In August, you hated it all. In December, you were singing wildly.
One of college football’s weird subtraditions is a television entity that jams a stadium rock song into our ear canals for an entire season. Whether it’s an ad break in a game or the upcoming week’s promotion Saturday Night Football game, it is now a regular phenomenon.
First, a chorus (musical term) for the song which was really good.
Bubba Sparxxx’s “Back in the Mud” was the College Game Day theme before the arrival of Big and Rich. The song was about shit about other shows (“our show is so superior to yours”)…
…and the BCS: “Controversy over the BCS, will they finally settle it? / Put the two best teams on the field, forget the rhetoric.
There’s something about the smooth transition to regular college College Game Day intro at the time that worked.
Bubba gave way to “Comin’ to yo citayyyyyyyyy”, an obnoxious song that we’ve all loved for a long time anyway.
If you want a little spice in your zang zang, then you’ve come to the right place every Saturday morning.
I find myself whistling this during the offseason randomly. That’s how boring and catchy this one is. For many people, it’s simply synonymous with the road show ritual.
ESPN now airs a rock anthem every season.
You could tell me it was all the same group, and I would believe you. Some of them were used by ESPN for college football promos, some were not, but all of them were broadcast so endlessly during college football broadcasts that they left permanent imprints on the brains of fans of the CFB. So it doesn’t matter whether they were originally intended to be college football songs or not.
In 2019, ESPN went essentially the same route as usual and chose The Score’s “Can’t Stop Me Now”:
In a brief digression, Disney* broke down the electric guitar with one Kendrick Lamar during halftime of the Alabama-Georgia title game from the 2017 season.
* Owner of ESPN, but also owner of Marvel, whose next Black Panther starred Lamar.
Kendrick, who also played “DNA” and “Humble” during games, and Eminem are undoubtedly the two rappers you’re most likely to hear during college football broadcasts. It happenedafter all, and we were all making the same face after hearing Eminem’s “Berzerk” 1,000 times this football season.
It’s nothing. Rock and rap are common stadium music. ESPN can even make it seem like pure pop music is the go-to soundtrack for college football.
Pop songs like those by Swift and another by Fergie, used by ESPN, are made to be dirty.
Then they’re repeated so often during commercial breaks that you have no choice but to identify with them. They are also committed to something that interests us all intrinsically: football highlights. You’re already paying attention to what’s on the screen, and that’s how the music seeps into your skull and lodges there until January. It’s not just background music; it’s the soundtrack to something your brain is already invested in.
CBS, which hosts the SEC’s biggest games, is heavily involved in the country, for obvious reasons.
We get it: you’re from the South.
Brad Paisley’s full version of this song at least gave us a BIG RED CAMEO, which meant at least shoving something delicious into our brains along the way.
Hoo boy, that was Garth Brooks lip sync terrible during the 2016 version.
The latter is actually the ACC network’s syndicated intro which is a remix of a very good Jason Aldean song.
And the SEC Network opted for a more southern rock theme.
And let’s not forget the advertisements.
While many of these songs pull us into the break, what happens during the break can also be repetitive to the point of submission.
The first one I remember was WHALE JAMZ. But this one was never boring. It was still slapping (whale’s term).
There was VALLEY Also. If you ever hated this song, I feel bad for you.
There were others, but I can’t talk about the good without talking about the worst. For those who believe in the slippery slope theory, you can draw a direct line between these and the marketing equivalent of Satan’s spawn, i.e. This:
I will never accept this song, which debuted in Week 0 of the 2019 season. It will never be good. May God have mercy on the soul of the one who invented it.
We all need to be honest with ourselves.
In November, a Stockholm syndrome effect occurs for everything NOT in love with summer (I won’t be broken). We’ve heard these songs so much that we’re almost starting to like them.
Hold on. During this season’s Rivalry Weekend, you’ll be humming the latest song from the rock band that made all those songs.
