Best College Sports Movie Ranking, Black Friday Parking, & More
Around the College Towns: Links and commentary related to urbanism and higher ed for the week of November 20 - November 28.
Note: Around the College Towns is my weekly links roundup article on urbanism and education. These posts mostly cover news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events.
Best COLLEGE Sports Movies
ESPN recently covered a list of “Top Sports Movies Since 2000” as compiled by Seton Hall Sports Poll. I should note, that if you look at the method for the ranking, it is also somewhat limited in scope. I am sure that the list can provide some good fodder for Thanksgiving or holiday gatherings (The Blind Side (2009) is a terrible #1, for instance).
It got me thinking about college sports movies. But looking at the list on ESPN, I was surprised by how few movies were set in college. The Seton Hall poll certainly missed some, so I wanted to create my own list.
Using their poll as a jumping-off point, I compiled every movie that can be reasonably labeled a ‘college’ sports movie since 2000. This means that a good part of the movie is about college athletes or set in/ around a college campus. Of those, I ranked the top 25 using the following combined metrics (all normalized to a 10-point scale).
IMDb score
Rotten Tomatoes audience score
Letterboxd average score
College-life immersion (e.g., “hanging out with athletes” vibe)
Amount of gameplay/sports action shown
Percent of movie set on college campus
I call this the College Towns’ College Sports Movie Ranking Since 2000. Yes, I am critical of rankings and the practice of choosing arbitrary measures. I also used AI to help calculate the metrics. So I do admit: this all violates my own rankings sins. But this is just for some fun holiday fodder or sports talk radio. Please do not base a life-changing decision on this polling like some do with university rankings.
The best college sports movie since 2000 is Everybody Wants Some!! (2016). This Richard Linklater film is the spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused (1993). Also set in Texas, rather than depicting high school days, the newer film is about college life, specifically, the baseball team. This also happens to be one of my favorite movies. Did I use my personal judgment to skew the metrics so that my favorite movie was on top? Better call Pablo Torre for an investigation.
Other notable films on the list also score well such as Drumline (2002) and Miracle (2004). The former may not be about a specific sport, but the marching band is certainly a key facet of college football culture, especially at HBCUs. The Olympic movie isn’t set at a college, but rather it is about college athletes (the US used amateurs during this period).
To be honest, I was a little disappointed while compiling the list. Some may even be a stretch to consider as “college” sports movies, such as American Underdog (2021). Despite being central to Americana, there has been a dearth of sports movies set in or around a university in recent years. It seemed there were just more in previous eras, like some favorites such as Blue Chips (1994) or The Waterboy (1998).
Perhaps this shows a disconnect between the entertainment industry and the rest of the US. In LA or New York, college sports are just not as salient as pro sports. Lakers/ Knicks, Dodgers/ Yankees just have more cachet than Trojans/ Scarlet Knights (what even is New York’s big college team?). For the rest of the county, the Alabamas, Michigans, or BYUs are central to local life.
So what do you think? What is the best ‘college’ sports movie since 2000? And why have there been so few good ones this century? Did I miss something or is this a real disconnect?
Links I’m Reading This Week
Education
Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education has an interactive map of all tribal colleges in the US.
Students from the Northeast who typically went to little liberal arts colleges are eschewing the region in favor of the big R1s in the South. A big sea change is happening in US higher ed.
In a similar vein, Columbia is considering expanding enrollment by 20%. I think that’s not a bad idea, but those students don’t just materialize from nowhere. There will be trickle-down effects.
Arizona State U is launching a campus in London. Although, they explicitly say it is not a “branch campus.”
Similarly, Vanderbilt is running an ad at LaGuardia Airport claiming to be “New York’s SEC team.” The Age of Conquest in Higher Ed continues
Urbanism-ish
The trailer dropped for the so-called Pixar NIMBY movie. What do you think? I am on the record saying we urbanists should wait and see before freaking out. I still feel that way.
Waymos drive by the letter of the law; some humans don’t like it because drivers are used to breaking the law.
In more self-driving news, the California DMV approved Waymo to make a massive expansion in both the Bay Area and Southern California. I am selfishly excited to use the service here in suburban Orange County, where we simply refuse to do public transit or density.
Likewise, hear about the insane bureaucratic hoops a developer needs to go through to add a tree to his new building in LA. This exemplifies why so many things are so expensive but at the same time chintzy.
Gen Z’s drinking habits (or lack thereof) are hurting the restaurant industry, says celeb chef Dave Chang. I want to do a deeper dive on these issues without being too accusatory against the younger cohorts.
On the flip side, a bar in Greater Manchester has banned solo drinkers. The owner claimed people drinking alone caused too much trouble. I must admit I am somewhat confused by this story from the UK.
In more travel news, be careful when bringing battery packs to China right now, as new regulations mean they might be confiscated at the airport.
Nature ranks the best “Science Cities.” What do you notice? A lot of US and China.
Around Substack
Note: I also think it’s important to stay connected to the growing Substack community. Here are a few I am reading this week:
Juxtaposed to the “Science Cities” list, Jeff Fong at Urban Proxima argues that zoning has undercut Los Alamos, New Mexico, in terms of scientific output. It really highlights the negative externality of post-war auto-centric sprawl creep to absolutely every foundation of our society.
The net result of all that is exactly what we’d expect. As housing has become more expensive, newer employees at the lab have begun to live farther and farther away. Approximately 66% of lab employees commute in from outside the county. The spillover from lab employees into neighboring communities like Santa Fe has created a knock-on displacement effect, pushing residents there even further out into Bernalillo County. And before anyone raises the “but maybe Santa Fe is just nicer” objection, a survey of 9,392 in-commuting LANL employees showed 75% would have preferred to live near the lab in Los Alamos County if they could.1 This has created a retention problem, which LANL leadership openly acknowledges.
Trip Harrison of The Spieler has a historical analysis of video games inspired by literature. Apparently, the practice has faded away in recent years.
What makes me so sure? Well, I became briefly obsessed with what appeared to be a sharp and sudden decline in the rate of literature-inspired releases around that time, and figured I might as well run my intuitions to ground. Returning to the aforementioned dataset from MobyGames, I drew up a table of releases per year from 1980 to 2024... The data spoke for themselves, but I went ahead and plotted it for your viewing pleasure:
Daniel Muñoz writing at Big iff True has a scathing critique of bad writing in academia that masquerades as deep or mysterious. This kind of thing drives me crazy in my profession.
If you refuse on principle to make your point clearly, I am going to suspect that you don’t have a point, after all. If your theory of gender or of ideology is literally inexpressible in language that I can understand—or if it loses its plausibility when shorn of flourishes and ambiguities—that is not the fault of my language: it is the fault of your theory.
Closing Time… My Black Friday Parking Audit
Black Friday is one of the busiest shopping days of the entire year. People flock to stores after Thanksgiving hoping to snag sales for Christmas gifts or just personal use. While online buying has simmered some of the craziness of Black Friday, it still should be one of the busiest days for a lot of retailers.
Strong Towns uses the sale day to illustrate just how much excess parking places have in the US, often needlessly mandated by local building requirements. The organization challenges its followers to go to their local retailers/shopping centers to audit parking situations on Black Friday. What most find is that their stores have plenty of parking on Black Friday. So if a strip mall cannot even fill up the entire parking lot on the busiest day of the year, when else could it happen?
I did my own audit of my city, Aliso Viejo, California. I chose the Town Center and Commons in my area because they are basically the only major retail spots in my city. Admittedly, these strip malls are not likely the main targets for Black Friday deal hunting, but they are basically all we have in my specific Orange County suburb.
What I found is pretty much what Strong Towns reports every year: plenty of parking. The parking lots in both areas were basically only half full with spots everywhere. No surprises.
I wanted to highlight the Commons area in particular. The parking lot in this strip mall is the site of a proposed apartment building. I will write a full article on the battle the town has waged against the developer in the future, but I will just say that it has raged white-hot.
One of the key complaints from residents in the area is that there is not enough parking. I never bought this complaint because any time I go to the stores here, there is plenty of parking. Black Friday was no different. What this parking audit shows is that the complaint over parking is a fake. Parking is just a tool to obstruct.
What about you? Did you do a parking audit in your town? What is parking like on Black Friday around you? Since Black Friday sales have more moved online, what other day should we audit parking? I would love to hear your thoughts on these questions or other related issues.
In Midwest City OK Town Center was packed on Black Friday! I did find parking. Worse part, people driving around looking for the perfect spot in front of the store they wanted to go to! Nobody wants to walk more than they have to.