The manor might be changing, but the people still remain
In Greek mythology, the king of Athens rescued the children of the city taken to Delos to be a sacrifice to the Minotaur by slaying the beast and escaping onboard a ship. Each year, the Athenians would commemorate him by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos.
After hundreds of years of maintenance to the ship, a question emerged: if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus were replaced, was it still the same ship?
This simple question has gone on to become one of the most well-known thought exercises in human history that leads to additional questions such as what is more important when looking at the continued history of something, the form or the components? The structural integrity or the originality?
There are several different popular approaches to this question: many agree with the assertion that constitution is not identity and that what we are made of does not define what we are. Some believe that so long as the parts are replaced gradually and not all at once, the ship retains it’s original form. And some believe that the ship can only exist as it is at one point in time, and is constantly in a state of change. That one never made much sense to me either.
There is a cruel irony to the timing of the college football video game’s return.
Yes, having a college football game back in my life has been an immensely welcome development and I love the game now as a 31-year old as much as I did a decade ago when legally buying alcohol was a big event, and even two decades ago as an 11-year old.
But while the game has returned triumphantly, it’s also done so with some stark reminders of how much college football has changed since it was last here. The BCS National Championship has been replaced with a 12-team playoff, UCLA is a Big Ten school, Texas is an SEC school, Stanford is an ACC school, and Colorado is a Big 12 school. Wait no that last one’s not that weird.
Even the reason the video game was able to come back – NIL – has changed college football, transforming the way programs are built from a three to four year developmental program with the occasional graduate transfer to essentially free agency balanced with player retention.
Conference realignment isn’t new – the “old” 12-team SEC with Arkansas and South Carolina is just barely older than I am – but the most recent iteration of it that saw the effective dissolution of an entire conference and made Washington bunk with Rutgers and Stanford play conference games in Miami is by far the most extreme it has ever been, leaving college football in a mangled, nearly unidentifiable shape.
The postseason expansion offers a lot to be excited about (home playoff games) but also plenty of reason to be cautious about the direction the sport is heading (the possibility of a school playing 17 games in a season, which the NFL for all it’s might and power had to move heaven and earth to make possible) and it’s left us with conflicted emotions, present company included.
For over a year I have been dreading the day the “new” college football arrives, hoping I would find some resolution one way or another about how I am going to accept this new version of college football. But now that it’s here, I’m just as conflicted I was the day it was reported that PAC-12 presidents were holding a closed-door meeting.
I’m not sure when I first learned about the Ship of Theseus – probably high school but I couldn’t say for sure – but two events in my adult life have made me think about it critically:
1. About 7 years ago today, my family moved back into our home after the 2016 flood. The walls, floor, counters, doors, windows, insulation, cabinets, backsplash, bathrooms, etc. were all replaced in our house. Turns out a flood is a GREAT excuse to do some remodeling.
But…it is still my home. Despite the fact that I haven’t lived slept there for nearly a decade, the middle bedroom down the hall is still “my” room, and is referred to as such. The counter I ate my breakfast at every morning is nowhere to be seen and has been replaced by a different counter made of different material in a different location, but I still feel the memories of the kitchen, the morning cinnamon toast and midnight bowls of cereal. The decor and the details may change, but the feelings and memories don’t.
2. In a shockingly positive and immensely well-received move, my soccer club – Arsenal – adopted a song by a local artist as their pre-match anthem. They only play the most positive (and anthemic) part of the song in the stadium, and for an understandable reason: the lyrics are a pretty uncut push back against gentrification, white-washing, and general stripping of identity in North London. It’s really shocking that someone as nakedly craven as real estate mogul Stan Kroenke – the owner of Arsenal – would allow a song that comes just short of stating him by name as the enemy.
I’m not going to claim the song is the greatest in the world, but in it and beyond my feelings for Arsenal Football Club I find a parallel to the world of college football we are about to enter and find a wonderful summation of my feelings towards it. It’s just serendipity that it’s been adopted by my club.
What is often lost in the ship of Theseus debate is the logistics of the ship and what is was made of wasn’t ever supposed to matter. What matters was that the ship was sailed in celebration by people in reverence and joy of a shared experience. The ship was merely an artifact to the celebration. College football may have gone through the most dramatic change in its long and winding history, but the sport has only taken its current form because we’ve attached such a massive personal value to it and the identity, tribalism, and collective experiences it has provided us.
Conferences, networks, postseason formats, rosters, and schedules may change in pursuit of the almighty dollar, but the dollars are there because we are. The ship may have a new mast, but the people sailing it are the same.
As I walk these streets alone, through a kingdom made of chrome
I see them ripping up the cobbles, tearing down our childhood homes
I see the architecture changing, watch the history disappear
And the skyline rearranging into towers of veneer
But I see the remnants of a London that they thought they could erase
Every time I hear the old schools talk about the good old days
Or every time I watch the football and have a ruby with the lads
See an hoister selling clobber or a dealer shooting bags
It’s in the single mothers juggling a baby and a job
In every single brother struggling that wound up in the dock
It’s in the roots and the foundations, still clinging to the land
It’s in the bricks that built the Morland and Popham that still stand
It’s in my family and my friends, in every gram and every Benz
It’s in the roots that we inherit when a generation ends
It’s in the ruins of your youth and the faces of your past
The manor might be changing, but the people always last.