The World is a Meat Market

A Meat Stall by Pieter Aertsen, year 1551

This is a meat market, I thought to myself, sighing and tossing my phone on the bed. And for the first time in fifteen years, I remembered a book I read about college football recruiting.

Meat Market was written by Bruce Feldman, and covers Ed Orgeron's 2007 recruiting class at Ole Miss. Coach O would be fired from that job a couple of years later, and bounced around as an assistant, filling in as interim coach at USC and LSU, and then finally taking over at LSU and winning a national championship in 2020.

I'd read a lot about football, and sports in general, as a kid. But I remember holding Meat Market in my hands, reading the blurbs, realizing that there was something else going on here. I would've been about 14, and it'd be a year or two before I started thinking about the world like an adult.

As an aspiring college football player myself, and general fan of the sport, I'd spent a lot of time in previous years on rivals.com, following the top recruits and which of my favorite teams would be able to sign them. And, of course, by then I had tons of experience as an ace recruiter in EA's NCAA football games. It's all about the star ratings, the height, the weight, the 40 time. Players are merely products.

So when I came across Feldman's book, I perked up. It was right there, in the name. College football is a meat market. These kids are for sale.

Of course, a lot has changed, in an explicit sense, over the last fifteen years. The NIL rules have made the market aspects of recruiting legible. The bidding is all done out in the open, as opposed to the old times when all coaches had were big problems, and if they were lucky, a shadow network of boosters to funnel cash money to recruits and their families.

Back in 2019, Feldman wrote a follow-up to his book for the Athletic, part where-are-they-now and part what-could-have been. It seems that the consensus is that Orgeron had all the guys in place but ran out of time. He inherited a bare cupboard and stocked it up for his successor, who had a brief run of success until he ran the stock out again. Those teams were stocked with now-recognizable names, many of who came from the 2005 and 2006 classes: Michael Oher (the Blindside kid), Dexter McCluster, Greg Hardy, Peria Jerry and Jerell Powe, to name a few. Even some of the names the didn't sign were obscure at the time, but a few turned into NFL Hall of Fame caliber players: Rob Gronkowski, Von Miller, Nick Foles and Harrison Smith.

Orgeron was rubbing elbows with future big name coaches too: Hugh Freeze was on that staff, and would later spend a few years as the head coach at Ole Miss, before running amok with recruiting violations. He got caught arranging for payments to recruits, and subsequently lied to future recruiting classes about the severity of the allegations levied against the school. In the end, Freeze got busted for hiring female escorts and resigned.

It's striking, to me, how fast the sport chews up and spits out the good guys like Coach O. In the pursuit of marginal improvement, schools set higher and higher expectations. They cycle through coaches hoping for someone to stick. Eventually they hire a guy of questionable character, who brings embarrassment to the institution. Ole Miss may have saved itself some trouble if it'd just let Orgeron do his thing a few more years. Or maybe not.

That's just the way it goes, I guess, when you're out for fame and glory and piles of money. Everything becomes a transaction. How much can we squeeze out of this hard-working mentor of young men? And how much can we profit off the backs of the young men themselves?

It's no surprise that the players have embraced their place in the meat case. When the money is there, I can't blame them for trying to get theirs. But one thing that's striking about Feldman's retrospective is the where-are-they-now thread. Almost all of these athletes end up selling insurance or driving trucks. One nearly forgotten player in the piece seemed to have his own influencer racket. Some become educators and coaches themselves.

I think, for me, what is sad is that in the pursuit of money, the sport has lost purity. The love of the game comes in second or third these days. But without football, and I say this speaking for everyone who's played, life looks dramatically different. There is hard work and camaraderie and intellectual challenge that is hard to find anywhere else as a kid. You do everything you can to keep playing, and I guess to do that, you've got to find a way to get paid.

It's always been this way, the grand scheme of things. It is both true that people love this game for all it represents, and also need to make a buck to keep the game going. This is just one of those things you can't think too hard on or else it drives you crazy.

After all, college football is merely one of many meat markets, which we all willingly do our best to present ourselves as a nice filet mignon. Perhaps the answer is to change our tastes, to become the humble skirt steak instead. But even that is a commodity these days. Just enjoy what you have, I guess.

I pick up my phone once again, tap the flame, and swipe a few more times.

This is just like the NCAA games. I'm looking for a five foot seven brunette with a nice smile pretty eyes and a penchant for European literature. And all I see here are plastic blondes with an appetite for tequila shots.

I look at my own profile, thinking about what cut of meat I'm selling myself, putting on my salesman's hat to figure out how to get everything I want. I guess I'm not so different, am I?

I close the app, press down on the flame, and tap delete. Perhaps I'll have the salad instead.