The Greek hero on everyone’s minds this summer was Odysseus, but today I want to talk about Theseus. Or rather, his ship.
Theseus was said to be one of the kings of the city-state of Athens prior to it becoming a democracy. Among his many mythological exploits, he is the one who killed the Minotaur then escaped to the island of Delos. Athenians were said to have celebrated Theseus for centuries after by sailing his ship to Delos each year.
It being an old wooden ship, boards on it would rot and have to be replaced. And so even in antiquity, the philosophical question arose: how many boards can be replaced on the vessel and have it still be Theseus’s ship? Replace one, and most would say yes, it’s still his ship. Two? Same thing. But once every board has been replaced, is it still Theseus’s ship? If not, at what point did it cease to be so?
We are all the ship of Theseus. Our bodies replace most kinds of our cells, if not reliably every seven years, then at least multiple times if we have good long lives. Rivers, ironically, could also be said to be the ship of Theseus if you believe you can’t step into the same one twice.
And, as you’ve probably figured out by now, sports teams are the ship of Theseus. At least, that’s a more highfalutin way of saying that we root for clothes.
College sports teams have always replaced their boards at a faster rate than the pros do because of eligibility rules. The portal and the fall of transfer restrictions have turbocharged that. In recent years, college football teams in particular have replaced the boards of their coaching staffs at ever faster rates as large buyouts stopped being impediments to changes and head coaches have shuffled their assistants to try to prove they’re doing something differently when they fall short of expectations.
All the changes have strained the relationships between the most involved fans and their schools. The SEC Shorts, er, short about a game show where fans can’t remember who’s on their team anymore was spot-on satire, but as far as being satire, it was only just.
I particularly resonated with the Florida section, and not just because it was the Florida section. Super fan “Hank” was shown in a fake flashback to 2007 knowing players’ exact names, numbers, hometowns, and high schools, plus all seven quarterbacks on the roster, including walk-ons. In the present day, he can’t name a single player UF signed in the offseason.
Again, this is satire because transfers counted, and the starting quarterback Aaron Philo is someone UF got in the offseason. Even the most casual sidewalk fan knows who the starting quarterback is by now.
But is it that far off? No, not really. If I wasn’t still writing about the team, I might struggle to name anyone in the freshman class or many more transfers besides Philo, the son of a guy who played on the Orlando Magic when I was in high school, and the couple of transfer starting offensive linemen.
Some of this is that I’m much more busy these days than I used to be, now having two young kids taking up a lot of my time and attention where in 2007 I did not. All of us seem a lot more busy than we used to be, though that could just be misplaced nostalgia kicking in.
Theseus is said to have reigned in the time before the Late Bronze Age collapse, an event Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey explicitly refers to. Greek civilization crashed so hard that they lost writing for centuries. The myths don’t even agree if Theseus was the son of a human king or a god. The famous question about his ship was first written about centuries after its voyages to Delos were said to have ended.
Memory can be a tricky thing. Times change. Circumstances shift. Steve Spurrier won the Heisman for his passing and kicking exploits. As of now, 20 players have thrown for more yards in a season than Spurrier did in his whole career. Case Keenum did it three times, and the list includes fairly anonymous players with fairly anonymous names like Anthony Gordon (Washington State, 2019) and Paul Smith (Tulsa, 2007). Indiana won the 2025 national title going undefeated in 16 games, which is more than half of the 30 games Spurrier played total. And good luck finding a quarterback doing anything but holding on place kicks anymore.
I look at my son, who will soon turn eight-years-old and is only just beginning to understand football. He will have no memories of an SEC with fewer than 16 teams, or a time when players had to sit out after transferring, or rosters didn’t have budgets in the tens of millions. The only question I have about a collective bargaining agreement for college football players is whether the first one will come before or after he leaves elementary school.
College sports leadership is increasingly capitulating to the idea that a CBA is the only thing that can reduce chaos in the sport, and so it is only a matter of time. The mess the NCAA made of the five-in-five eligibility rule, which now has court orders blocking both national and conference attempts to stop players who appeared in NFL preseason games from playing in college again this fall, is yet another example of how making roster-related rules without a CBA is a recipe for legal losses and organizational mayhem.
We will get to the other side of all this upheaval, though in which exact year I don’t know. What I do know is that we’re not all just rooting for the ship of Theseus, or merely for laundry.
The community that roots for the orange and blue ship of Spurrierus is indeed a real community. There are real bonds that are built between families, friends, and generations. It is a far-flung community, as I can attest having lived both six time zones ahead and behind Eastern. The Gator Nation is everywhere, one might say.
Maybe Jon Sumrall is the one we’ve all been waiting for, and he’ll be the first head coach to hold down the job more than a half-dozen years this century. Heck, just getting to a half-dozen years would be pretty good. But also, maybe he won’t be. We’ll all find out together.
And we will find out together: at the Swamp, at road games, in our living rooms and rec rooms, with a dozen friends over to watch, or with our spouses in the dark with the sound turned down after the kids go to bed. Everything around college football is a mess, but the sport itself is unmatched. Nothing beats a full slate of games on a Saturday when anything can happen as nearly two dozen 18 to 23-year-olds make snap decisions on the thinnest of margins all at once.
And within the realm of that sport, nothing beats being part of a deep rooted community like Florida’s. College football is very different in 2026 than it was in 1996, and it’ll look very different in 2056. But throughout it all, it’s our bonds with each other that truly last and give all the seasons, both good and bad, their meaning.
Fill the stands. Tee it up. Let’s do this. Together.