Toucans, Identity, and College Sports Fandom

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

I am finally back in the United States! Thanks for sticking with us while I was out for a little while. 

I’m still in the process of getting back up to speed, but the Extra Points Library has been trucking along in my absence. We currently have over 700 D-II contracts and budget reports, and nearly 7,000 documents from across D-I, including stuff like GM contracts, MMR deals, ticketing partnership contracts, international travel marketing agencies, and much more. If you want to get the data you need for athletic department benchmarking, academic research, sports reporting or more, check out the Extra Points Library today.

I spent the last two weeks splitting time between São Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul, a Brazilian state sharing the border with Paraguay. Since my two daughters are obsessed with toucans, I made sure our vacation included a trip to a bioreserve that treated animals that were injured or otherwise unable to return to the wild. That way, I could guarantee my kids saw toucans just in case we weren’t able to find any in the wild. 

We saw a python that was missing half of its tongue, so it was perpetually off-balance and unable to hunt. We saw a capybara that decided it preferred hanging out with a family of tapirs instead of its own kind, so the sanctuary couldn’t release him. And yes, we did see a variety of toucans with various visible problems. One bird was missing half of its beak. Another had a broken wing and couldn’t fly. 

But I remember there was one toucan who didn’t have anything obviously wrong with him. He had all of his toucan parts, and it looked like he could fly just fine. I asked our tour leader why he was still in the cage. 

Turns out, this toucan’s mom was also born in captivity, but had lost her parents very early. Too early, apparently, to teach the mom toucan some critical information about how to be a toucan. She was unable to teach her child how to properly eat, how to evade predators, and other toucan stuff. The bird we were looking at looked like a regular toucan, sounded like a regular toucan, but couldn’t function in the wild because it didn’t know how to act like a toucan.

I couldn’t forget that bird for the rest of my trip. My feathered irmão, I think I know how you feel. ¹

I didn’t bring my wife and daughters to Brazil on a whim, or because that’s where we got the best deal on tickets or anything. I’m half-Brazilian. My mother was born in São Paulo. My sister, and much of my extended family, still lives there. I didn’t just want to get out of town for a while to stop thinking about email engagement rates and drink caipirinhas, I wanted to show my family part of my Brazilian heritage. 

But there’s a small problem. I wasn’t born in Brazil. I was born in Westerville, Ohio. My mother immigrated to the United States when she was a little girl, and was raised in Cleveland, a decidedly not Brazilian city. My parents wanted to make it as easy as possible for me to blend in the United States, which is why my name is Matt Brown and not, like, João or Miguel. If there were other Brazilians in Licking County, Ohio in the 1990s or 2000s, I certainly never met them. There were barely any other Latinos at all. 

My only exposure to Brazilian-ness growing up then came from my mother, who had an imperfect and complicated understanding of her home country, whatever books I could find, and maybe speaking Portuguese with returned Mormon missionaries. Want to know what that sounds like? Imagine Ted Lasso or Peggy Hill saying Rio de Janeiro. Nailed it.

Every time I go to Brazil, I’m struck by how much I look Brazilian. In the United States, given my name, I typically come across as some vaguely and ambitiously ethnic person…somebody who might be Greek or Lebanese or somewhere else where people have black hair. But in Brazil, I get asked for directions or chatted up on the bus. It’s hard to explain, given the extensive racial and ethnic diversity of the country, but I certainly feel like I blend in.

My Portuguese is barely competent if I limit myself to only communicating in the present tense and occasionally replace verbs with hand gestures. I grew up hundreds of miles away from the few Brazilian enclaves in the United States, in a county that was less than 2% Latino, as a member of maybe the most white and American churches out there ² . My mother passed away in 2018. 

I knew that I wanted my family to have some understanding and connection to Brazilianness. I knew I wanted to maintain this part of my identity, especially given the current American political and cultural climate. I want my kids to understand more about Brazil than this:

But could I claim that part of my identity if I couldn’t really talk the talk or walk the walk? How could I pass something down I only sort of understand myself? 

Okay, you might be wondering, that’s all fine and good, but this is a newsletter about off-the-field stuff in college sports. A missive about an identity crisis sounds like a better fit for a therapist, no?

Well, we don’t have therapists on the Extra Points Health Insurance plan, so every once in a while, you’re gonna get a post like this.

But I don’t think that questioning personal identity is simply an academic thought experiment. It’s core to not only this publication, but the enterprise of college sports.

All of us, on some level, create our sense of self out of a variety of personal identities and stories. 

For me, one of the reasons this newsletter covers what it does is because I have taken from my life experiences a deep belief in the transformative power of higher education. I would be happy to knock doors and share the good news with my fellow Americans…my brothers and sisters, because of people like Justin Morrill and Claiborne Pell, the Sons and Daughters of Toil are not doomed to live in ignorance, but can expand their knowledge at Land-Grant Universities. 

That belief helps shape my interest in the intersection of college sports and universities. I could probably make more money writing about other stuff within the college sports extended universe, but my life experiences and identities lead me to believe that this is important. 

How one cultivates an identity is a critical question in college sports, because fundamentally, that’s the real value proposition for the entire industry. 

Sure, college athletics can provide a more affordable, more accessible sports entertainment product than the NFL or NBA…but so do minor league sports. It isn’t the highest quality athletic product with the absolute best athletes…the best college football team would get turned into hamburger by the Jacksonville Jaguars. And while this is changing, college athletic programs generally don’t have as sophisticated in-game presentations, data collection, merchandising or commercial operations as their professional counterparts. 

The difference is that many fans are connected to college programs via personal identity in a way that is less common with professional franchises: because of shared experiences, shared geography, shared ideology, and more.

I don’t have a neat answer for this. But I think it’s worth contemplating how one obtains and cultivates that “fan” identity. 

Just as a thought experiment here. What makes a Texas A&M Aggie?

Does it require one to have attended the university? What about a specific tie to the state or region? Is it about an academic knowledge of the myriad rituals assigned with Aggiehood? Is it about following a specific ideological creed (An Aggie does not lie, cheat or steal or tolerate those who do)? Is there a difference between BEING a Texas A&M Aggie, and being merely a fan of the Aggies? 

I’m trying to imagine a hypothetical friend in like, Germany or Mexico, who plays College Football 26, decides Kyle Feed looks cool, and decides he wants to be a Texas A&M fan. How much would he be able to learn via Youtube or Reddit or PlayStation, and how much important cultural information might get lost in translation if he hadn’t grown up around the fan culture? Do you learn what it means to be an Aggie from your parents, like our Toucan? Does it matter?

If you’re a coach or a college sports administrator, I don’t think these are academic questions. You want your athletes to not only develop and cultivate an identity as an athlete, but also other supporting identities, so their entire sense of self-worth doesn’t explode if the athlete goes into a slump or gets injured. ³

If you’re on the business operations side, you want to better understand how fandom takes root so you can help develop a new generation of deeply invested fans. The sort of people who will stick with you, even if the team goes 5-7 two years in a row. 

And for everybody else, I think you want to understand this process, because naturally, parts of our identity may shift and evolve as we get older, or have new life experiences. 

If there’s a neat, concise answer to these questions that can fit under the Gmail newsletter word limit, I haven’t found it yet. 

Folks much smarter than I am have written extensively on “No Sabo” kids or about the various constuctions of personal identity. I’m sure there are plenty of other papers on personal identity and fanhood that I haven’t read yet, and I’ll happily add them to the “to read” pile.

But speaking of a to read pile, I’ve got about a hundred more unread emails I need to get through, plus some additional reporting on stuff that broke while I was gone. I’ll get through all of that, I promise. 

Just as soon as I finish googling “how to make feijoada when the closest thing to linguiça in the stores is bratwurst”. Nobody tell my cousins, please.

Just because I was on vacation didn’t mean Extra Points took one too. We published plenty of stories while I was out of town that you might have missed.

• A few D-II and D-III schools may have a slightly easier path to winning D-I national titles now that we’re in the Post-House era. My pal KC explains why some small colleges opted into the settlement and have a potential pathway to big wins in sports like hockey and soccer.

• There are too many college sports lawsuits for me to track. Regular Friend of the Newsletter Sam Ehrlich helps explain what legal questions sit at the heart of the college athlete eligibility lawsuits, and what it all means.

• Everybody wants to earn more money. I chatted with some folks at NIL Fanbox about a strategy that isn’t just about growing athletic department revenues…but growing fanhood…and dare we say it…identity.

Thanks for reading, everybody. I’ll see you in your inbox again soon!

1  Later, a friend would tell me this is basically the plot of Rio. A parrot, voiced by Jesse Eisenberg, is taken from Brazil at a young age to Minnesota, where he becomes a giant nerd. He then has to spend the rest of the movie learning to fly and act like a Brazilian. I can’t believe I’m not getting royalties for this movie. 

2  I was an active Latter-Day Saint until, like, last year. This was a cultural community that taught that teenagers needed to “leave room for the Holy Ghost” while dancing with each other, and that women’s shorts should not extend beyond the knee, lest they drag men into temptation. Could you imagine the cultural shock that comes with taking a dude from that environment to a Brazilian beach?!?

3  There’s some academic research about this exact principle, and this probably deserves its own newsletter.