How Football Ought to Be.

It’s a Monday, early in September. NCAA football season has just begun. While we wait for the NFL season to start, there’s a conference rivalry game between SMU and FSU that was delayed. The delay was not due to weather or an accident, but a power outage caused by a surge. That’s right—60,000 college students were left in darkness for 1 hour and 45 minutes. I’ll get to the why later. For now, we’ll discuss how the game was played once it began.

You see, the 7:30 p.m. kickoff happened at 9:15, and the athletes and coaches had to play the game as it was originally intended. There was no play clock, game clock, scoreboard, or jumbotron. Those times were kept by the referees, with certain officials taking on different responsibilities to split up the scorekeeping and timekeeping evenly. Oh yeah, the scoreboard wasn’t going to be on.

Football without the gadgetry

To add to the difficulty, there was no use of iPads, player or coach radio on the field, or digital armbands. Ultimately, this was football played very old-school and primitive. It takes me back to playing something close to backyard ball.

In the college game, referees do not have microphones, so there is no communication between the refs and those “in the booth.” Phone calls were made during the occasional 30-second television timeout to ensure the game clock on television matched what the officials had.

Since they had nothing fancy, they have replays for reviews, right? Right? Nope. They can only use television replay if the play involves a potential game misconduct, and even then they’re only allowed to use the DVR’d ESPN feed. Otherwise, there is no replay as well.

The game, as remembered

So ultimately, we watched football in 2026 the way I grew up watching it in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Just the football game—which, for player safety, actually has rules to make it as safe as it can realistically be played—and in high definition.

Now, let’s get to the “why did it happen?” question. That’s relatively simple. It isn’t the data center farm that’s around 2 to 3 miles away from Bobby Bowden Field at Doak Campbell Stadium that opened about 4 months prior. Surely it’s the reason, but a statement from the Governor’s office said that “clearly it wasn’t from the Northwest Regional Data Center.” Well, that’s that. It can’t be the “micro-data center”—the politicians said so.