Gridiron Graduation: How Kennesaw State Football’s Leap to the Big Time Explains America’s Peculiar Higher-Ed Circus

Under the shadow of Appalachian foothills, where strip-mall sushi meets Civil War reenactments, the Kennesaw State Owls have decided to migrate. Not to richer feeding grounds—this is still collegiate athletics, not venture capital—but upward into the Football Bowl Subdivision, that glitzy aviary where ESPN cameras preen the plumage and the cadaverous remains of amateurism are kept barely breathing on a drip of television rights. From the outside, the globe shrugs: another American campus upgrading its shoulder pads while the planet’s ice caps update their resignation letters. Yet the move is oddly instructive, like watching a toddler insist on using the stove to learn about thermodynamics.

To the international observer, Kennesaw State’s elevation from FCS afterthought to Conference USA aspirant is a miniature, padded allegory for late-stage liberal capitalism. A university founded in 1963—barely older than Mick Jagger’s current liver—now spends millions so that 85 scholarship athletes may legally collide at higher velocities in front of marginally larger crowds. Meanwhile, in the same metro Atlanta ZIP codes, life expectancy drops with the same dependable rhythm that the Owls’ strength coach prescribes squat reps. The juxtaposition is almost poetic, if you like your poetry ghost-written by an athletic-department PR intern.

Across the Atlantic, European friends—those who still believe football involves feet—ask polite questions. Is this the same sport, they wonder, whose concussion protocols read like satire written by Franz Kafka on a bad head day? Why does a school with “State” in its name behave like a sovereign hedge fund, floating bond debt to build a press box that will be obsolete by the time today’s freshmen develop their first CTE lesion? The answers are best served with bourbon and a waiver form.

Globally, the affair is a reminder that the United States remains the only nation where higher education and gladiatorial spectacle share a balance sheet. In Singapore, universities brag about quantum-computing grants; in Kennesaw, they brag about a 70-yard field house that can be converted into a concert venue for country stars who peaked during the second Bush administration. Somewhere, a Singaporean post-doc shrugs, then returns to curing dengue fever.

The strategic calculus, however, is brutally rational. Conference USA’s media payout—though dwarfed by the Power Five’s Scrooge-McDuck vault—still outearns the FCS stipend by multiples large enough to finance an entire chemistry department, assuming anyone on campus still remembers what chemistry is. Athletic directors call this “brand enhancement”; political economists call it “accumulation by dispossession in shoulder pads.” Tomato, tomahto, traumatic encephalopathy.

For students from Lagos to Lahore who enroll hoping for a piece of the American dream, the spectacle offers a lesson in priorities. While they queue for optional practical training visas, the university’s new indoor facility features biometric entry turnstiles and a barber shop shaped like a hamburger. One suspects that if Socrates wandered onto campus today, the security guard would ask to see his NIL licensing agreement before allowing him to drink from the fountain of wisdom—or at least the Gatorade cooler.

And yet, cynicism must kneel before spectacle. On crisp autumn Saturdays, when the Owls emerge to the orchestral throb of a 300-piece marching band, even the most hardened Euro-skeptic feels a twinge. It is the same twinge that grips a war correspondent who, against every instinct, tears up at a Fourth of July fireworks display: an admission that humans, despite abundant evidence, still prefer myth to mortality. The fireworks, like the kickoff, burn money in order to manufacture meaning. The difference is that fireworks rarely require an orthopedic follow-up.

In the end, Kennesaw State’s flight to FBS is neither tragedy nor farce; it is merely the next logical step in a country that long ago replaced civic religion with broadcast rights. The rest of the planet, busy with heatwaves and debt restructuring, will glance over, sigh, and return to its own circuses—some with bread, some with broadband. The Owls, meanwhile, will take the field this fall under stadium lights bright enough to blot out the stars, which is convenient, because the stars have lately been issuing troubling reports on humanity’s GPA.