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Articles by Connor Mighell
What College Football Games Are On TV (Week 4)
This one’s played at Jerry World, and it’s an eyebrow-raiser. Texas A&M benched QB Haynes King for new pigskin-chucker Max Johnson against Miami last week, and it didn’t help that much. Don’t get me wrong, the Aggies won, but mostly because their defense didn’t allow a touchdown. They have prevented passes from connecting super well, but coach Jimbo Fisher’s blah offense continues to sputter.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 4 2020
I moved last week. Meaning, I changed cities. It was a career thing, a shift from one job to another. And I didn’t schlep everything cross-country or something. Just a few hours, city to city, within the same state. But it got me thinking about endings. Not to get too existential in a silly college football column, but everything ends. Whether that end is good or not, you’d think, depends on the thing that is being ended.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 3 2020
In Dallas, there’s a restaurant called Snuffers. Most restaurants have some featured specialty, some entree or even dessert that people recognize as especially delicious. At Snuffers, oddly enough, it’s cheese fries. This classic appetizer usually falls victim to one nagging, eternal problem: that top layer of fries are all cheesy, but everything below’s just fries. Not so at Snuffers.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Weeks 1 and 2 2020
It used to be common knowledge that unpredictability leads to overreaction. We forgot that truth this past spring when The Virus (yes, future historians, that virus) hit America in earnest. Immediately, top scientists predicted mass death in the millions, based on research backed by assumptions that turned out to be at best repeatedly inaccurate and at worst hopelessly, hilariously false.
Bad - The Resurgent
If you twist and turn away If you tear yourself in two again If I could, yes I would If I could, I would let it go Surrender, dislocate Football used to be a violent sport. Yes, today’s version of the game involves plenty of bumping and banging. But we’ve worked out the kinks, padded the players, spaced out the formations. Heck, the most popular modern offensive scheme is called the Spread.
WATCHING FOOTBALL: SEC 2020 Season Preview
Americans – and by extension America, because America is Americans – hold liberty as their first love. Liberty, put simply, is the ability to do whatever you want so long as it harms no one else. This naturally fuels bold expression and action, as everyone aims their life toward whatever maximizes their version of happiness. No region of the country has this uniquely American pursuit down to a science more than the South – especially the maximization part.
WATCHING FOOTBALL: The Season(s) To Come
Yesterday, the Big Ten officially canceled its fall college football season, with the expressed hope to play in the spring. The PAC-12 swiftly followed suit. But the Big 12 stood firm for now, releasing an in-conference fall football schedule this morning. That’s the news. To my eyes, here’s what it means. Deciding to cancel fall sports is, to be generous, hasty and willfully unreasonable.
WATCHING FOOTBALL: #WeWantToPlay
As last week came to a close, the largest college football conferences looked like they’d settled on a course of action in the face of the ongoing COVID pandemic. Armed with safety procedures and a limited, conference-only approach, the Power 5 seemed ready to play ball. Sure, there was a rumbling of player dissatisfaction and media chatter about unions, but most players, coaches, and ADs appeared satisfied with the compromise.
WATCHING FOOTBALL: Big 12 2020 Season Preview
I’m going to say something controversial: Hamilton is very good. (Gasp!) In my eyes, the pivotal moment in the hip-hop musical’s second act arrives when the title character, founding father Alexander Hamilton, decides to preemptively reveal his unwise affair to the public, in order to head off false accusations that he embezzled money.
WATCHING FOOTBALL: COVID Scheduling, PAC-12 Players Strike, The XFL
If you’re like me, you were starving for sports – games, news, debates, anything – as the world’s long virus hiatus dragged on. Thankfully, most major sports (and the WNBA) are now back! And the ones that aren’t back quite yet are at least making news. For instance: football! Just in the last few days, we witnessed a blitz of exciting news across the pro and college game. Below I’ll break down the three biggest stories of the week so far.
WATCHING FOOTBALL: Big Ten 2020 Season Preview
So we’re going to begin our Big Ten preview talking about the Big 12. Don’t worry, it’ll make sense in a second. Earlier this week, Big 12 head honcho Bob Bowlsby did something unusual: he said something intelligent! (I kid. Mostly.) Anyhow, ol’ Bowls said that in this period of pandemic-ness, every conference should craft their own personalized plan to play this season. This makes sense.
WATCHING FOOTBALL: ACC 2020 Season Preview
The Avengers is a movie masterpiece. I’m still amazed at just how well the whole apparatus clicks into place, all these disparate, strong characters in the same place, no one overshadowing anyone. The script is why. It’s full of gems, but early in the film super-spy and SHIELD Director Nick Fury asks one of his agents to load some prototype weapons onto a truck as their secret base is about to collapse. The agent asks whether that’s really a priority.
WATCHING FOOTBALL: COVID and the Conferences
I’ll spare you the usual opening paragraph that starts with some hackneyed phrase like “in these strange times.” We’re in the middle of a nationwide, worldwide battle with a scary virus. It’s super infective, even if not super deadly. You know this. I don’t need to say it. Most states have imposed gathering limits, and part and parcel to those, major sports leagues have been reconsidering whether and how they can effectively play games.
WATCHING FOOTBALL: College Football and COVID
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you know COVID-19 cases are rising nationwide. The percentage of positive tests – the best method for tracking coronavirus community spread – shows especially large spikes in California, Texas, and Florida since mid-June. The virus’s sudden resurgence has the media panicked and top scientists sounding the alarm. Governors are rolling back reopening and mandating masks. Businesses are partially or completely closing, again.
When Are Sports Back?
Saying COVID-19 changed a few things is like saying water’s wet. It’s fully accurate and yet sorely lacking at the same time. We shut down nearly everything. Voluntarily. For months. Social distancing, for many, became isolation. Self-inflicted self-reliance. No way to live. Not for long. As a nation, we seem to have reached the general consensus that it is not good for man to be alone. But we also don’t want to take COVID unseriously. We can be smarter than the average bear without savaging modern life.
Black Swans - The Resurgent
There’s been increasing talk the last few days about “black swan” events. Like many folks, I was at least semi-familiar with the term when I first heard it. I went looking for its origin and found Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, a fascinating book that placed the phrase in modern parlance. It offers important lessons for understanding our current situation, how we got here, and what we can do next.
On Panic - The Resurgent
At a certain point, news is bad for you. Imagine there’s a meteor headed for Earth. The media reports that the meteor has a decent chance of hitting our planet. But scientists are diligently working on some sort of Deep Impact/Armageddon-esque countermove. It’ll be a hard deadline to meet, but there’s an excellent chance that they’ll be ready, given enough time and funding, to deflect or mitigate the effects of this meteor.
Fight or Flight - The Resurgent
I think it was when all the sports leagues shut down. That’s the answer to the question I’ve been turning over in my mind the last day or so. When did coronavirus go from far-off curiosity to immediate concern for most Americans? As close as I can tell, it happened this Thursday, when every major sport save UFC and NASCAR (and WWE, but that’s really more sports entertainment) abruptly canceled or suspended all play. That’s unprecedented, except maybe in wartime.
A Good Reminder - The Resurgent
On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him. And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion.
WATCHING FOOTBALL: XFL Week 4 2019
Well, the week’s over, and now it’s time to kick back. Not for me, though! I’ll be on the road. Thank goodness my treasured football games are on satellite radio. But you’ll be watching on TV. So let me help you out, if you’re football-ly inclined. Below I’ll preview every XFL game this weekend. And there’s some doozies. I’ll give you the start time, TV channel, and even pick the winner. Still, I know that XFL game previews are . . . not the usual Resurgent fare, to say the least.
WATCHING FOOTBALL: XFL Week 3 2020
The going theory around the American sports media water-cooler for decades has been the following: non-NFL football leagues are destined for mediocrity or failure. They’d been proven right so far, as every attempt at fielding an alternative professional league that could rival the NFL’s dominance ended up bankrupt. The USFL. The Arena Football League (several times). The Alliance of American Football, just last year.
WATCHING FOOTBALL: XFL Week 2 2020
How do I love thee, XFL? Let me count the ways. Kickoffs are now entertaining, interesting, and safe. Hearing coaches, players, and refs talk in real time is real cool. The refs mostly just let the teams play football. Nothing remotely political besides a Bloomberg ad during a commercial break. Point-after attempts actually take strategy. Pat McAfee. An Instagram model threw for 4 TDs and won Player of the Week. This happened: Insane, I tell you.
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
What It’s Like Imagine gathering with top undergraduates from across the nation for an in-depth, weeklong (and all-expenses-paid) summer conference exploring the conservative intellectual tradition . . . . . . learning from, being mentored by, and forming friendships with leading professors from many different colleges across many disciplines . . . . . . being invited to exclusive weekend seminars . . . . . . forming lifelong friendships with like-minded, intellectually curious students . . . . . .
WATCHING FOOTBALL: XFL Week 1 2020
Well, that was a pretty great Super Bowl, huh? Congrats to the Chiefs, good game to the Niners, a decided “no thank you” to whatever that halftime show was, and a “do better next time” head pat to the advertisers. Guess it’s time to resign myself to the doldrums of the long football offseason and take a long sportswriting hiatus until next year. … … … Ha ha! Just kidding! While the NFL slumbers, the XFL comes out to play.
WATCHING FOOTBALL: Super Bowl XLIV Preview
Pretty much the last common thing that all of America does together is watch the Super Bowl. That alone makes it an immensely important event. Objectively speaking, the Super Bowl is the championship professional football game, accompanied by unique advertising, celebrity participation, and A-list production. For better and worse, the Super Bowl also reflects our culture like a funhouse mirror.
WATCHING FOOTBALL: Wait, The XFL's Back?
Next week all of America will gather in our annual commercial-watching ritual, with occasional breaks where some people play football. If you like football like I do, though, the Super Bowl is a bittersweet experience. Yes, it’s a glorious three-and-a-half hours, but afterwards comes almost six solid months where nary a football game is to be found. Not this year though.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Bowl Weeks 2 & 3 2019
Another Christmas is in the books! It’s my favorite time of the year. I hope there was laughing and paper-tearing and candy-cane-devouring all around at your various houses. And I hope you ended it with an epic feast with family and friends. But are you all feasted out? I hope not. Because the football feast is just beginning.
WATCHING THE MOVIES: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
I haven’t written one of these reviews in a while. But I had to come back for this. Star Wars is the American epic, the single greatest generation-spanning cinematic storytelling achievement our country has ever produced. The first film blew up from an arthouse filmmaker’s love letter to Flash Gordon serials into a true cultural phenomenon thanks to a near-Herculean editing effort.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Bowl Week 1 2019
Well, we’ve made it. The season’s over. The calendar year’s winding down. But there’s still mirth and merriment to be had, football fans. We can find it in this year’s crop of bowl games. Think of bowl season as a very very very lengthy average college football week. A week that takes way longer than the average week. Yes, that analogy is terrible because a week that lasts longer than a week is in fact not a week. BEAR WITH ME.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Championship Week 2019
I started this column because I had the same problem many of you experience: too much college football, no idea what’ll be worth watching. So every week, I would look at all the games out there and write down my own little personal schedule. Then I thought, “hey, I bet other people have this issue too!” I hope you’ve enjoyed it this year. I really do.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Rivalry Week 2019
I firmly believe Americans don’t eat enough pie. Americans consume a lot of dessert, but not much of it is the crust-and-filling conglomeration that is your average pie. Ice cream, candy, cake, sure. But mostly not pie. Yes, there’s that old saying: “as American as apple pie.” But apple pie isn’t all that American either.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 13 2019
I love the word “gumption.” First of all, it’s fun to say. Gumption gumption gumption. Where was I? Oh yeah, gumption. It’s a near-indefinable word that combines discernment, initiative, determination, drive, and common sense into a descriptive gumbo. You might say it’s the old-fashioned American work ethic distilled into two syllables. Gumption is both something that can be observed, and something that must be drawn up from within. There is no magical gumption-granting fairy godmother.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 12 2019
Horse racing isn’t really my sport. Neither is NASCAR, or speed-skating, or the 100m dash, for that matter. But I suppose you could guess that, since this is an article about college football, not the Triple Crown. But there is something elemental, grounded, real about a race. Speed against speed. The variables change, but the test stays the same: Are you fast enough? Well, we’ve hit the home stretch of the college football season.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 11 2019
My current job lets me travel a bunch. In fact, I’m on a plane right now as I write this. While I’m not supremely fond of flying or sleeping on hotel beds, I do enjoy the sights and sounds of unfamiliar places. But I especially enjoy seeing each new place’s take on the humblest of food items: the sandwich.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 10 2019
Some folks see the glass half empty. Others see the glass half full. But, dear reader, when taking a look at every glorious college football Saturday, I try to call things down the middle. That means as little doom-and-gloom as I can muster. Football is fun, after all. But this week, the college football scheduling hamsters (see Week 9) are really testing my patience. There’s few silver linings on the dark clouds in this storm front of a Saturday.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 9 2019
You know, putting this article/schedule/thing together is difficult sometimes. Some weeks, there’s just a ton of good games. So picking the best and the worst is difficult. This is a tad hard for me, but not for you: you get lots of great football. And so do I! But when most of the games are stinkers, my list of watchable stuff gets shorter. And no one likes that. So it was very nice of the game-scheduling hamsters to spin their tiny wheels in perfect harmony to produce this week.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 8 2019
A shark can detect blood in only 1 part per million of water. That’s a drop of blood in your average sized swimming pool. This incredible sense of smell makes them one of the most efficient and fearsome predators on the planet, so fearsome that Discovery Channel devotes a week of programming to them in some sort of ritual yearly appeasement of angry shark god wrath. Why am I beginning this article, which is ostensibly about college football, by bloviating about sharks?
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 7 2019
When I was young, I loved pizza buffets. Cici’s, Gatti’s, Chuck E. Cheese, you name it. Just give me some quarters for the arcade and permission to go ham on all the pizza pie I could stomach, and you had a happy kid. Well this weekend, I feel like a kid again. We’ve got quite an impressive spread to consume, and with a slate of games like this, I bet you’re feeling pretty overwhelmed. After all, there’s only so much football watching a body can do. But what’s worth your time? And what isn’t?
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 6 2019
We’re back to preview another week of college football, separating the winners from the losers, the watchables from the unmentionables! I can’t wait to get started! Let me just take a glance at what’s on TV. Oh. Ohhhhhhhh no. Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat this: based on my initial look-see, there ain’t too much worth watching this weekend. And most of the entertaining stuff is front-loaded.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 5 2019
This college football weekend is like a Monday. That may seem like a very silly thing to say. My practical, serious readers (who also seem to make up most of the commentariat) will probably retort, “No, only Monday is like Monday! This is a weekend! Get a calendar!” What I mean is that last week produced some of the best regular season football in some time. Just concentrated glory from pretty much beginning to end.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 4 Tier Rankings
The regular readers of this esteemed column will no doubt be wondering: “Why are you posting something on a Tuesday?” And those who don’t read this column will wonder instead: “Who the heck is this guy?” Regardless of who you are, welcome! Glad you’re reading. To answer the second question: I’m Connor, and I mostly write about sports and entertainment here at The Resurgent. In the fall, I run through every weekend’s college football matchups, helping you decide what’s worth watching.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 4 2019
According to astronomers, the planets don’t align all that often. The last time every single planet in the solar system was within 30 degrees of each other – which is really close from an Earthbound perspective – was 561 BC. The next time? 2854 AD. What about the stars, though? Surely they’ve got to cross paths in our field of vision more often, right? Well no, not really. The stars are so far away from us that they usually stay fixed in place from our perspective.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 3 2019
I don’t want to alarm you, but I’m a biiiiiiiiiiit out on a limb this week. There are no matchups that I can solidly point to as must-see TV. Sure, there’s a bunch – and I mean a bunch – of games that could turn into incredible, entertaining, close contests. But because they’re all neck-and-neck in terms of quality, it was very hard to pick the best game for each timeslot. Basically, you should take my recommendations this week with a larger grain of salt than usual.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 2 2019
Back in the Cold War, CIA spies had a few gut-level sayings to guide them in their Russia-based missions, colloquially called the “Moscow Rules.” The most well-known one: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a pattern.” With all due respect to the Agency, I disagree. Twice is a pattern. Week 1 is an isolation booth. We all come in with our preconceived biases and estimations, carefully crafted over a long and bleak offseason, about how everything should shake out.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Week 1 2019
Week Zero was a fantastic football appetizer, one of those family-style platters with plenty of tasty entertainment for everyone. But now we’ve reached the main course: a real, bona-fide, full-bore week of college football glory. We made it! And now you (yes you, Random College Football Fan) have a much different problem. Before, in the offseason, you were starving, a hungry dog begging for scraps. You needed your football fix. Perhaps you even went so far as to *gasp* WATCH THE AAF. (I’m kidding.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Para Bellum
In their heyday, the Romans ruled the world – or at least the world they knew. Calling their former domain massive puts it too lightly. At its peak Rome held sway over 65 million people, about 21% of the world’s population. If you were born in the second century AD, there was a one in five chance you were born a Roman. To give you a sense of how insane that is, only about 5% of the world’s population lives in America today. 10% calls Europe home. Africa boasts 17%.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: SEC 2019 Season Preview
EIGHT MORE SLEEPS. Can you believe it? Eight more short nights until college football is finally, gloriously, back. And there’s only one conference left to turn our previewing powers toward, the one where It Just Means More (TM). Welcome to ESPN’s favorite conference, the SEC. (DISCLAIMER: That was a joke; please don’t sue me.) Below, as with our prior conference previews, I’ll let you know who’s a contender and who’s a pretender. I’ve previously mentioned two rules for these previews.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: PAC-12 2019 Season Preview
Aaaaaaaaaaaand we’re back! 15 sleeps until sweet, sweet college football content returns for real. Until then, I’m here to tide you over with conference previews. Only two more to go, and this one’s the West Coast’s favorite conference – complete with weird TV schedules and dubious decision-making by corporate governing bodies. That’s right, it’s PAC-12 time! Below I’ll take you through the likely contenders and pretenders for this coming year. Two rules here.
WATCHING THE MOVIES: Hobbs & Shaw
The Fast & Furious movies have a reputation as one of the great action franchises of all time, centered around car chases, heists, and (most of all) the familial bonds that link the crew of law-breaking antiheroic misfits Vin Diesel heads up. Hobbs & Shaw is barely recognizable as a Fast & Furious film. Vin Diesel isn’t there. It isn’t really about a heist, and isn’t even about family until the suddenly-island-set third act. There’s three car chases, sure.
WATCHING COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Big 12 2019 Season Preview
Only 22 scant sleeps to go until college football’s back! And on this auspicious day, when all sorts of exciting goings-on are happening in CFB Media Land, we take a look at the most consistently exciting conference in the sport: the Big 12. Home to (mostly) zoomy offenses and (mostly) nonexistent defenses, this conference always produces gloriously fun games with ridiculous boatracey scores. Yes, I’m a little biased. I went to Baylor. That also means I have some . . . rooting interest at stake here.
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