Triangle college sports have identity greater than the sum of flailing football teams

If you’ve been disappointed by this college football season, where not only the thrill of victory but the bare minimum of drama and excitement seem to lurk everywhere but the Triangle, you have no one to blame but yourself.

N.C. State and North Carolina have once again raised expectations to entirely realistic and achievable levels over the course of the offseason and, in the space of a single month of the season, reduced themselves to steaming piles of irrelevancy.

Oh, you fell for it? Again?

Duke and N.C. Central are exceptions, so far, but in Duke’s case it’s still just an amuse bouche until the officially official beginning of the five or possibly six months of the Cooper Flagg Era, which means we’re all once again back where we always are at this time of year.

It’s time to stop blaming those programs for failing to meet your — again, quite reasonable — expectations and acknowledge that there’s a bigger-picture reason why football in the Triangle inevitably and inexorably falls short, and it’s as simple as that it’s just not as important as it is elsewhere.

And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

There are places, and not just in the SEC, where every action an athletic department takes is debated under the rubric of, “what does this mean for football?” Which, given the degree to which football is the economic engine driving television deals and therefore every single aspect of college sports, is admittedly pragmatic.

But here, and N.C. State’s run to a long-awaited ACC men’s basketball championship and Final Four only reinforces this, football is just one sport among many. Basketball matters, deeply. Soccer matters. Baseball matters. At various times and in various places, field hockey and wrestling and volleyball and lacrosse and softball and many others have their moments.

It’s not that the Triangle doesn’t care about football; it’s that the Triangle doesn’t care as much about football, in part because so many other sports have so much more success, because the rivalries are so fierce in any and every venue, not just that one football game a year.

That may not ring true to extreme-tailgating N.C. State fans or big-money North Carolina boosters cloistered in their Blue Zone bunkers, but the reality is that for everyone else, basketball will always be No. 1, and football will always be one other among very many. In today’s football-driven era of college sports, that’s not common. (If you are a football-first school, like East Carolina, a lack of football success can become utterly incapacitating.)

Why can’t N.C. State win more than nine games? Why can’t North Carolina have a functioning defense, no matter who the head coach or defensive coordinator is? These persistent failings are inevitably rooted in the fact that the collective commitment to football — schools, fans, communities, boosters, everyone — is just short of what it would need to be to fix them. There are other priorities.

That’s not a bad thing. Just because the rest of the college-sports world genuflects to football — a finely honed brain-injury delivery system run by too many narrow-minded, martinet coaches and punctuated by endless television timeouts and replay reviews — doesn’t mean there can’t be more to college sports than that.

So, yes, basketball season has come early again. But that has less to do with football’s struggles than a culture that sees more to college sports than 12 Saturday afternoons (or Thursday nights, or Friday nights, or Saturday nights, or Saturday late-late-late nights) in the fall. Deep down, isn’t that a trade we’re happy to make?

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