TAMPA – It’s 4:30 am the night of Clemson’s first national title since 1981, and the crew at the hotel bar is showing no signs of slowing down. The bartender announced last call almost two hours ago, and he simply shrugs and keeps on pouring. He’s not passing up the chance to see this thing through, and neither are any of the people proudly wearing bright orange who are just as loud as they were at Raymond James Stadium when they saw DeShaun Watson dump the ball to Hunter Renfrow for a two-yard score and a place in college football history.
One man, he never bothered giving his name and nobody was in any mood to ask him for it, took a group up to the Presidential Suite he reserved a year ago – days after Clemson lost to Alabama in the 2016 College Football Playoff National Championship – and let everyone admire the view of the river and the buildings downtown. Moments later, he changed his mind.
“We’re all going to the casino,” the Tigers fan exclaimed. “Call some Ubers. We’re playing craps the rest of the night. I’ve got a flight at 10 a.m., but if I miss it, I miss it. Anybody coming along, I’ve got your $15 chips.”
The crowd took the elevator back down, and all that orange disappeared through the sliding doors and into the night. That guy probably missed his flight. And given the situation, he probably didn’t care. Clemson was here to party, and Tampa was more than willing to oblige.
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We all clamored for the Playoff for so long, when it finally arrived, we never actually took the time to appreciate the fact that it was here. There’s this habit with college football that things are never just fine, they’re always bad, and will always be bad, and if we make a change for the better even that change is bad too. The Playoff was here, we got two more teams a seat at the table, and a chance for more drama (and more money flowing between schools, broadcast partners, and sponsors but still not to the players), but that wasn’t good enough for anyone.
Instead now the “regular season doesn’t matter” or “bowl games don’t matter” or “there are only like 10 teams that can get in the Playoff anyway.” That’s just how college football fans think. That’s how people in 2017 think in general.
There’s a Louis CK bit from an episode of Conan where he talks about all the advancements we’ve had in the past couple decades. We can fly places, we can get wifi on that flight, and on that flight with wifi we’re able to communicate with others, stream videos and games, and still do our jobs. What once was a quiet haven became seamless, and we’re able to do almost everything we can do from home thousands of feet in the air inside a metal box. And that still isn’t good enough for people.
That’s where we’re at with the Playoff. We can instantaneously get clips, highlights, quotes, and everything else we need. We have a Playoff. And that Playoff just delivered us two incredible Championships in back-to-back years with the same two teams. Watson played one of the best bowl games ever, and will be remembered forever as the quarterback who finally brought Clemson back to the promised land. The atmosphere at Raymond James was electric, Tampa put on a show all weekend and was the perfect host, and the game delivered.
We should’ve all been talking about how amazing all of this was. Instead a quick glance at the timeline revealed a whole bunch of people griping about how the game was too long.
There were hundreds of tweets – many from media people who must feel an obligation or a need to simply “be upset” because it’s good for business – from Monday night and Tuesday morning, while most Clemson fans were still trying to figure out how they got here, how they’d get home, and how they’d get over this hangover.
“It is a Super Bowl event which means that TV breaks are going to be a little bit longer than they are for other games,” ESPN senior writer Ryan McGee says. “That’s fine. That’s how it works. It’s the Super Bowl, and people need to start treating it like it’s the Super Bowl because it’s the second biggest event in the world behind the Super Bowl. As long as the last game played leaves everyone wanting a fifth quarter – which is what happened the last two years – if the best we can come up with was, ‘yeah but it was four hours and eight minutes,’ then fine. If that’s what you’ve got, then that’s all you’ve got.”
What we saw in Tampa was a product still trying to get used to its place in the sporting atmosphere. College football is still growing, it’s earned its place as one of the most-watched sports out there, and there’s a huge future, even if that future might not recognize the football we watch today. The Playoff is a good thing. And sponsors have noticed, as they try and figure out how to attach themselves to the party.
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For so long, sponsors of bowl games and college football have been content to get their name on something, see that name on a bunch of banners, and get some club seats for their corporate friends. It was a good pairing, and college football benefitted from that. Sure, you’d see a “tailgate” or an event or a signing, but it never reached the level of the Super Bowl, where brands are more important than the teams that are playing in the game.
Last year’s Super Bowl in San Francisco was an exercise in excess. It was sanitized, sweeping anything remotely offensive into the margins as the Super Bowl Village felt like its own Philip K Dick short story. College football hasn’t reached that point yet, and it has a few years to go before it gets there.
Dos Equis managed to become the “official beer of the College Football Playoff” this year. For so long, beer and college football had an unspoken agreement (or as Seth Rogan’s character from The 40-Year-Old Virgin would call it, “a completely and utterly unspoken agreement”). People were going to drink, and college football would quietly disregard it but let everyone drink as much as they wanted, well, until they got in the stadium. Once they realized nobody would really care, and this whole amateurism thing really and truly does not exist except in name only, they noticed they were missing a part of the pie they desperately should’ve gotten involved in.
Rather than be comfortable selling a bunch of beer at the game, Dos Equis went all-in on their deal from the get-go. They made it out to the New Years Six games, integrating Snapchat filters and giving out hot air balloon rides. Distributors put Dos Equis cups with the college football playoff logo in every downtown bar in Tampa. Bartenders had Dos Equis shirts on. The city allowed people to drink on the Riverwalk, as long as they were drinking out of “official” Dos Equis branded cups.
And the brand put together an enormous “Gameday Greatness” tailgate along the river, with a firebreather, a gigantic former military helicopter that’s been turned into an RV, fried gator, and a DJ. There was also a blowout party at Franklin Manor with dancers on stilts, contortionists, and the interesting kind of weird you’d expect from Dos Equis.
And this is year one.
“We knew it was the right time to make a serious commitment to the sports viewing occasion,” Dos Equis brand manager Ryan Thompson says, “and what better than the College Football Playoff platform – one that we and our fans are passionate about. Fifty million people attend a college football game every year, and six of the top ten most passionate college football fan-bases are in our key markets. If you spend any time at a tailgate or in the stands at a major college football game, it’s crystal clear that the sport was primed, and we jumped at the opportunity.”
We’re always going to be sold to. Ignoring that won’t make it go away. The American Dream in 2017 isn’t getting a house, and a car, and a picket fence anymore – it’s getting all those things by having a brand pay for it. If Dos Equis didn’t do it, another beer brand would, and chances are we’d be getting the same type of homogenized events we’re used to in the NFL.
For college football to survive, and to keep staying on the rise, it has to take chances. And the sponsors putting their name on everything so that college football can pay the bills have to do the same.
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The game will always need changes. Staying pat or refusing to address issues is how you get to the spot the NFL is in in the first place, where the idea that they’re too big too fail and people will continue to eat their meat and get their pudding has the league largely boring and inaccessible.
But if we don’t take the time to enjoy things rather than always complaining about how it could (or should) be different, we end up missing out on magical moments, like what we just witnessed on Monday night.
“It is totally fine to enjoy something,” McGee says. “It is. Sometimes it’s just okay. Sometimes everything’s great. But everybody’s just like Ricky Bobby’s dad. Everything’s a little too perfect right now. I’m a little twitchy. We’ve got to do something to blow this up.”
Ask that Clemson fan and his buddies from the craps table if they think the College Football Playoff needs eight teams, or the bowl games don’t matter, or there are too many sponsors, or the games are too long. He’d probably laugh and keep on smiling, that is if anyone has been able to find him since.
