When I was growing up in the Teays Valley, my parents, siblings, and I took a trip in our used maroon 15-passenger van into the city, at my sisters’ insistence. It may have been after church. My father stopped the van in an old residential neighborhood —the kind with century-old Four Square houses, quiet brick streets, and concrete obelisk street markers— and let my oldest sisters out of the car. Outside was a large crowd of people. I learned that we were there because a large studio was filming a movie, more specifically because the movie had Matthew McConaughey and Matthew Fox. Fox, at the time in his Lost prime, was a familiar face to me; as the sixth child, I never got to pick what we watched on the T.V.
The movie being filmed was We Are Marshall, a movie about how Huntington, WV dealt with the death of the college football team in a horrific plane crash. I was born in Huntington, and my parents met there, at Marshall University. My father was a hillbilly on the collegiate wrestling team and my mother was a Florida girl who became homecoming queen. The college’s campus is beautiful, compact, and the nerve center of downtown. I now work at the steel mill featured in the film, across the street from the engineering building I spent most of my degree studying in.
When I was born, Marshall had recently won two Division II national football championships followed by a post-promotion run of Division I conference championships. This was all recent memory when We Are Marshall came out. My parents loved the movie, and I too thought it was pretty cool at the time.
However, I never felt the emotional connection seemingly everyone else did. As you can imagine, a movie about a plane crash is supposed to induce sadness in its audience, but I just couldn’t get into it. I was born almost 30 years after the plane crash; I wasn’t related to anyone on board; and I did not grow up in Huntington, though we did go to church and school there. In fact, I had closer ties to the Mothman-infamous Silver Bridge collapse that occurred only a few years before, up river from Huntington in Point Pleasant, and my family didn’t make a habit of wearing sackcloth and ashes over even that tragedy.
I assume that the town’s difficulties in the wake of the crash that the film documents are real and genuinely uplifting. But that was over fifty years ago, and NCAA football has changed a lot since then.
When I grew up, I went to college at Marshall, and settled into a comfortable rhythm. Every morning, I’d wake up at 5 in order to commute down the Teays Valley, arrive at the campus Rec Center in time for opening at six, go to a local coffeeshop before classes, then spend my evening either doing homework or working parttime at the jobs that funded my cafe society lifestyle. I was in the engineering college, and my degree wasn’t very difficult; I suspect only a handful of degrees typically are, nationwide. I worked ~30 hours a week doing retail jobs, and I always had plenty of free time. What I did not do was attend a home football game. I did not set out to neglect the football schedule, but I just never felt the impulse to go.
Once when I was in middle school, an ice cream man that set up shop in the parking lot ranted to me for several minutes — while I patiently waited for my SpongeBob ice cream bar — about how the NCAA was becoming a professional sports league, turning its back on the pure values of local sportsmanship. In my freshman year of college, I quickly figured out that the schizophrenic ice cream man was at least partially correct, even if his medium could be improved.
Football games hardly came up in campus conversation. The stadium was on the far end of campus, across a large parking lot. The student athletes seemed to not actually attend school, as I never had class with them, and besides, they had an army of private tutors. If certain rumors and trends are to be believed, their academic performance was somewhat overlooked, to say the least. Marshall students tended to come from West Virginia or the Appalachian regions of Kentucky and Ohio, but the football athletes were recruited from all over the country. A kid from my rival high school that I played against often in soccer became a walk-on starter for WVU, but cases like that are exceedingly rare in the NCAA. In general, no Marshall students grew up with the athletes or came from the same place. So why should I care if a college kid from Arizona caught a ball from a college kid from Philly?
In 2021, the Supreme Court affirmed in a case against the NCAA that the organization is indeed a professional sports league, making complete the change from de facto to de jure. In the years since, NIL deals have allowed students to gain considerable wealth from corporate and personal sponsors to the extent that it is seriously affected where students choose to play.
Marshall’s football team this year won the Sun Belt Conference title. Conferences no longer being regional is unfortunate and yet another symptom of the problem I am describing, but Marshall’s season was good enough regardless to be bowl-eligible; and so they were scheduled to play against AAC champion Army in the Independence Bowl.
Imagine the city of Huntington’s shock when Marshall’s head coach and virtually the entire playing squad entered the transfer portal, seeking more lucrative prospects before the season was even over. To quote ESPN’s article on the situation:
“Marshall has 36 players in the transfer portal, including 29 scholarship players and 17 players on the team's two-deep setup for the Sun Belt title game. All three Thundering Herd quarterbacks who played this season are in the portal, including starter Braylon Braxton, the Sun Belt Newcomer of the Year.”
Marshall forfeited the bowl game. And yet, I find it hard to blame the players, because by and large they were not from Huntington. Huntington was just the location of their dorm room on a pitstop in their professional sports career. If not for the forfeit, Huntington would not have even noticed they left.
The list of reforms to return college sports to the club era of a hundred years ago, when the teams were as grassroots as the turf they played on, are nigh endless and likely to never to be implemented. The sad truth is that creative minds interested in society-building will probably have to wait for the inevitable creative destruction of NCAA football before the time is right to replace it, and even then the replacement will probably be unrecognizable.
After all, why would the NCAA have listened to a schizophrenic ice cream man.
Excellent. Man, I despise the fanatical allegiance of Southerners and Appalachians to college sports.