College Football Angst Watch 2024: Week 12 (Mormon Malaise & Jake Paul)

Angst Watch is a weekly recap of the existential misery caused by college football. It’s also my ongoing tracking of Colorado, USC, Texas A&M, and Ohio State, four programs I thought were going to cause their fanbases a great deal of misery.

But that hasn’t really been the case so I’m kind of scrambling on what the schtick of this is supposed to be.

The State of Angst

I am beginning to think the BYU football program is an experiment to test the faith of mormons.

For those unawareth of our generally blonde brethren and sisteren in Christ, Brigham Young University is the flagship university of the Church Educational System (CES). The Church in question is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose believers are called mormons for reasons I am too lazy to look up but do know that’s what their holy text is called—the Book of Mormon.

Mormons seem to be a generally pleasant group of individuals from my limited interactions with them. I’d say the main point of contention between them and I is that they do not drink “stimulants” like coffee, soda, and beer while for me those are three of the five things that make life worth living (the other two being more coffee and more beer).

The BYU Cougars were, up until this past college football saturday, undefeated. They were a shoe-in for the playoffs, and my pick to win the Big 12 championship, which is how I should’ve known they were going to find a way to blow their miracle season by dropping their game against Kansas, and that they would do it in comically weird fashion.

Kansas was 3-6 going into the game at BYU’s stadium located in Provo, Utah. They are not a bad team, but they cannot close a game. Five of their six losses were by one score. By contrast, BYU had pulled off a number of close wins, with memorably close comebacks against Oklahoma State and Southern Methodist University. Though BYU may be the more complete and respectable team, neither are statistical juggernauts on either side of the ball.

And this showed for most of the game. It was a back-and-forth slog that was entertaining but kind of in the same sort of way Sunday’s Jake Paul-Mike Tyson boxing match was entertaining. They were both bizarre and uncomfortable affairs that made you question why you watch television at all, but you can’t bring yourself to stop because there’s an almost cosmic certainty that something singularly weird is going to happen and you want to bare witness to it.

In the BYU-Kansas game, this took the form of a pooch punt. This is a rare and weird play where the quarterback lines up like it’s a normal play, but instead of passing the ball or handing it off, he just punts it away.

That this play was called at all is weird on its own, but what made it singularly weird is the kicked ball ended up doinking off the back of an unsuspecting BYU player’s helmet, bounced around on the ground, off the hands of a BYU linebacker, and ultimately into the arms of a Kansas player, setting up Kansas for a touchdown that BYU would not be able to answer, leading to this shot of sullen Logan Paul lookalikes.

My thing about Jake Paul and Logan Paul, two Ohio-born brothers turned YouTubers turned boxing/wrestling… people (I won’t call them fighters and I won’t call them phenoms), is that they’re deeply stupid. Even if you don’t know who they are beyond that description I just gave, I don’t feel like I need to explain beyond that. They are YouTubers. They are from Ohio. They look like those two BYU kids but with more tattoos and less ethos.

I do not know who organized the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson matchup that was broadcast to mid-fare the night following the BYU game, but I think they missed bigtime. I did not want to see Jake Paul and Mike Tyson box, I wanted to see them do high school debate. The incredibly insane and incoherent arguments they’d come up with would rival our finest presidential debates.

As for the fight itself—what were you expecting? It was between a 60-year old and a twentysomething who has more tattoos than there are pages in the Book of Mormon. Paul took a lot of swings and Tyson waddled around taking hits to the head that did nothing at all because his last neuron died fifteen years ago. Tyson made it through all eight rounds and, ultimately, nothing weird happened. Paul was named the winner by decision but the only real winner I saw was the promoter.

Throughout the fight I just kept imagining Mike Tyson getting knocked down and having a Creed-esque vision but instead of that being a series of fast cuts of his loved ones who inspire him to keep going, it’s just the hard-drinking, foul-mouthed cartoon pigeon Norm MacDonald played in the Scooby Doo parody series Mike Tyson Mysteries.

“Get up Mike,” Pigeon Norm MacDonald says in the vision, taking a swig of his beer while lounging in Mike Tyson’s pool. “Get up and hit the YouTuber.”

“He’s too fast, Pigeon.” Mike Tyson says, coughing up some blood. “How can I beat him when he’s just so fast?”

“Why’re you asking me? I’m a fucking pigeon.”