Hey everyone! Happy Week Zero! It’s been the wildest offseason in recent memory, but there’s at least one thing that remains totally ordinary and predictable: USC’s defense still sucks.
First, if you’re reading this I want to thank you for reading this. I’ve wanted to start a new-ish unique-ish college football rag for awhile now and this final season of college football as we know it feels like the perfect time to do so. If you haven’t read the ‘About’ section or the ‘Coming Soon’ posts then I encourage you to do so, but Cream will essentially focus on the world of college football with an Oregon State lens. It will be a lot like the Belligerent Beavs podcast, which I co-host with my two favorite Beaver alumni JP Bertram and Benny Wehage, but will probably zoom out and look at college football as a whole in a way I don’t get the chance to on the show.
There will be multiple posts per week open to all subscribers, but I’ll also be creating content for paid subscriptions multiple times a week. The paid subscription is currently $10/month or $100/year. I want to be sure there is always a free option on this site, but if you are able to purchase a paid subscription it will help me to write even more dope college football stories as well as cover travel to cover games in person. I plan to be at multiple regular season games, a the Pac 12 Championship Game featuring Oregon State obviously, a bowl game or two, and definitely the Senior Bowl again.
Okay, enough business. Let’s get into the first post on this new college football publication. We are of course starting with Jurassic Park.
I’ve been thinking about Jeff Goldblum a lot lately. This is a piece on college football’s recent realignment tangle and the carnage left in its wake, but just bear with me. I’ve been thinking about Jeff Goldblum a lot lately because not only am I a person who often thinks of Jeff Goldblum, but also because of one of the most poignant and perfectly delivered lines of his career.
The line goes like this:
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Goldblum is of course delivering this bit of wisdom as the amusing chaos theorist Dr. Ian Malcolm shortly after arriving at Jurassic Park, a brand spanking new theme park on a remote island west of Costa Rica powered by a team of scientists who have brought dinosaurs back to life and who are just a little too enthusiastic about how filthy rich they’re all going to get because of their discovery. It’s maybe the best scene in the 1993 blockbuster that ended its opening weekend as the highest-grossing film of all time. It’s a scene the handful of suits who are destroying college football in 2023 could stand to rewatch a time or two before the next time they decide to flex their all powerful forces that didn’t require any discipline for them to attain.
You’ve seen the movie, but remember, this meeting is happening after a velociraptor has already eaten a park employee and yet here’s the founder of the park John Hammond (brilliantly portrayed by Richard Attenborough, RIP, king!!) gathering this group of scientists to say ‘hey guys, look at how good of an idea this is!!!’
Had the scientists stopped to think whether or not they should as Dr. Malcolm suggests, they may have arrived at a few questions. Such as: Why do this? How can we even control this? If we do this, will more than one person get eaten?
Spoiler alert: a lot more than just one person gets eaten.
I’m not going to go into anymore plot details about Jurassic Park because you’ve almost certainly seen it and I can’t talk about any movie where Samuel L Jackson dies and not get teary-eyed. These past few weeks have already been sad enough.
Is this metaphor clear enough? These greedy bastards are wielding power they didn’t earn, to extract every single dollar they can by overhauling a system that was already successful and doing just fine without them, and the only fair result to come from all of this would be a tyrannosaurus rex swooping in and devouring every single one of these spiritless perfumed bureaucrats.
As amusing as it would be to watch a T-rex eat Larry Scott (or whoever your villain of choice is in this, there are lots of them) clean off a toilet in the middle of a monsoon, it’s not going to happen. If there’s one thing we’ve learned by now it’s we don’t get to have nice things.
We may not get to have nice things, but that doesn’t mean that we have to shut up. And that’s why we’re here. That’s why I’m here.
If you’re reading this, then you likely have a lot of complex emotions around this college football season. I certainly do.