On Jan. 6, 2013, I nearly hit a naked man with my car.
The Florida State University Seminoles had just won the Bowl Championship Series National Championship, and Tallahassee was ablaze with the excitement and pure joy victory brings. I was a student at FSU then and was driving back to my apartment when I almost collided with the aforementioned naked man. The thing was, I was too happy and too busy mentally preparing the witty status I would later post on Facebook about how Jameis Winston was a god sent from heaven to save the FSU football program — which I later deleted following the incident with the crab legs — to care that I had almost run over a streaker.
The rest of the ride home was less eventful, but in the hours and days following FSU’s biggest victory in more than a decade, a palpable electricity flowed through campus.
I bring this up not to taunt The Gator Nation, but to remind everyone that this euphoria, this sense of being on top of the world — it does not last.
In the Donald L. Tucker Civic Center, a brilliant sense of togetherness washed over the room as Winston made the throw that won the championship. As a deafening roar filled the arena, strangers were hugging strangers, students were high-fiving security guards and a value-sized bin of cheese balls was hurled through the air.
The energy spilled onto campus, as students threw toilet paper into trees, jumped into fountains and, as I saw firsthand, ripped off their clothes and ran through congested intersections singing “We are the Champions!” loudly and terribly off-key.
In the days that followed, victory celebrations and parades were held, professors were showing highlights of the game and FSU championship gear was being worn proudly by nearly every student I saw.
But then, it just stopped.
Our bubble had been burst, and it was time to face the reality of a new football season filled with the unknown. How could we top this season? How would we silence the critics that would be coming now that we were the champs?
Gator Nation, I am going to let you all in on a secret. Being a champion in college sports is like being in a boy band. One Direction is the perfect example, which is convenient because I wanted to fit them in somehow.
A video of two of the band members leaked online showed them smoking pot on the way to a concert. GASP!
One Direction is a band made up of five young men in their 20s and two were caught doing something they should not have. GASP! The backlash was swift and brutal.
The point is, in the world of sports, you’re only a winner until that trophy arrives home. The second after you’re officially on top, everyone else is coming after you.
With Monday’s inaugural College Football Playoff National Championship over and done with, the Ohio State University Buckeyes may be hauling their hardware back home to cheers and celebrations, but it is the University of Oregon, along with all of the other losers, who really get the best deal out of all this.
The chance to rebuild and do it all over again — it may sound cliche, but it happens to be the perfect opportunity to try something new. For The Gator Nation, this means embracing a new head coach, new assistant coaches and plenty of new players. It means we have not lost yet, have not yet fallen behind and currently have a record of 0-0.
The first year of the College Football Playoff was not without controversy. Was it perfect? Nothing is perfect unless you’re referring to One Direction.
The critics of the College Football Playoff can moan and groan all they like about the problems with this new system, but truthfully, it is a vast improvement over the BCS system. We would have had an entirely different championship matchup this year had the BCS remained intact.
With FSU unbeaten through the regular season, they would have earned a No. 1 ranking and a trip to the title game for the second year. Instead, they crashed and burned, much to the delight of my Rowdy Reptile roommates.
So was it a success? To that, I say, ask me in five years. And to that streaker whom I nearly ran over one year ago, I would tell him, keep doing you, bro.
Erica Brown is a UF journalism junior.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 1/14/2015 under the headline “College football: not so happily ever after"]
