I wouldn’t say that everyone on the staff is dancing around it, but when you work with a Florida State fan at a time when the football team is having the sort of season that team is currently having, you worry. It’s not that Israel had unrealistic expectations for the Seminoles; he was somewhere between realist and skeptic where his team was concerned, even during last year’s simultaneously star-crossed and undefeated campaign. It’s just that when a colleague’s team gets trounced by Boston College, a wellness check seems like the right move. As it happened, though, Israel reached out first. He was ready to talk about it, and so we talked about it.

It’s not all Florida State talk, of course, but the program does make for a good way into a conversation about a number of micro- and macro-scale failures and fractures in college football. We talked about how the Noles managed to lose to Georgia Tech in Ireland, but also why they’re in the strange position they’re in—cobbling a new roster together through the transfer portal, riding the raw edge of contemporary NIL fuckery, caught in the churn that’s sorting college football into mega-conferences, and part of the rush of private equity capital into college football, both as nascent tragicomedy and also as farce. We also discussed the strange and meaningful relationships that fans have with college players, the pitfalls of the 12-team playoff era, and college football’s singular knack for overdoing it. I should note that, in keeping with those difficulties, Israel’s audio is fairly deep-fried in this one. Still, even as someone who is most interested in college football as an amusingly rowdy discourse and a living symptom of various cultural ills—conceptually, the idea of a Journeyman College Football Player is both perverse and rich—I found the conversation wide-ranging and interesting. We talked a little bit about Deion and Colorado, too. It’s the law.

After the break, we discussed Tyreek Hill’s recent bad experience at the hands of some chestily aggro dunces from the Miami-Dade Police Department for a bit, which segued into a brief conversation on Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge and the cop-hating Sylvester Stallone vigilante opus First Blood. And then, after Drew handed me an opportunity to talk about the (fucking appalling) New York Giants football team and I basically shut the podcast down entirely, we turned to the Funbag. After weeks of abbreviated sessions, we kind of luxuriated in the ‘bag this week, fielding questions on relationship-risking international travel, NFL-altering time travel and my fascination with how disgusting everything was in the year 1973, and our personal listening-while-high music choices. Drew tried to silence my truth on Dead Meadow, but I managed to get it in there. You have to take your wins where you can find them.

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