Lost in the Maize

A weekly reflection on life in academia

This week I’m well and truly lost – tomorrow I’m being initiated into the mysteries of collegiate football, and I’m terrified!

Just in case you are one of the 6.5 billion people in the world who doesn’t eat, drink and sleep American football (a perceived minority, if not an actual one), collegiate football is big here – and I mean BIG.  I would have realized this if I was into team sport in any way before coming to Ann Arbor.  But though I don’t know the pointy side of a football from the other (I think that’s the correct technical term), even I couldn’t fail to realize that football is important on a game day here.  The literally billions (it seems) of people dressed in blue and maize, all asking you “are you going to the game?” is a bit of a giveaway.

Just to get the measure of things, the population of Ann Arbor is around 112,000 (including students).  According to that fount of all knowledge Wikipedia the first football game of this season had over 113,000 squeezed into the stadium.  Now to a novice like me, a greater than 1:1 ratio between local population and game attendance says something!  And attendance is likely to be even higher this weekend in the “Big House” – the team’s on a winning streak, and are playing Michigan State in what I am reliably told is one of the biggest games of the season.

And I will be there, with my long-suffering wife.  We were given tickets by a very kind colleague, who clearly took pity on us sticking out as poor, uninitiated incomers.

So we’ve been learning the lingo and buying the merchandise (had to rush out this afternoon to make sure we at least weren’t going to embarrass ourselves with what we were wearing!).  But for two people that wouldn’t recognize a football if it hit us in the head, and tend to use large crowds as signposts to where we shouldn’t be, this is still going to be something of an “interesting” experience.

Still, it’s got to be done.  One thing I’m learning fast is that college sport is more important than I ever imagined.  Sure I used to cringe at the idea of academic institutions caring more about sport than science (for example).  But there are nuances here that aren’t always obvious from afar – the sense of community and branding for one that comes with a successful team.  I was once told that financial giving to places like the University of Michigan tracks directly with the success and failure of their sporting teams.  I don’t have the data to back this up, but I can well believe it.

Which means that, while all the fuss over college football can be rationalized as trivial nonsense within elite academic circles, in real life nothing could be further from the truth.

And this is a truth I am about to feel the full force of.  This will be my first American football game ever (that “American” is important by the way).  I have the tee shirt.  I’ve had the coaching.  Somewhere I’ve got a crib sheet of the things I’m supposed to say and do – and those that I’m not!  I still have no idea what this game’s all about, but I’ll let that one go.  All I have to do now is to psych myself up to meld with a hundred thousand screaming fans.  As long as I don’t loose the slip of paper reminding me what we’re screaming about, I should be fine!

Update 10/11/10:  My wife and I survived what can only be described as a right of passage!  Unfortunately, the University of Michigan football team didn’t fare as well.

No related posts.

Tagged as: Big House, Football