My uncle’s email titled YOUR PSU SCORECARD, listed which Penn State football players were staying, which ones were leaving, and which ones were transferring in from other schools. The transfer portal, in which kids can now switch schools every year without penalty (you used to have to sit out a year if you changed schools) has fundamentally changed the game of college football. That and the fact that kids are now getting paid to play – some of them earning millions of dollars a year – have turned rosters upside-down and changed the entire recruiting landscape. It’s estimated that 8,000 students will enter the transfer portal this year. For Penn State, according to my uncle’s email, 30 players are staying, 45 players are leaving (at least 8 of them following their former Penn State coach to Virginia Tech), 6 players have yet to decide, and 33 players are transferring in (21 of them are following their former coach from Iowa State to Penn State where he is now the head coach).
With so many kids transferring in to Penn State from one school, Iowa State, the grumpy old man in me began to think, “if I wanted to watch Iowa State play football, I’d watch Iowa State.” Thinking this way brings up the fundamental question of, what does it mean to be a fan of a team? It brings up the question of how we define identity. What does it mean to be a Penn State guy or an Alabama guy? Are we cheering for the kids (who now switch allegiances every year)? Are we rooting for a particular coach and their way of doing things? Is it still about the idea of an alma mater and the players and coaches are interchangeable?
I grew up a Penn State fan. I was born there and had gone to games as soon as I could walk. I went to school there. Most of my family went to school there. My brother has an entire room in his house dedicated to Penn State including memorabilia, a section of a bench from the stadium, and a custom-made blue carpet with a white S on it. We’ve all had seasons tickets – some of them dating back to the 70s. It’s what we talked about at holiday gatherings. For us, these changes don’t come lightly.
For me, the players and the program have always been inseparable. Penn State’s football identity was about a method more than anything else, and I bought in to the Penn State way of doing things. Under their longest tenured coach, Joe Paterno, Penn State would attempt what he called a “grand experiment,” in which they would strive to be a nationally competitive football team that focused on academics and character. He was known to bench some of his best players when they skipped class, got bad grades, or otherwise screwed up. As such, Penn State tended to attract a certain type of player – kids who bought into the program and typically focused on team over self. If there was a thing such as Penn State pride, this was it. “We Are” the famous chant echoed this sense of collective identity. With a strong focus on character, it made it easier to think (however right or wrong we might have been) that our kids were somehow better than the kids at other schools. Even the words we use, “our kids” are undergoing a fundamental shift.
All of that is changing – though the habits of fandom die hard. As I sat at a bar some 3,000 miles form Pennsylvania and Penn State watching the Eagles lose to the 49ers , I was thinking about college football. At the start of the game, I was trying to identify which players went to Penn State. I was trying to locate that school pride at the beginning of a big game -hoping “our kids” played well. In that moment I realized it would only be another year or two of transfers in and transfers out until I’d no longer be able to identify the Penn State players because they might no longer identify as Penn State players. 45 Penn State players leaving. 21 Iowa State players coming in. I leaned over to a friend and said, players identifying which school they went to is going to change in the next few years. I posed the rhetorical question, “who do they list as their alma mater when they’ve attended four different universities?” He agreed, the portal is wrecking everything.
Stoically, I try to avoid thinking of change as “wrecking.” College football isn’t what it used to be. College sports aren’t what they used to be. I suspect switching schools frequently will have a negative impact on the scholar part of being a scholar athlete, but for the kids getting paid, they’ll at least have more agency over their careers. So grind the gears of commerce.
For the first time in over twenty years, I won’t be renewing my season tickets to Penn State. This past year, I only watched two of their games on TV. My father, who has four season tickets (tickets that he’s had for forty or fifty years) will be letting go of two of them. He also wants to talk about eventually getting rid of the house he has in State College. My brother, who as recently as two or three years ago was talking about getting an RV for tailgating, is thinking he won’t get as many tickets either. Family dynamics have been part of the change as well. I moved away. My father and brother had a falling out. The pre-game, big family breakfasts stopped five or six years ago. The post-game dinners stopped as well. None of it is how it used to be and there’s a certain sadness to that. So grind the gears of change.