College football is a television show now. That was my thought after watching the semifinals of the College Football Playoffs on New Year’s Day. Overhyped and overproduced, grotesquely overlong—each game took almost four hours—the CFP now seems less like a sporting event than like the Academy Awards for football. College sports may still be many other things—a campus event, a communal gathering, an enactment of the scholar-athlete ideal—but college football invokes those values only in service of a larger project of branded commercial spectacle.
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