When I realized that the NFL has no minor leagues as baseball does, I wasn’t yet ready to understand that it, in fact, does. It is called NCAA Divison III and it enjoys far better wealth than any AAA team with the cushiest bus. Why is this, if baseball enjoys a longer professional history?
While baseball could owe some of its roots to British sport, it was differentiated from rounders and cricket as far back as the 1790’s. That’s plenty of time to snuggle itself into the heart of a quickly developing nation.
Campus Action
Baseball was grafted onto colleges, while football sprang from the quads. We have evidence of college games sharing a birthdate with the Red Stockings– 1869– but football players weren’t paid until the 1890’s. While young men enjoyed exchanging broken limbs in athletic clubs, campus was where the action was. Early matches consisted of young men basically forming opposing mobs and hurling themselves at one another. The injury and death rates were horrifying. From the beginning, without college football, there is no NFL.
The concentration of the burgeoning sport of football at colleges made for a highly regional experience. However, college football teams didn’t travel nearly as far and as widely as early professional teams did. Nor did they play as often. Baseball therefore showed itself more openly, and more frequently.
Pre-Steelers
Consider, too, how few people attended college versus those who happened to live within the orbit of a professional baseball team. While regional proprietorship always played a role in the adoption of a college, in 1900 only one percent of the American population was enrolled in college. Many people never made it out of high school.
Pre-Steelers, you’re a mill worker living a handful of generations ago in Somewhere, Pennsylvania, where are your general sports loyalties lying? Probably with the Pittsburgh Alleghenys rather than Pennsylvania State University. Now, 31% of Americans have college degree, not to mention far greater ease in travel in communication. The bonds of regionalism are far more fragile and far less bound to the nearest red brick pile. We’re on the move.
Happily, baseball and football are played in opposite seasons, so the two sports were never in direct competition with one another. This allowed both the ability to expand and naturally form emotional ties.
Opening Day Realities
Leaving the orbit of Cincinnati astounded me when it came to college football, where we’re generally an affable UC town, but not to the extent that traffic stops and hotels are four bills a night every weekend in the fall. I was plopped directly into Notre Dame football culture as a college freshman, then Alabama’s, and Ohio State’s after that, and was shocked to see the equivalent of Opening Day every single home weekend. These people do not mess around. They will move weddings.
But we can’t sustain an Opening Day for 81 games– emotionally, economically, or physically. Maybe it’s the long summer stretch of the baseball season or the hectic mass emotion of 80,000 late-stage teenagers crammed into the square footage of 1200 acres. Baseball is spread out in every way, from fan age to psychological reach. And those apt to become interested in college football have had far more options for fandom, thus diluting the general pool of enthusiasm.
Location, Location, Location
I guess it comes down to who is more prepared to show a girl a good time. Even raised in Reds and nothing but Reds, I initially had no idea where my brother school’s baseball fields were, nor did I think to look. You know when I did find out?
When I happened to stumble past them on the way to the spring football scrimmage.
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