It’s harder to sweat who’s blocking at OU or how much NIL money anyone’s making at OSU or what team is next on either schedule when the Sooners and Cowboys are actually playing.

Ralph Russo and I spent the first half-hour of my most recent Mind Games podcast loading up on the heavy topics tipping college football in a complex, uncomfortable direction.

We have been writing about the sport for 20 or so years, Russo from a national perspective with the Associated Press and me on a Bedlam-related scale in Oklahoma. We are having to reinvent our coverage to keep up. 

“I think I’m a lawyer now. Really, I think I could pass the bar,” Russo said on the show. “I never thought I was going to have to read this many court documents and have to know that much about legalese to cover college sports when I decided I wanted to be a sportswriter when I was 13 years old.”

I wasn’t sure about the sportswriting part when I was 13, but gosh did I love watching college football. I remember OU scoring 82 points at Colorado on something called ESPN. I remember Bill Flemming talking me through the Sooners’ 21-17 upset at Nebraska, and then Keith Jackson narrating USC-UCLA later that day. 

Fall Saturdays were everything, man. 

It’s good to be reminded of that now that I’m middle-aged and more irritable and I tire easier, and I work a job connected to college football.

Unlike the NFL, the faces of the biggest college programs are the head coaches. Why are the good ones leaving in droves? - by Todd Lisenbee https://t.co/CupuftM3GV #SelloutCrowd

— Sellout Crowd (@selloutcrowd_) February 9, 2024

A lot of that job means keeping tabs on volatile coaching staffs and player rosters because of the transfer portal and name, image and likeness, and on conferences realigning because ESPN has grown up to pay conferences billions of dollars to televise their games, and on court dockets because the money pouring from media outlets and donor collectives into college football threatens the NCAA’s amateurism foundation and the NCAA responds in billable hours. 

Russo and I covered some of this shaking ground that first half-hour of Mind Games, focusing on potential aftershocks at OU and OSU. I’m glad we did. 

It’s important to process the sea change and to try to make sense of as much as we can. I felt better processing with a colleague. Maybe a few of you tuned in and anything we said helped you process. 

It’s still a little exhausting. It can be discouraging. Like last fall, when we all had to re-learn OU’s depth chart and remember that Texas wasn’t on OSU’s schedule, and then the regular season ended and we all had to wonder if the collectives around here were stocked enough to guarantee Ollie Gordon was coming back to the Cowboys and Danny Stutsman was staying with the Sooners. 

Wait till the courts pass final judgments related to players’ rights to revenue sharing and collective bargaining. It isn’t like this is going to get any easier moving forward. 

My idea was to finish Mind Games with a segment on those court cases, my guest being further along toward his juris doctor than me. Instead, I tamped down the turbulence and asked a question. 

So how do you feel about all this?

The answer was exactly what I needed to hear. 

“If the people who run the… I’m talking about college football in particular, but college sports in general… If they can just not burn this thing down before they get to Saturday,” Russo said. “Because on Saturday, everybody’s troubles go away and we sit down for 12 hours and we orgasmically watch this incredible product, which is college football and the pageantry and the wildness and so much of it…

“If the adults can just not screw it up and just get to Saturday, I think we’re generally fine.”

Fall Saturdays are still everything.

College football can be messy and confusing and locked in fights with schools, conferences, networks, agents and the NCAA itself, and the media who cover it and the fans who devour it can be exhausted or exasperated six days of the week… as long as there is a seventh. 

Game day. 

It’s harder to sweat who’s blocking at OU or how much NIL money anyone’s making at OSU or what team is next on either schedule when the Sooners and Cowboys are actually playing. 

“Yeah, I do still enjoy it,” Russo said. “I think that, ultimately, if you can protect the product, which is the games, you will still have a vibrant business and enterprise.”

The enterprise is changing because of business. We all know that. We all struggle with that at times, and with the effect it has on coaches, players and opponents who might not be as familiar to us.

But at least the games still look familiar. They are still most important. 

That’s something worth remembering more often between now and Aug. 31.