Huntington Park, Columbus (AAA #22 - Why I don't care about football)

 

Huntington Park, with the view of  the Columbus skyline. Nationwide Arena, home of the NHL Blue Jackets, is visible beyond the concourse to the left.

In some of the cities where we’ve seen AAA games, minor league baseball is the biggest sport in town. That’s definitely not the case in Columbus, where there are two teams in the top tier professional league of their sport, which both play their home games within a few blocks of the Clippers' stadium.

However, the team that draws the most spectators each year is not the AAA Clippers, not the NHL Blue Jackets, not the MLS Crew. It’s the Ohio State Buckeyes, the local university football team (see the table below).

But while we go to about 50 professional baseball games per year, I haven’t been to a college football game since sometime in the mid-90s, when I went to the first three quarters of a game in which a friend of our son’s was on a youth team playing at halftime, and I haven’t been to an NFL game since sometime in the early 1980s, when I got free tickets to St. Louis Cardinals games a couple of times. Why is it that I’m a baseball fan, but not a football fan?

I never played either one beyond the youth level (I ran cross-country and played basketball in high school), so it isn’t a level of familiarity.

I think there are two basic reasons, which are related, why I don’t care about football.

Growing up, I watched whatever sport I could watch, whether live or on TV, which mostly meant football, basketball and baseball, although I liked track meets, too, and I’d watch the weekly bowling competitions on TV. ABC’s Wide World of Sports ("the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat) and the Olympics introduced me to a variety of sports that were strange to me, although none of those really stuck.

I spent a few years as a sportswriter, working for morning daily newspapers, and I think that was what cured me of football. I went to a lot of high school football and basketball games, as well as other random events. The two cities where I worked, Evansville, Indiana and Owensboro, Kentucky, were big enough to have multiple high schools that played football, but many of the high schools didn’t have football stadiums (just practice fields). So high school football wasn’t just a Friday night thing – there were games on Saturday nights, and sometimes Thursday nights, as well, so I would go to two or three games per week all fall.

I liked covering the games from the sidelines, because I thought I got a better feel for the action. However, at some point, I realized that it seemed like I was watching one teenager per team per game getting carried off the field with a knee injury. And by that time, I realized that many of those knee injuries would require at least one surgery during adulthood, even if they didn’t require surgery the next week. So I questioned the human cost. Note that that was before the risk and cost of concussions was understood.

The other thing was that I realized that while I understood basketball and baseball at a fairly detailed level, and even track and field and golf, I really didn’t understand football, and might never. There was a venerable football coach in Evansville who reinforced that for me. After the game once, I asked him how well he thought his team had played, and he replied, “I don’t know. I’ll have to look at the film.” Over the course of the season, I started trying to find other ways to ask him about his team’s performance, but I’d always get an answer saying that he’d have to watch the film to see. I figured that if a guy who’d been coaching football for decades couldn’t give me an off-the-cuff analysis of his team’s play without watching the film, I didn’t have a chance. At that point, I also realized that the fact that the boom in the NFL’s popularity happened at the same time that instant replay came into wide use in television, and concluded the two were related.

Between the two of those, being bothered by the damage to the athletes and fearing that I’d never really understand the game as I watched it, I started to think that football was a stupid game.

Since there are many things about football that are contrived rules (if you throw the ball forward and no one catches it, the play’s over; if you throw it backwards and no one catches it, a mad scramble ensues; the list goes on and on). So once you start to think a game is a stupid game, you can’t unthink it. In fairness, that’s not just true of football. I can’t think of a sport, except perhaps footraces and boxing, that don’t have lots of contrived rules. My two favorite team sports, baseball and ice hockey, definitely fall into the contrived category. But once I started to think football was stupid, I started watching it less, and I found that I didn’t miss it.

Becoming a university faculty member didn’t help my attitude toward football either. In the course of three decades of teaching science for non-science majors from around campus, I had dozens of scholarship athletes in class, from many different sports (although I don’t think I ever had anyone off the men’s basketball team, the other big revenue sport besides football). Some of them were really good students (a swimmer had the high grade in a class of 150 one year), some of them weren’t very good. But I set the class up so that if a student did the work, they could probably pass. For sports other than football, 100% of the scholarship athletes passed. I believe two of the five football players I had passed.

Another factor that probably contributed to my loss of interest in football was that I was never in a place with high-quality football. After my stint as a sportswriter, I moved to St. Louis, where the football Cardinals were late in their 28-year-run in town, a run in which they never had a home playoff game. After St. Louis, I moved to Arizona. The Cardinals did, too, and now own the longest streak in American professional sports without winning a championship, 79 years and counting.

Although I follow Phoenix sports, I actually live in Tucson, where the biggest sports are at the University of Arizona. Since I moved to Tucson, UA has won one men’s national basketball championship and made it to the Final Four several other times (including this spring), lost a women’s national baseketball championship game, won two national baseball championships (and made the College World Series many times), won most of the women’s national softball championships in the 1990s (when their practices were visible from my laboratory), and won assorted national titles in golf, swimming, and triathlon. They also have a football team.  In more than four decades in the Pac-10 and Pac-12, Arizona never won the Rose Bowl berth that went with the football championship. At one point in 2024, I checked the standings, and they were 13^th in the Big 12. Obviously, that says something about college athletic administrators’ ability to count (Ohio State is in the Big 10, which had 18 teams, last time I checked), but still, Arizona football is not very good.

Perhaps I’d feel differently if I’d lived in Columbus, seen teams that won at least as often as they lost (and sometimes won  them all), and watched the tuba player in the band dot the “i” in “Ohio” during the halftime show, but I think it’s far too late for me. I really don’t care about football.

The game: Toledo Mud Hens 8, Columbus Clippers 3 

The game wasn't competitive. Columbus got one base hit in the first inning, then didn't get another until the seventh. They finished with a total of three, including one on a swinging bunt and one on a checked swing blooper. In the inning when they scored their three runs, they didn't have a single hit, but they got three walks, and Toledo committed three errors. Perhaps the most amazing error came when the first baseman made a bad throw in attempting to throw the ball back to the pitcher after a pick-off attempt.

In a minor league game, though, it's the players, trying to get the first or last chance at the majors, who fascinate me. Catcher Eduardo Valencia of Toledo had two doubles, two single and two walks in five plate appearances, plus he threw out a runner trying to steal second, so he certainly looked like the player of the game, but there were two Columbus players who caught my eye.

Starting pitcher Trenton Denholm gave up seven runs in five innings, including three home runs. But what fascinated me was that he occasionally threw a knuckleball. One of the stats that has started showing up on scoreboards is the spin rate on pitches -- the higher the spin rate, the more the ball bites into the air it's going through, and "moves" (at least, it moves from where the batter expects it). But in an age where more spin is better, Denholm is the first pitcher I've seen in years at this level to try to go the other direction. If you can throw a ball with virtually no spin, it's at the mercy of the little variations in air movement between the pitcher and the batter, and not only does the batter not know where it's going to move, the pitcher and catcher don't either. A few pitchers have made careers out of throwing the knuckleball (one traditional grip for throwing a spinless pitch is to hold it with the knuckles - don't ask me how, because I could never do it decently), but it's been a few years.

I was also fascinated by Stuart Fairchild, who had the Clippers' only solid hit of the evening. I saw him play with the Diamondbacks when he first made it to the major leagues in 2021. We had acquired him from the Reds the year before. A year later, we sold his contract to the Mariners, who then traded him to the Giants, who released him. The Reds picked up his contract, then sold it to the Braves, who sold it to the Rays before he became a free agent last winter, and signed a contract with the Guardians. He has played in the majors for five different teams, three of them for 12 games or less. He's now 30 years old, and looking for that one more shot. 

 More about Columbus sports

The table below gives the attendance figures for the most recent complete season for the five major Columbus sports teams. Whether you're looking at per game attendance or total attendance, Ohio State football is clearly #1. 

        Columbus sports attendance

Team	Sport (Level)	Season	Attendance
			Games	Average	Total
Ohio State	Football (NCAA)	2025	7	104,105	728,735
Blue Jackets	Hockey (NHL)	2025-2026	41	16,878	691,998
Clippers	Baseball (AAA)	2025	70	7,330	513,085
Crew	Soccer (MLS)	2025	17	22,795	387,511
Ohio State	Basketball (NCAA)	2025-2026	17	11,252	191,284

One of the things that fascinates me about the Columbus sports scene is that the three high-level professional teams each have their own arena, all within a few blocks of one another in the "Arena District." The general area was the home to a penitentiary for decades, then was abandoned for a few decades more. It is now a very pleasant multi-use area, with apartments, offices, restaurants, and the sports arenas. The city helped with it, but the public help was mostly in the form of infrastructure, as far as I understand it. Most of it was privately funded. I'm not an economist, but this seems like a success story for that sort of enterprise. 

The baseball stadium has a nice view of the Columbus skyline, and the hockey arena is even visible from behind home plate. Of course, the view was helped by being here on a day with a few puffy clouds in a blue sky, but we liked the stadium, and the area.