Tradition! Stuffing, Tevye, and Rivalry Saturday
A Thanksgiving-week plea to save college football’s sacred rituals in a realignment era.
When I was younger, I was in plays and musicals. For some, that might be hard to believe; for others, totally on brand. As I got older, I started listening to the kids in the neighborhood about what was “cool,” and—right on cue—my voice dropped a few octaves. Those two things killed the thespian in me. Back then I was the regular sing-and-dance guy. If it were today, I’d be rapping my way through a community production of Hamilton.
One of the shows my hometown, Walla Walla, staged was Fiddler on the Roof. Classic mid-20th-century musical set in tsarist Russia on the edge of revolution. The main characters are a Jewish family; the father, Tevye, is trying to cope with a world tilting under his feet. In the opening act, the whole cast belts “Tradition!” to nail the point.
Why can’t we keep things the way they’ve always been?
Some days I feel like Tevye. Other days I’m Perchik, the modernizer. With Thanksgiving here and December coming, it’s the perfect time to ask: When are traditions good—and when do we need to make room for change?
Marriage vs. The Sacred Side Dishes
Get married (I did, young), and those first five years become a negotiation. Your childhood traditions meet your spouse’s and both sides audition for the new family. You figure out what’s worth fighting for. Do I really need the green-bean casserole she finds gross? And why does she prefer the processed cranberry gelatin blob that slides out of the can with the little cylindrical ridges still stamped on it, swaying like a dashboard hula dancer?
For me, stuffing—or dressing, depending on the family—was the hill to die on. That was my Tevye moment. She says she doesn’t get stuffing and won’t eat it; I’m over here belting “Tradition!” I love stuffing. Don’t come at me with Stove Top or anything in a box. That’s junk. I want homemade—preferably cornbread-based, but a great bread version works too. We have it every year, and most years I’m the only one eating it unless we’ve got company.
“Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof.”
— Tevye, Fiddler on the Roof
College Football Killed the Fiddler
When it comes to college football, I’m more Tevye than Perchik. And just like in the musical (spoiler), change won.
Growing up, the Saturday before Thanksgiving was Rivalry Saturday. All the big ones on the same day: Iron Bowl, Michigan–Ohio State, Yale–Harvard. In the Pac-12, you had USC–UCLA, the Civil War, and the Apple Cup—all stacked together. That went on for 75–100 years. Tradition and pageantry were the sales pitch: TV montages, Sports Illustrated spreads, bands, colors, the whole thing.
Then 1984 happened: NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma. The Supreme Court said the NCAA couldn’t restrict TV games. Pandora’s box: open. I wish we could’ve had a Marty McFly moment—go back, convince the powers that be to create a real commissioner for the common good of the sport before it ate itself. (Back to the Future is on Netflix; I had to.)
That didn’t happen. Greed won. TV networks, Fortune 500s, rich boosters—push, push, push. It took about 40 years, but they finally smashed one of the pillars: Tradition. The networks, the Big Ten, and the SEC took a sledgehammer to it like an HGTV demo day. No one thought the stuffing was worth saving.
Was there a point of no return? Southwest Conference dissolving into the Big Eight? The Big East imploding in 2013–2014? Rutgers to the Big Ten, Maryland leaving the ACC? Pick your brick.
For me, the music died June 30, 2022. Six months after I got sick and my life was already a disaster, my beloved Pac-12—the Conference of Champions—lost two of its most important members. The gateway to Southern California, USC and UCLA recruiting, ratings—gone. Turns out the roof the fiddler danced on had termites: bad management, brutal commissioner hires, arrogant university presidents who didn’t understand the game anymore. No one to save the conference from the monster it helped create.
The roof collapsed. Tradition is dead.
Now WSU and OSU are on the outside looking in. In this home-reno/Fiddler analogy, the house is condemned and the roommates can’t move in until next year. Meanwhile, the other big four conferences fled to the suburbs.
This once mark-your-calendar rivalry weekend is diet food—kinda like the original, but not. Stanford and Cal play… in the ACC… after Thanksgiving. The Apple Cup happens (sort of), but now the worry isn’t snow and frozen faces; it’s sunburns and dehydration. It’s a forced non-conference game instead of a showdown that decides the Pac-12 North, a championship berth, or the Rose Bowl.
College football has turned into Game of Thrones. Starks vs. Lannisters, everyone else scrambling for scraps, waiting for the next surprise betrayal. Chaos reigns. No one’s looking out for Tevye, his roof, or the stuffing.
This sport is now pro ball hopped up on Mountain Dew—and it desperately needs a salary cap.
And now my stuffing is ruined.