A College Caught in the Middle of America’s Football Obsession

Short on writers and needing to fill pages last October, Ava Harvey did what any sports editor for a small newspaper would have done: she assigned herself a football story. But since Harvey, then a senior at Oberlin College, was writing for the Oberlin Review, covering football was a rather tricky proposition. Oberlin’s team, the Yeomen, had finished 1–9 each of the previous two seasons. When Harvey began working on her column, during the 2025 season, the team was already 0–4, almost halfway to its eventual record of 0–10. A story breaking down Oberlin’s next opponent seemed useless. A feature on the team’s defense wouldn’t work, either. In its season opener, a home game against Calvin University, Oberlin had allowed its opponent to score seventy-four points before the start of the fourth quarter.

The Review has a history of publishing big feelings about football, keeping with the Oberlin tradition of having big feelings about a lot of things. Harvey decided that she wanted to write something “a little more controversial.” Her take? The school and its students should support the team more.

Had she stopped there, with a spirited call to fill the bleachers at Dick Bailey Field, that would likely have been that. But Harvey did not stop there. She felt bad for her friends on the team, not just because of their dreadful record but because of what she saw as a stark divide between football players and the rest of the student body. In her article, “Put Your Mouth Where Your Money Is: Back Oberlin Football,” she argued that “the majority of students are, at best, indifferent—if not outright hostile—to the sport.” She also noted that “the homogenized coastal culture historically propagated by the school”—despite Oberlin’s campus being in northern Ohio—“alienates Midwest athletes seeking a sense of home.” (Harvey herself is from Lansing, Michigan, and is a diehard Lions fan.) She pointed out that, in recent years, Oberlin’s best offensive season came after its newest recruits were prevented from visiting campus owing to the coronavirus pandemic. This was no coincidence, she contended: “Why would players choose a school where they’re viewed, at best, as an oddity, and at worst, as fundamentally incompatible with the institution’s values?”

After the article ran, something weird happened: people at Oberlin began talking about the football team. Friends told her that in the dining hall, where copies of the Review are often scattered like birdseed, some students were trashing the column. Harvey even noticed a spike in views of her LinkedIn page. About a month later, the Review’s opinions page published two responses, each taking aim at her rationale. The first called Harvey’s perspective “audacious,” adding that “the real issue with the piece is that there is no issue.” The second referred to the “illogical nature of the cultural argument” Harvey had made. Harvey felt like persona non grata, the lady who wrote that football column. “It definitely provoked a response,” she said. “So I guess I got what I was looking for.”

Oberlin is a Division III school that, by N.C.A.A. rule, doesn’t offer athletic scholarships. But having a football team, even one that never wins, is a suck on resources. As the Yeomen continued losing games last year, the larger college-football machine kept humming at campuses across the country. Ohio State, fresh off winning a national title with a twenty-million-dollar payroll, kept on buying separation from most of its peers. Down South, L.S.U. fired a coach to whom it still owed more than fifty million dollars, and then the Louisiana governor joked—maybe?—about having President Donald Trump choose the next hire. A core American truth is that football is a reflection of wherever it exists. Oberlin, it turned out, is no different, no matter how much it might want to be.

The most obvious fragmentation at Oberlin, a school of three thousand or so students, is right there in the institution’s full name: Oberlin College and Conservatory. There’s the liberal-arts college, and then there’s the renowned music conservatory. But just as at any school, the students are then split into many more subcultures, starting with those in the co-ops—student-run living and dining communities that essentially stand in for Greek life. There are also the journalists, the athletes, and the kids who spend sunny days doing contact improv, which was invented at Oberlin, tangling their limbs in the grass outside the library. There’s the Luddite Club, which last fall used a seventy-year-old typewriter to make a poster denouncing the school’s decision to offer students ChatGPT and Google Gemini subscriptions. There’s even a Let’s Talk About Death Club, which, according to its founder, the senior Bee Herbstman, holds “a lot of meetings that are about . . . death.”

Students describe Oberlin as a kind of oasis, a place where high-school misfits can find a community of outsiders. They also know that Oberlin is an avatar for the über-progressive, mad-about-every-micro-aggression school, which makes it hard not to frame their experience in relation to public perception. “It’s totally portrayed as Fox News’ worst nightmare, and maybe it is,” Herbstman told me. “But it doesn’t feel like the only thing we talk about at Oberlin is gender or feminism.”

“It’s like if ‘Portlandia’ was turned down a few notches and everyone was twenty,” Viv Tullis, a senior history major, told me. And so, when it comes to athletes, the traditional social hierarchy is completely inverted, especially as compared with other, more sports-centric schools. Tullis recalled that, back at her high school in Boulder, Colorado, it felt like “athletes were in charge of everything and running the show.” At Oberlin, she said, “it feels like it’s totally the reverse. I guess that does raise certain questions of what it means to be totally socially inclusive.”

To explain Oberlin’s social scene, Tullis used the dance department’s biannual show, saying that it might include watching spoken word about a performer’s menstrual cycle, maybe while the performer rolls around the stage. Or, she said, “it’s Friday night, you’re, like, let’s go crazy, and then there’s just a guy with a bassoon in the corner.” Such jazz parties, I learned, are one of the few settings in which football players and non-athletes regularly mix outside Oberlin’s classrooms. If the football team has live jazz at a postgame party, Lucy Wadman, another senior, said that she will try to get there early to snag a good spot where she can hear the music clearly. She does not, however, attend the football games themselves, at least not since the home opener her freshman year.

Oberlin won that day, one of two victories while Wadman has been on campus. That night, the jazz party, she told me, was probably the biggest party of her first three years. “It was insane,” she said. “Nobody cared, obviously, but it was just something to celebrate.” It makes you wonder what the Review coverage would read like if the Yeomen would just win another game.

Oberlin is not without some real football history. The last team in Ohio to beat Ohio State? That would be Oberlin, a 7–6 win in 1921. The first coaching job for John Heisman, of college-football-trophy fame, in 1892? That would be Oberlin again. And the school Peyton Manning almost chose before committing to Tennessee, when every program in the country was fighting for him? O.K., that one wasn’t Oberlin, but you get the point.

Football at Oberlin has not always felt so oxymoronic. But the true tradition, no matter the era, is the debate about how—or whether—football fits into Oberlin’s culture. “It’s part of Oberlin folklore to think of athletics as a problem, in some way,” Sebastiaan Faber, a professor of Hispanic studies, told me. Faber has been at Oberlin since 1999 and is in his first semester advising the student paper. “I think if you would run through the archives of the Oberlin Review,” he said, “you would see on the op-ed page regularly the same kinds of pieces about how football should be abolished, then people saying, ‘No, no, the football players that I know are also really good musicians and they love to read novels.’ It’s a permanent battle.”

When Khalid McCalla, a member of the Oberlin class of 2021, was looking to play college football, Division I coaches told him that he was too slow for a running back and too small to play linebacker. He ended up as a linebacker—at Oberlin. At his freshman orientation, in 2017, someone told him that there were three distinct groups on campus: athletes, NARPs (non-athletic regular people), and Obies. Ask fifteen Obies to define the term and you might get fifteen different responses. One clean answer is anyone in a co-op. But, broadly, an Obie is more likely than the average student to say “sportsball” or “athletic-type person” to describe an athlete. They’re also more likely to walk around barefoot, or to participate in activities like jello wrestling, as many students did during a weekend music festival last spring.

McCalla wanted to bridge these social divides, which eventually led him to quit football to do more on campus. (He was unhappy with how little playing time he was getting, too.) Another Oberlin graduate told me that McCalla was like a translator between athletes and non-athletes. But McCalla felt that some friends looked at him sideways for being on the team in the first place, because they felt that sports were “tools of the patriarchy or tools of oppression,” he said.

Still, the biggest challenges are on the field, all to play for a team that attracts few fans and very little interest beyond fellow-athletes. During a game, each side has eleven players on the field at a time, but a team’s full roster is much larger: many Division I programs carry the maximum hundred and five members. Smaller schools typically have smaller rosters; Hiram College, Oberlin’s first opponent this season, has a roster of sixty-eight. This year’s Oberlin squad, meanwhile, has just forty-one players in total. To compensate for its small size, Oberlin has seventeen players listed on the college’s athletics site with multiple positions. At the team’s early-morning practices, many players flip between offense and defense to prepare for any situation, especially when there are even a few injuries. “It does become a safety issue at that point,” a former player who graduated recently said. “I think the school has the resources and the ability to focus on it if they wanted to. I definitely feel for those guys and the future players who are coming in.”

The recent grad floated slightly looser admissions standards for football as a possible solution. I can already see the Review editorial slamming that idea. Harvey’s column, she said, reflected complaints that she had heard from a number of players, which included similar frustrations about the lack of, well, players. But what she hammered most was how, in her view, Oberlin has failed to make football players feel welcome. She wanted to see if the reaction might reveal insecurities, a sort of trick play for the truth.

As for Oberlin’s athletic director and the football team’s head coach, both declined my interview requests through a school spokeswoman, who instead sent along a three-hundred-and-sixty-three-word statement (plus a list of recent highlights in men’s lacrosse, women’s softball, women’s tennis, and men’s tennis). The statement recognized the roster size and injuries as a challenge for football, mentioning that the team has access to a sports psychologist. “Oberlin has always been a place where students ask hard questions, challenge assumptions, and debate what our values mean in practice,” the statement read. “Athletics is no exception. We see the student discussion about football as part of that tradition.”

Ghulam Woolman’s parents like to tell a story about a hike that they took when he was six years old. The Woolmans were with family friends. At some point, the conversation turned to Tom Brady and the Patriots, and Woolman didn’t know who they were talking about. He asked them to explain, not realizing how absurd of a question that was for a kid growing up near Boston, Massachusetts, in the twenty-tens. “It was kind of like being a six-year-old Catholic and not knowing who the Pope was,” Woolman told me. “Like, how did I miss this?”

When it came time for college, Woolman wanted to go to a school in a big city. He instead wound up in a small town in Ohio, having been sold on Oberlin by a performance of “Dracula” he saw at the end of a campus visit. He started there last fall as a freshman. He planned to get involved in theatre, but he also wanted to write for the Review. When Harvey published her football column, Woolman read it, loathed it, and saw an opportunity. And then, like a seasoned writer, he waited a month before publishing a rebuttal. “Obviously, being a freshman, starting as a staff writer, wanting to go into the opinion side of things, part of me was maybe, like, Oh, you want to make a name for yourself,” he said. “I feel like responding to this would be like tapping into the campus Zeitgeist.”

In his column, “Oberlin Does Not Need to Change Culture for Football,” Woolman said that Harvey’s logic was “shamefully faulty.” But instead of calling to abolish the football team, he defended Oberlin as it is, framing football as just another campus activity, not particularly deserving of face paint and giant crowds. “There is widespread indifference to the sport, but football is not unique in this,” Woolman wrote. “The indifference to football is the same people feel to soccer, or field hockey, or someone’s DJ performance at The ’Sco, or my standup. People go to events if they have a personal connection or if they have a free night and their interest is piqued.”

Woolman, like Harvey, kept on swinging. He described Harvey’s column as a “broadside that mischaracterized campus life and failed to appreciate what makes our college special.” This was the tame version, too, after a friend read the first draft and told him to rein it in a bit. “I was, like, you know what? I probably really should,” Woolman said later. But if Harvey wanted to use football as a mirror for Oberlin’s flaws, then he wanted to smash it into a bunch of tiny pieces. “I think people in the newsroom were kind of excited,” Woolman said. “Like, ooh, it’s sort of like a family fight, a staff writer and an editor going at it.”

“Actually having the football team is the inclusive thing,” Woolman told me. “And we don’t need it to be good for it to be meaningful.” In a vacuum, this was an intuitive argument: the idea that, unlike most of higher education, Oberlin can field a team without bending to the country’s football obsession. And yet another core American truth is that being normal about football is just about impossible. Nationally, there is more spending and attention on the sport than ever. The Senate is in knots over a bill that would try to regulate college football’s billion-dollar economy. The N.F.L. is coming for the night before Thanksgiving, as if Sundays, Mondays, Thursdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and some Saturdays weren’t enough. But as Faber, the longtime Oberlin professor, put it to me, the school’s desired self-image is as a “special place with a special way of doing things.” Preaching indifference to football, however radical that is, played straight into this sensibility. And so the column got “really, really big,” Woolman said, remaining in the Review’s trending-stories bar for two or three weeks. “Which, you know, you try not to get an ego about these things, but it’s pretty cool to see it up there,” he said.

After the Review ran the second editorial panning her, Harvey considered writing a response to the responses. But then the season ended, and then there were midterms, and then the semester came to a close, resetting the discourse until the next football column appears. It might even be here soon: the Yeomen, looking to win for the first time since November 26, 2024, have their season opener on Saturday. It’s a home game. ♦

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