Americans spent Saturday screaming for Yotes and Hokies, Orediggers and Eagles, while the institutions governing their lives continued to operate without scrutiny. That's by design.
The weekend's sports coverage offered a masterclass in manufactured tribal identity. In Caldwell, Idaho, No. 3 College of Idaho knocked off No. 2 Montana Tech 35-19 in a top-ranked Frontier Conference matchup, with Cole Tanner returning a kickoff 84 yards as time expired in the first half to break the game open. The Kalispell Inter Lake gave it the full treatment—yardage counts, scoring drives, the works. In Chestnut Hill, Boston College blew a fourth-quarter lead and fell to Virginia Tech 21-14 in a nor'easter, and Sports Illustrated treated Bill O'Brien's postgame platitudes as "quotes that matter."
What matters is what wasn't discussed.
O'Brien's comments, elevated by SI as particularly notable, were pure coach-speak: "I think that's a good football team," "we just need to do a better job on third down," "we're going to go back to work tomorrow." This is the content the sports-industrial complex serves up as analysis. MassLive reported the actual news of the BC game: Jeffrey Overton Jr. ran for 209 yards and a 76-yard go-ahead touchdown in the fourth quarter, while the stadium emptied out in the second half as rain and 40-mph winds hammered the region. A mostly empty stadium in the fourth quarter of a one-score conference game tells you everything about how deep this tribal loyalty actually runs when the weather gets uncomfortable.
The Frontier Conference coverage is even more revealing. Small-college football in the Mountain West generates intense local identification—the Inter Lake noted Polson's own Jarrett Wilson under center for Montana Tech, former Glacier standout Connor Sullivan catching touchdowns for Carroll, Columbia Falls product Kai Golan handling kickoffs. These are real communities, and the local paper serves them. But the national sports apparatus doesn't care about the Frontier Conference for its own sake. It cares about the template: pick a tribe, pick a side, argue about rankings.
Virginia Tech is now 4-0 under first-year coach James Franklin—the program's best start since 2017, per MassLive. That's a nice story. It's also a story that costs nothing to tell and challenges nothing about how the country is run.
The founders debated self-governance in taverns. We debate whether O'Brien should have run or passed on third-and-seven. The question isn't whether sports are entertaining. It's what we're not talking about while we argue about them.
