant to be a college football fan in the weirdest year on record.
Last year, I was in on the football and out on the storylines. You know, like so many of the storylines were so dour, and I just really didn't want to follow along.
I just sort of mailed in my fandom last year.
It was like a weird feeling to get excited but also keep this part of your mind to that you're just kind of.
Like, I don't know if I should be enjoying it this much. Now, let's close the book on twenty twenty. From the solid verbal, this is a special production, so now what Welcome back. My name is Ty Hildebrandt. I am joined as always by my co host and friend Dan Rubinstein, and on today's show we close the book on twenty twenty. We look ahead to twenty twenty one, and we talk about what we as fans can take from that experience, apply to this coming season and hopefully
have the best season ever. Dan, how are you?
I'm great, and I'm hoping for the best, because not just is the world going through hopefully positive changes, at least the college football world at least this country. Hopefully everybody continues to move in a positive direction as it relates to coronavirus pandemic and everything that has been affected by it. But I'm encouraged that we will have a relatively normal season, relatively normal season from the fan standpoint.
And I'm curious though, because that's just a short term view, because as the college football world gets back to quote unquote normal, it's also an experience that is continually getting more and more different than what we're used to, right, like the transferring and the NIL stuff and TV deals and commissioner going in and out, like it's a sport going through a lot of changes, the postseason changes, Like, I'm curious to see if everybody's just going to be
so happy to be along for the ride that they just roll with everything.
My assumption is they won't, because.
That the college football fan experience is very much aligned with not rolling with everything. So I'm just I'm exceedingly curious about how we all ride this wave.
It will be interesting to see what happens. As we said in part one, we had a trusted panel overballers with us on a Zoom call to discuss all things related to the fan experience, and one of the topics that came up was that whole situation of unrest. Again,
think back a year. We have a pandemic, we have an election, we have social unrest in this country, a lot of things going on, and it just sort of all spilled out into the college football world on some level when it came to are they going to play a season or are they not going to play a season? Who is the final voice in the room. Is it safe? Is it not safe? I thought one of our verbawlers put it best.
Will like the vitriol that you saw last fall like disaster to stick around, because that, to me, that makes the game itself like less fun.
It did make it less fun, and it was something that we had to deal with as fans to great extent, I know for me personally, and this is something that came up also in our panel. I relied less on social media to get my information on game day and
to build context for our podcasts. In general. I used a lot less social because there was just so much going on, random infighting because of an election, We've got major cultural tensions because of the death of George Floyd, and obviously widespread pain and suffering because of the pandemic. I tuned out social as best I could, only to stay seen and that extended to game days for me. And I feel like if we're looking to maybe tune out some of that vitriol or some of that conflict
that we don't need any more of. That is something that I'm going to take with me into twenty twenty one, maybe focus a little bit more on the game in front of me on the big screen, and aser Verballer said a little bit less on the small screen.
There's a lot of really positive things about following along and the conversation online during games, and people are posting clips of amazing catches, or people are posting like an amazing stat that this team hasn't done this since this year, whatever. There's really interesting context to be had. But with everything sort of melding together, it's easy to get your brain scrambled a little bit if you're paying too much attention
to your laptop or your phone. So now I get where you're coming from that, like you just you have to be discerning about how you consume on Saturdays or really any other day of the week. Who you are following, how you are following how often you are reading that kind of thing, Like, you need to look out for yourself as well, and if football is that escape for you, let it be an escape. Trust the escape.
Lesson number one for me was to try and tune out noise and enjoy the game in front of me. Lesson number two perhaps goes without saying. Lesson number two is that in a year where it was really difficult to focus on some of these topics that would otherwise bring us great joy, the fact that it seems like we're going to have a level of normalcy in twenty twenty one is incredibly exciting. It's incredibly exciting to look ahead.
We had countless comments from folks who are already starting to get into it, maybe even earlier than before this year.
You know, going into the summer, I found myself definitely following a little bit more closely, you know, outside of the raw football product, like following a little bit more on recruiting, Following what they're doing in terms of amenities for the stadium, you know, seeing what's happening with the you know, athletic department as a whole. I've definitely found myself a little bit more back into that, Like I normally would be.
And this support something that I think we've been saying on the show now for a while that even though we had a really goofy twenty twenty, we anticipate that it's going to be all gas, no breaks in twenty twenty one. People are going to be into it earlier than usual. They're going to be following that narrative more intensely than ever before. We had a comment hear from Andrew.
I think over the past month, I've really caught the fever, I guess, and I'm baiyah, I am ready and like have caught up on all the recruiting.
We are recording this in May, Dan, and I know from looking at our numbers typically May is not one of the hot months for college football. I feel like I'm picking up that sentiment across the board that May is not too early in twenty twenty one to fully re engage with college football. No.
I mean, we do this show all year every year, so you know, it's one of those things we're engaging with the sport all year long, even if the news that comes out isn't all that plentiful. But yeah, it's hard to paint an entire group of a sports fans with a broad brush, because I still think some people are going to be I think a minority of people are going to be hesitant about bigger gatherings, be it watch parties or attending games or traveling to attend games.
But I think, by and large, my hunch is you are more likely than not to be more engaged than you were last year around this time or even June July, August, when there's media days, when camp opens, when more and more stories are coming out about things that are going to happen during the season with your favorite team or a conference or anything like that. Yeah, I think the majority of people are ready to exhale and la.
Loose, even just from the standpoint of paying attention, even if it doesn't translate to people going out to the stadium. I think there is definitely an element here of not realizing what you had until it was gone or until was not itself a slim down diet version of itself. And so I would expect that we're going to see just intense fervor for college football in a way that
we haven't seen in generations. In twenty twenty one. That's less than two for me, We did talk specifically to that point of are you gonna go out to the games, like, what's what's that going to look like? I'm gonna go to a big game to the first weekend and I'm not looking back like.
I'm head first absolutely all on into the season.
I feel like it's one or the other. I feel like you're going to have a swath of folks who are not comfortable yet with that, and then on the polar opposite side, you're going to have folks like our verballer who are just intensely ready to get in there, go to the stadium, pack it in, cheer for your team, and carry on as normal.
Well, think about how much more information we have now, even a few months after the season, just between vaccinations, between just more and more science coming out. It's just it's going to fill people with a confidence that they just didn't have. So much was unknown, and so much changes, and so much is added to our our knowledge base every day, every hour, every week, whatever, and so it's
a huge, huge deal. We were trying to form opinions with very little known about how to combat travel gatherings, you know, masks, things of that nature, and obviously now vaccines. So the fact that people are armed with so much more knowledge, I think is just it's beyond meaningful at this point. The question to me is, it's not like and this is a broader conversation, we can touch on it a little. It's not like college football. The sport
was in a great place attendance wise. So maybe this is a shot in the arm, partial pun intended for attending games live because we're so desperate to be in person with people and to yell in person, and to tailgate, and to hear a marching band in person, and to kick the pole at USC and all the fun traditions.
But I wonder if it's short lived. I wonder if things sort of go back to the way they were twenty seventeen, eighteen nineteen in terms of the TV product has gotten so good, the pain of parking and you know, finding reasonably priced tickets and going to a stadium that there aren't enough bathrooms or the catwalks are cramped and there's no Wi Fi or phone signal or anything like that.
I wonder if we get back to that less ideal version of normal as well, or if schools are going to double down and really embrace the fact that we prove being together in a stadium more than ever before. That to me is interesting question wise.
I think for sure, in the short term we're going to see an influx in folks who want to go out. We're going to see higher than usual ticket prices on game day on stub Hub. There will be demand for these tickets. And I don't care what school you will see demand. What happens though in twenty twenty two remains to be seen. Will it go back to the place where Dennis Dodd is writing about SEC attendance. What do you think? I think eventually it will get back to
that place. I don't know if it's going to occur just after one season. I could see this taking a while to get out of everyone's system.
It's a question of the sports health in general, where people believe playoff participants are kind of a foregone conclusion right now, where you sometimes you get sort of that wild car team that isn't used to being in that conversation, like LSU was a couple of years ago that was
just lightning in a bottle. But by and large, the postseason of the top of the sport has looked kind of similar for a few years now, and I don't know if it's a direct relationship, is a correlation causation thing, but depending on what the postseason looks like, depending on how well schools and stadiums invest in the fan experience and making things as comfortable as possible, because for a
long time they didn't have to. People just always bought tickets and showed up and tailgated and yelled at the refs and did everything that comes with the territory of attending a game. I sincerely wonder and there is an opportunity to be had. There's a financial investment needed, but there's an opportunity to be had as fans come back, for fans to come back and see how much better
the stadium and in person experience is now. I don't know if the funds are there for a lot of these places to make those investments, but the opportunity is there right now to double down on how excited people are about attending names.
We shall see what happens, but I think that is one of the other takeaways for me in talking with folks that of course there will be some hesitancy about going back to the stadium, but we are going to see a great number of folks who are on the complete opposite end, and they are just chomping at the bit, champing at the bit, champing to get out there and cheer on their favorite teams. What other takeaways do you have, Dan.
That people want to feel okay about watching football. I think a lot of people felt fine about watching football last year. But I think if you look at the totality of college football fans, you know, some people felt that there should have been a spring season and it should have been pushed back to where we did know more and that would have been the safer route to go.
And I think a lot of those people are going to feel a lot better about watching, engaging with the sport, going to game games, listening to podcasts, watching game day things like that than ever before. I am looking forward to seeing the I mean I mentioned the overall health of the sport and just how people feel about a
sport that's still changing a lot. We're seeing nil laws across different states and conversations about Congress getting involved, and I'm curious to see how people once they are fully back in with the sport and looking at message boards and you know, making their opinions known among their friends and online. I'm curious to see what the long term health of the sport looks like with a lot of the horrors of twenty twenty behind us.
I definitely noticed as well that just in talking with our panel, even in talking with some of our previous interview subjects, that source of conflict was a through line. Everybody felt very conflicted about this season. Even the people who wanted to play the season felt conflicted about some element of it. So to be able to go into twenty twenty one with hopefully most of that behind us is definitely a wanted need from the fan base, from the college football universe as a whole. People want to
be past that. They don't want to have to deal with that baggage anymore. One of the other big takeaways for me, Dan and this goes back to this whole idea to do a so Now What series. Looking back when we originally envisioned this subject back in late November early December, the hope, the intent was that our part two would always feature a great deal of lessons learned. I don't know if we ever really got there. I
think we found it. On a personal level, people learned things about themselves, what it meant to be cooped up, what it meant to be watching games at home alone, away from their friends. But in neither the conference show, nor the PAC twelve show where we talked about players and coaches, nor the broadcasting show, nor this one, frankly, did we learn a whole lot that we can take
with us into twenty twenty one and beyond. And so I guess the big thing that I've learned is that, more than anything, people just want to forget about this. People are just done with this, for better or worse. That is the sentiment that I think rang the most true.
Yeah, I think a lot of the lessons are probably going to come out of the fact that we learned a lot more about the inner workings of the sport and how administrators and coaches and players are or are not able to navigate serious challenges. And we saw discord in the Big ten, and we saw certain conferences much more on the same page in terms of how things should operate, whether they should play, how stadiums should be. And that's a huge lesson about who's on the same
page and who's not. I thought a huge lesson was knowing that the players had the quietest voice in this all, that they were able to make their voices heard, And I think moving forward, that's a huge deal.
Trevor Lawrence justin fields guys with a lot to lose. I think it's a huge deal.
I think it's a huge deal that is not going away, no matter how badly some people want it to and have the conversation strictly be about football. I think there's an interesting lesson about players' ability to get message out that I think is a huge, huge deal that I don't think is going to go away. So that to me is also fascinating.
And fans responding to it, frankly, because without the reception from the college football world, none of it goes anywhere anyway. The fact that it was met with the reception it was was a turning point in many ways, and a good one at that.
Yeah, I think there is going to be a certain amount of accountability that didn't exist in the sport before because of how transparent things can be, both with reporting, with social media and with just the inspiration to make certain truths known. So that to me is going to be an ongoing element of all of this. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot to unpack with twenty twenty. Tie that you know is just it's going to play out, not just over this offseason, but years to come.
I am ready to close the book on twenty twenty. How about you as am? I?
Yeah, I absolutely am. It was a year i'd I'd rather forget in terms of my own selfish personal fandom.
Thanks for listening to So Now What, our limited run series taking a look back and a look ahead. A special thank you to our eschemed panel Overballers Andrew Andrew, Dan Cole, Taylor, Nathan Mark and Squishy. To close the book on twenty and So Now What. Head on over to verballers dot com for our live discord chat on Friday night, June the fourth. While you're there, you can also find audio and video versions of the interviews we
use to make this series. Thank you again for your support, Stay safe, and as always, stay solid.