College football fan bases run on heavy amounts of Hope-ium in the lead-up to the next season. With the advent of the transfer portal, it is very easy to get extra shots of this Hope-ium during the offseason. If we examine the top 5 transfer portal classes for 2025, four of the five teams are programs that typically have a high level of expectations/attention by the collective college football media. However, Texas Tech made massive waves by securing one of the top classes in the country. The Red Raiders’ spending has brought with it college football expectations that fans in Lubbock haven’t seen since 2008 or possibly ever. While head coach Joey McGuire will have to navigate the noise with his locker room, how do fans live with this newfound attention?
Non-Blue Blood Life
You are walking around passionate about your team. Those fall Saturdays are a secondary life source only rivaled by crisp, clean oxygen. For three, sometimes four, hours on those 12 Saturdays, it feels like the entire world has stopped. Your employer only dreams that you could bring half of this energy and passion to the workplace. And yet, most Saturdays, you find yourself wishing for more. Loss after loss piles up. You turn on your favorite college football show or podcast, and your team isn’t even a thought in the producer’s brain. If you are a Cal, Maryland, Rutgers, Texas Tech, or Vanderbilt fan, you have NEVER seen your team ranked in a single College Football Playoff Top 25 ranking.
You have been suffering 10 years (and counting) of mediocre-to-bad football. You don’t have Arch Manning or Drew Allar players garnering Heisman consideration all year. An occasional bowl win here or there is nice, but no one cares nationally about you. If you were a student during this time, the campus had zero buzz during the week. Maybe Friday, there is something palpable, but that could just be the lasting effects of a long Thirsty Thursday night out. If you eat any of your meals at the student union building, it’s just a bunch of zombies floating around perusing for anything for survival of their upcoming mid-terms.
Nerd Gets The Party Invite
But even Seth, Evan, and Fogell (aka McLovin) got an invitation to the end-of-high-school party. A type of event that they never would have seen in the previous high school years. So what changed? After being excluded for all those years, something had to change. Ironically enough, your football team tries something different. Just like Fogell went out and found his fake ID to “buy” his way into the party, Texas Tech’s off-season spending spree has that same feeling. No one will mistake head coach Joey McGuire for a guy from Hawaii with just one last name. But the fan base that knew him as Fogell is starting to brag about him being McLovin. As the long-suffering fan who has long stood by this national outcast of a program for over a decade, these new college football expectations reverberate in your bones harder than the drumline at kickoff.
The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
Have you ever bought a new car and then started seeing it everywhere? This is known as the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, better known as the frequency illusion. This occurs when something you’ve noticed or recently learned suddenly seems to appear everywhere. But is it appearing more frequently, or is your brain just paying more attention to it? After all, social media platforms are specifically engineered in a way to keep you engaged by feeding you information that scratches your most prevalent itches.
So you start casually bringing up your team to people outside your own tribe. They start making comments like “Oh yeah, I saw they have been spending money like crazy.” Or “you know, I really think they have a chance to surprise some people this year.” These morsels of positive feedback are just the fuel to ignite a decade-long dormant pilot light. You are now the only fuel source the hype train needs to pull from. Before long, it just isn’t people outside your fan base; it is the national media starting to display your team’s logo more frequently.
Hype Train Has Left The Station
All during spring practice, your team is one of the lead topics of the offseason. “Which program is poised to make the biggest leap this year?” You are waiting on bated breath for you to see the national pundits light up when they talk about your team. They look like they have discovered a pot of gold that “no one” else knows about it. It’s like you gained a brand-new friend that you will never meet. You are no longer experiencing frequency illusion. It is a reality to everyone that the amount of attention your team is receiving.
There is a tangible energy around campus, even with everyone preparing for Spring final exams. One of the cliché sports topics is the mounting wait of new college football expectations. The team will indeed have to navigate a new target on their back. But for the fans, it is the exact opposite. The countless years of mediocrity and flat-out refusal of acknowledgment from the rest of the sport is no more. You feel like you have your magic carpet under your feet, simply gliding around with your school’s gear proudly worn for the first time in forever.
Season Becomes Choose Your Own Adventure Book
In all walks of life, newfound success or attention will undoubtedly attract the haters.
“Wouldn’t you want to be surprised by the season and not let down?”
“You guys never live up to expectations.”
“Too many new guys and not enough time to come together.”
“No way you guys can be that good. You’ve never been that good.”
“Come talk to me after you start 6-0. Otherwise, nothing matters.”
Normally, the haters always carve a notch in your emotional health because deep down, you know that they are right. But not this year. Not one person can yuck your yum. You have the authority to dream wildly. The ceiling is a national championship, even if in a quiet moment, you would even acknowledge that is “too crazy.” With less than 30 days until the season starts, you choose to bathe in the Kool-Aid. You aren’t going to pick the predictable choices for the season. You are choosing to live in an alter-ego that you have never had the chance to experience. Now, you can peacock anywhere you go because until that ball gets kicked off, not one person can steal this feeling from you. You are now the exclusive Hope-ium dealer, trying to find new buyers for what you are selling.
Unsolicited Advice on New College Football Expectations
All those promotional videos for the upcoming season now have your team in them. You have officially arrived at the cool kids’ table in the college football lunchroom. So now what? Specifically, if you are a fan of Texas Tech coming into the 2025 season, you are seeking a season that would include only the second 10-win regular season since 1976. You are also hoping to see the Red Raiders fill their trophy case with their first-ever outright Big 12 title and first outright conference title since their 1955 Border Conference days. The season is going to go one of two ways.
The team will live up to the hype, and the shine off new trophies will be a better glow-up than any makeover could give you. That shine will remain with you for the rest of your life. Ask anyone who lived the 2008 Texas Tech season, and that only included a brief stint at number two in the polls and a share of the Big 12 South Divisional title. Or the season will go off the rails and will crumble spectacularly. Just like the boys of Superbad, the party does come to an end. They wake up the next day with their lives returning to “normal” with only the one night of memories they can hold onto.
Last Word leaves you with this last piece of advice regarding these new college football expectations. Do not worry about what this means for the future. Live in this season. The future of the program can wait until December. You found one of Willie Wonka’s golden tickets. Lose yourself in touring how the Blue Bloods lived once. The time for logic and future worries will come. But now is not that time. Announce your arrival to the party in style and live it up until the party gets broken up by the NCAA…I mean cops…I mean, until they turn on “The Party’s Over” by Willie Nelson and everyone goes home.
Main Image: Katie Perkins/For Lubbock Avalanche-Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
