Once was a time I really enjoyed college football.
I’ve always liked Ohio State and Virginia, and at least in 1963, I got tremendous enjoyment out of watching Roger Staubach lead Navy to the Cotton Bowl. Navy was 9-2 that season, and oddly enough, both of its losses came in the same stadium, to SMU in the regular season and to Texas in the bowl game.
I certainly don’t want to get into a “good old days” rant here, but after covering football as a sportswriter in the ’80s and ’90s, I could see that the game was really starting to change.
In 1946, before I was born, Army and Notre Dame played at Yankee Stadium in New York in what is considered one of the best college football games ever played.
The final score?
0-0.
And yes, it was American football, not soccer.
0-0.
I can almost hear modern young fans reacting to that.
“Borrrrrrr – ing!”
And this afternoon, a game was played between two teams I don’t follow except as rivals to Virginia. North Carolina scored 28 points in the fourth quarter for a come-from-behind 59-53 victory over Wake Forest.
If you think about it, that’s nearly two points a minute in a 60-minute game.
There will be people who attended that game who will consider that one of the best games they ever saw. Yet I’m certain there were people at that Army-Notre Dame game in ’46 who felt equally good about that 0-0 tie.
I can’t help wondering if it’s a question of overstimulation. Around 1960, when the concept of sound bites came along, the idea was that a news show might show the best two minutes of a political speech. Within a decade, that two minutes had been reduced to 30 seconds.
I believe now it’s 7 seconds.
It’s even more pronounced in movies. Look at some of the best movies from the ’30s and ’40s and they’ll look almost static compared with modern films that cut from one shot to the next every 2-3 seconds.
Does that make me feel old?
Hell, yes. Of course I am old. I find myself wondering if that’s why my default position when it comes to watching movies is to watch things I have seen before and enjoyed. It may be why I’ve never seen any of the Matrix movies or any of the Lord of the Rings films. I have seen all the Star Wars movies except the most recent one, but with many of the recent ones, I haven’t tackled them until they had been out a year or two.
Maybe being old is why I have so enjoyed watching baseball the last few years. The game has changed for the worse in some ways — mostly the increase in strikeouts — but the pace is pretty much the same as it’s always been. I don’t walk away from watching baseball feeling overstimulated.
At my age, that’s a good thing.
I can live with the occasional 12-11 game, because I know one thing.
It’s never going to be 59-53.