A College Caught in the Middle of America’s Football Obsession | The New Yorker
The liberal-arts college Oberlin has barely won any football games in the past few years. Still, one senior argued, the school and its students should support the team.
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…
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