I'm no STAR, but let's keep a few words out of college football | Opinion
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There comes a time in a man's life when he must identify the hills on which he's willing to die.
I arrived at such a grassy knoll many years ago when college football coaches, led by Nick Saban, began rebranding the nickelback position as the “STAR” position.
I refused to get swept up in this trendy twist. I would not allow myself to ditch a perfectly good piece of vocabulary, and certainly not in favor of a hip term that had to be spelled in all-caps. Anyway, nickelback makes sense. Five cents in a nickel, and the nickelback is the fifth defensive back. So, voila, nickelback. Beautiful.
Other sportswriters got caught up in the craze and started referring to a nickelback as the “STAR,” so as to be part of the zeitgeist and co-opt Saban’s language. Not me. I fought the good fight and continued referring to the fifth defensive back as the nickelback.
Not all heroes wear capes, right?
Editors knew better than to swap nickelback for STAR in my stories, lest they incur my wrath.
I understand the etymology behind STAR — five points in a star — but why toss an effective word like nickelback into the language dustbin, where it would join other still-useful but scarcely used terms like penultimate, thrice and (until Taylor Swift rescued it) fortnight? Oh, how tickled I’d be to hear someone say they’ll see me in a fortnight, or on the penultimate weekend of the month, when we’ll have thrice as much fun as the last time we got together.
Anyway, Saban’s retired now, and he joined the media, and I’m still typing nickelback in my columns, so maybe I successfully defended that hill.
Now, for another.
Brace yourself.
Today will be the one and only time I use the word cloture in a sports column.
I’m not familiar with the word.
You’re not familiar with the word.
When I type cloture into a Microsoft Word file, I’m alerted by Word that I’ve misspelled closure.
That’s what I initially thought, too, when I read a sports headline this summer discussing whether a college sports bill being debated on Capitol Hill would advance to cloture.
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Later, I learned it’s not a misspelling. Cloture is a word, and the 12 people who watch C-SPAN probably could define what it means.
I don’t watch C-SPAN, so I consulted a dictionary.
A dictionary, kids, is a big book people used to learn the meanings of words, before AI search summaries started to plagiarize the efforts of humans at a patchy rate of accuracy.
Basically, cloture means the formal legislative act of ending debate on a bill so it can proceed to a vote.
Why not just say: He called for a vote on the bill? Well, because they've got to sound officious.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) on Aug. 5, filed cloture on the Protect College Sports Act. Thanks to this move of cloture, the bipartisan bill that would institute federal regulations of college athletics can be put to a vote. It’ll need 60 votes to advance out of the Senate. Then, it’ll still need to pass in the House, before being signed into law by President Trump.
Will the bill become law?
I could offer a guess, but you’d do just as well consulting a Magic 8 Ball.
I could tell you more about the bill, or I could research the etymology of cloture, but I’m just not sure you care all that much about cloture.
Big Government might be coming to college sports, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it or use the vocab of Big Government.
So, I vow to make this the final time I type cloture.
Now, what was it you wanted to know about your team’s nickelback? You can watch him yourself, after the season starts in just a couple of fortnights.
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network's senior national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: I'm no STAR, but let's keep a few words out of college football | Opinion
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