Hawkeye Style

Thank you, Deadspin, for posting this video to a wider audience.

College football, a sport of rivalry, pageantry, and not a little bit of id, concluded its regular season last weekend.  Now we await bowl season, a calendar of thirty-four arranged matches lousy with corporate sponsorship overlaying America's holiday calendar.  It all culminates on 7 January 2010 when Alabama and Texas play in the Citi BCS National Championship for the "Coaches' Trophy presented by Dr. Pepper."  The whole spectacle of college football with its marching bands, cheerleaders, and huge stadiums bedecked in partisan apparel only intensifies for these events.

All those trappings of competition might be symptomatic of unfortunate tribalistic fervor with disturbing resemblances to militant nationalism.  However, it should be remembered that many parts of America have embraced university teams because of a dearth of other amusements.  This would be especially true of many state schools.  Notice a pattern among many of these other top-ranked teams in addition to Alabama and Texas: Utah, Nebraska, Oklahoma State, West Virginia, and Iowa.  Most of these places are long on rural heritage and without a local professional team.  Too little  urban entertainment should help explain why aspiring rapper Notti Boy took the time to record the largely wholesome video above in support of his team, University of Iowa Hawkeyes.  It sounds like hip-hop in the Midwest has not changed much since the start of the decade. Imagine the even greater limitations of supporters for high achieving football squads at religious institutions like BYU (Brigham Young University, a Mormon college in Provo, Utah) and TCU (Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, TX).

Iowa and Georgia Tech play in the FedEx Orange Bowl on 5 January 2010.

USA Soccer: First the Bad News

Update added below...

Mexico is in. England is in. So is Italy, but Turkey is out, and Portugal is looking shaky. Saturday featured worldwide sporting excitement as the major European football (soccer) leagues paused their schedule for the penultimate game of the World Cup group qualifiers. The Americans had to travel to Central America and defeat Honduras if they wanted a place at next summer's World Cup finals in South Africa. But did anyone care in the USA?

Yesterday, the Passengers awoke early in Singapore to join some of my countrymen watching college football courtesy of new-fangled Slingbox technology. For all you Britons, college football is the Saturday ritual of autumn across the Atlantic that involves millions of people gathering in stadiums with seating for over 100,000 people to watch university students play (American) football. A college football Saturday features more than fifty games, but only about twenty really matter. To partake of this rite in Singapore, twelve hours ahead of New York, passionate alumni must choose between the afternoon games starting at midnight or the evening games that start at 8:00 AM Sunday morning. This week was the highly anticipated contest between Florida and Louisiana State, but we were Big Ten alumni so we cared more about Michigan vs. Iowa.

As we watched, we noted the results from the earlier European qualifiers that occasionally scrolled across the bottom of the screen, along with other college scores and listings for the baseball playoffs, but none of us knew what country USA was playing nor what the game meant for their chance to qualify. The second half of the match in Honduras was still going when the Michigan game finished so we decided to change channels and cheer for our country. Unfortunately, no station available to us was carrying the game. That's right, despite 300+ channels of cable television available to one Michigan household, not one station bothered to broadcast a major international soccer match.

UPDATE (14 October 2009): The difficulty in finding the USA vs. Honduras game on TV was abetted by the Honduras federation, which under FIFA rules holds the television rights as the home side, deciding to sell the US broadcast rights to a company which elected to show the game on an obscure closed-circuit broadcast. Similar, yet stranger, circumstances restricted the moot England qualifier in Ukraine to a pay-per-view, online-only event. However, both blackouts ultimately resulted from the calculations of major media outlets that the expense of buying television rights and altering established broadcast schedules would not garner the advertising revenues or ratings to justify airing a World Cup qualifier.