Colgate Football: How a Small-Town Touchdown Explains the End of Empires
Colgate Football and the Twilight of Western Civilization
By “B. Traven” – Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker World Desk
Hamilton, New York – Population 4,000, three stoplights, and one football team whose annual budget could bankroll a modest Balkan navy. On a slate-gray Saturday, Colgate University’s Raiders jogged onto Andy Kerr Stadium in front of 5,200 spectators, a turnout that outnumbers seven United Nations member-states. The opponent, Holy Cross, arrived with the Crusader swagger of men who believe God grades on a curve. For the uninitiated, this was merely another FCS skirmish; for the geopolitically caffeinated, it was a miniature morality play about late-stage empire, soft-power nostalgia, and the irresistible human urge to ritualize violence while wearing spandex.
Let’s zoom out. While Colgate’s offensive line practiced gap schemes, the Arctic registered its warmest October on record and the South China Sea hosted a three-nation game of maritime chicken. Yet here, on a patch of upstate grass, the planet’s anxieties were distilled into a 100-yard metaphor: two groups of unpaid twenty-year-olds slamming into each other to protect a leather egg, cheered on by alumni whose 401(k)s are presently doing a passable impression of the 2008 Greek economy. The symbolism is almost too tidy—Rome fell while the Colosseum was still selling season tickets.
International readers may wonder why a liberal-arts college named after a toothpaste magnate fields a football squad at all. The answer lies in America’s unique conviction that higher education should include a minor in controlled concussions. Colgate’s endowment ($1.1 billion, enough to purchase Iceland’s entire GDP with change left over for a decent rug) subsidizes a program that loses money every year. The university claims the team “builds character” and “community.” Translation: it keeps wealthy alumni emotionally invested enough to open their checkbooks when the development office calls right before Christmas. If that sounds cynical, remember that Qatar bought the World Cup for roughly the same reasons, except they used air-conditioning instead of nostalgia.
The broadcast feed—streamed on ESPN+ to anyone awake in 37 time zones—illustrates another layer of farce. A play-by-play man in a Hartford studio mispronounces the Samoan defensive tackle’s name while, in Singapore, a currency trader half-watches on his phone between margin calls. Neither realizes they are witnessing a soft-power echo of Manifest Destiny: American football as televised comfort food for a world increasingly addicted to American anxiety. The Raiders score on a flea-flicker; somewhere in Kyiv a drone pilot misses the highlight because he’s busy trying not to die. The universe, ever the comedian, declines to comment.
Halftime entertainment featured the Colgate pep band performing a brassy rendition of “Seven Nation Army,” a song originally written by a garage-rock duo from Detroit who now sell NFTs to fund dental work. The irony was lost on precisely no one over 30. Meanwhile, the stadium’s concession stands hawked “artisanal poutine” in a nod to Canada’s quiet cultural invasion—because nothing says upstate New York like Quebecois gravy at $14 a tray. The queue stretched past the anthropology majors discussing post-structuralism and the finance majors calculating future herniated-disc settlements. Both groups will eventually vote for different brands of the same neoliberalism, but today they’re united in cholesterol.
By the fourth quarter, Colgate trailed by ten. The PA announcer exhorted fans to “make noise,” a request that sounded eerily similar to directives issued by beleaguered central banks. The defense stiffened; the Crusaders punted. With 1:12 left, the Raiders’ quarterback—a political-science major who once wrote a paper titled “Gridiron Hegemony: Soft Power and the Modern Surveillance State”—unleashed a 38-yard prayer into double coverage. Touchdown. Pandemonium. Fireworks exploded like a small-scale reenactment of the Battle of Fallujah, minus the war crimes.
Final score: Colgate 27, Holy Cross 24. The crowd spilled onto the field, blissfully unaware that the Dow had just dropped 400 points on news of yet another supply-chain bottleneck. Somewhere in Brussels, a Eurocrat drafting sanctions against Belarus glanced at the scoreboard alert and muttered, “At least someone still believes in overtime.”
And that, dear reader, is the global significance of Colgate football: a $4-million-per-year reminder that when the world burns, humans will still huddle under the glow of stadium lights, pretending the clock can be reset by moving chains ten yards at a time. The empire may be in Chapter 11, but the concession stands are open until the bitter end.
