Sorry for my relative inaction and weak content today. I've been running on low imagination levels. Luckily I went back to the place where my imagination can run wild, my paying job cleaning other students' bathrooms. The following is a weird idea, but follow me here:
I want to talk about Jean-Paul Sartre. First off, he's pretty crazy, but I want to talk about one particular element of Sartrian existentialism as it applies to college football. This element is bad faith. Bad faith is the failure to successfully combine the two standpoints of the self: the facticity or being-in-itself and the transcendence or being-for-itself. Facticity is the person from a 3rd person perspective and can be quantified as the history of the self up to this point. Transcendence is the first person perspective, a place where, theoretically, anything is possible.
Bad Faith can occur in two ways:
First the submersion of transcendence into facticity. Take for example, the Texas offense. The offense's facticity is that it is a horizontal passing game with an inexperienced quarterback. The coaching staff chooses to embrace the facticity of the situation, throwing short passes and runs. Sartre would say that Texas has a horizontal pass game because they choose to be a horizontal passing team, which seems a lot simpler now that I've typed it. To embrace their transcendence Texas would have to take more risks and diversify their offense, acknowledging that they are what they choose to be.
Second is the use of transcendence as an escape hatch. In essence it's affirming that something will happen despite overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary. As an example take the high falutin' 'pologist. If you will. Despite the fact that in the last bowl season the best of the Big XII beat the best of the Pac-10 and the 3rd best in the Big XII beat the second best in the Pac-10, HP attributes to the Pac-10 dominance over not only the Big XII, but also all the other college conferences.
as Sartre would say, This guy's f***ing crazy.
This is by no means an advanced understanding of Sartre. This is all I could pick up from my philosophy class last year, but then again I didn't do that well in it anyway.