In September of 2015, I think I was the most focused on sports than I ever had been before. I was running a podcast about my school’s football team, writing season previews and mid-season updates about Kansas football, I was watching NFL games every sunday, going to as many Sporting Kansas City and FC Kansas City matches as possible, and I was even following the Royals - I don’t even really like baseball!
This September, for some reason, is much different, and I don’t know exactly why, but I’m going to try to figure out what changed and why it changed.
Last year, I couldn’t get enough information about football, despite the fact that I was watching a team have an awful season. It was like walking to the guillotine every week - knowing what was going to happen and still hoping that it might change any given week. It never did. KU ended the season without a single victory. I spent so much time watching and hoping in futility that something would change, but nothing did.
Now, here I am again, riding on a bus back from a game that the Jayhawks lost by 30+ points. This is all too familiar, and I’m fatigued by it. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the work they put in, or that I’m not glad to be in attendance at the games, but it’s difficult to be excited to see games like this most recent one against Memphis, where the play on the field just didn’t seem to get better.
At this point, I’m less optimistic than I have ever been before, and I just don’t feel like setting myself up for disappointment again. Kansas Football used to mean so much to me and it hurts knowing that I don’t get excited for it anymore.
On the professional level, problems exist as well. I tried to watch football every Sunday last fall. It was hard to watch at points, but my hometown team in Kansas City had a successful season, they even won a playoff game for the first time in over twenty years. And yet, this fall, I’m not excited, and I haven’t intentionally spent any time watching the NFL yet two weeks in.
The games themselves are fine, they’re fun to watch, and there are so many young, exciting players coming into their primes each weekend.
Yet, as hard as I try, I have a hard time divorcing the excitement of the games on Sundays with the media’s hand-wringing that happens throughout the rest of the week. Last year’s NFL season was defined by the play of Carolina’s MVP, Cam Newton. A player whose excellence was underscored by so many news articles decrying his actions in and out of play. He was hit with so many “keep it classy” and “shut up and play the game” tweets that it started to feel suffocating.
He’s not the only one who this hit, either. This summer, I decided that I wasn’t going to waste my time with the NFL media anymore. Before the regular season even started, I started reading the same sort of sentiments surrounding San Francisco quarterback Collin Kaepernick, who took a knee and still takes a knee during the national anthem before games. Unlike Newton, this was political. Kaepernick put the question of racism in the face of the American people, and he was met exactly how I knew he would be. There were some people who understood why he did it before getting upset about the fact that he did it. Many of them were friends of mine, and I’m happy to see that.
It’s the people who don’t get that, who refuse to listen and understand, who are a deadly combination of louder and far easier to cut out of my life. I don’t have to turn on CBS on Sunday to watch 50 year old men complain about a problem they’ll never experience.
There are more little problems that I don’t have to deal with if I don’t want, either. This league, just last season, employed a man who had been found guilty of assaulting his girlfriend, not even a year after publicly ridding itself of another man who had done the same thing. We still have to argue about whether or not concussions are bad for the body. I’m not entirely comfortable doing a fake indian chant anymore. I was unwillingly humiliated when a friend started laughing at me when the Chiefs lost their last game last year.
All of those things are little, but they add up, and since they're so little, they're not hard to pluck out of my life.
So, yes, I'm bitter. I just don’t have to care anymore. I’m worried that, in a year, when I’m not in the stands for every game, I’ll have those same rationalizations about the college game as well. For right now, I’ll be hopeless in Memorial Stadium every Saturday and doing something else every Sunday.
