The simplest way to describe a Sickos college football game is by borrowing a turn of phrase from former Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart: You know it when you see it.
Perhaps it has back-to-back muffed punts. Or an offense is moving backward more often than forward. Or it’s a battle between a pair of one-win teams. And if you detect College Football Playoff implications or Heisman Trophy highlight reel material, you’re in the wrong place.
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It can be obvious which games will fit the bill — this weekend features multiple promising candidates, from Iowa-Northwestern to UMass-New Mexico State — but, other times, a totally normal game can turn on a dime into a Sickos game. In either situation, the Sickos Committee Twitter account is ready to blast updates out to its 55,000-plus followers.
“Sometimes it’s a team that finds a way to win in the most hilarious ways and they shouldn’t be winning these games, but they do,” said George Smith, who considers himself the commissioner of the Sickos Committee, the official term for an unofficial community of about 10 engaged officers and 50 or so regular contributors per week. “Or the opposite side of it, like Nebraska last year. Like, ‘There’s no way they can do this again. There’s no way they’re going to lose another one-possession game.’
“It’s a game that is unconventionally appealing. It’s kind of hard to define, but you’re going to have some weird storylines.”
Smith explains all of this lovingly. He genuinely adores these “unconventionally appealing” games and the fan bases of the teams involved. He recently opened a week-long Fubo free trial in order to watch one specific game airing on the Pac-12 Network: Cal-Colorado, a matchup of the offense-deficient Golden Bears and a previously 0-5 Buffs team that had just fired head coach Karl Dorrell. Colorado, which has built a case as the Power 5’s worst team this year, ended up getting its first and potentially only win of the year. Fans rushed Folsom Field, a beautiful moment for a program that hasn’t had many great ones this fall.
“I had a gut feeling,” Smith said. “I had an inkling that I might want to watch the entire game.”
Therein lies the difference between the Sickos and football fans who only want to watch high-quality games or Top 25 matchups.
Virginia and Georgia Tech has got it all!! Interceptions, fumbles, missed PATs, Pick 6, and normal touchdown. YES!!! pic.twitter.com/Ssb7OLeHFW
— Sickos Committee (@SickosCommittee) October 21, 2022
The Sickos Committee gets its name and its ethos from a popular meme that grew out of a 2015 Onion cartoon, featuring a scruffy-looking man labeled “Sickos” looking through a window and saying, “Yes … Ha Ha Ha … YES!” The cartoon has since become shorthand for almost any sporting event that is so bad it’s good, in the eyes of the poster.
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Ward Sutton, the cartoonist, wrote in an email his delight that the image grabbed the attention of so many people — and that they’ve used it to convey their own schadenfreudian pleasure at the sight of something terrible happening to someone else.
(Ward Sutton / The Onion)“The thing to remember is that the Sickos guy is originally the creation of the Onion’s (fake) cartoonist Stan Kelly,” Sutton wrote in an email. “I’d say Kelly sees the Sickos character as someone who represents all that is wrong in the world getting enjoyment out of what Kelly sees as a tragedy.”
For the Sickos Committee, the meme was the perfect depiction of their corner of the college football internet. The roughly 10 diehard college football fans with login access to the account found each other in the fall of 2020 in a Discord server launched by Moon Crew, a community powered by popular and very online college football writers Spencer Hall, Holly Anderson, Jason Kirk, Alex Kirshner and Richard Johnson, among others.
The writers’ dedicated followers from projects such as Every Day Should Be Saturday and Shutdown Fullcast followed them to Discord, where fans could pay a few bucks per month to access channels and conversations led by the writers themselves. Some threads focused on self-care or live sporting events beyond college football. One sub-categorized channel was dubbed “Sickos Committee,” for the football fans drawn to the weirdest and least commercially appealing matchups.
LIU VS WAGNER, SOMETHING HAS GOT TO GIVE!! pic.twitter.com/VXvUzgDSF7
— Sickos Committee (@SickosCommittee) October 21, 2022
The channel still has thousands of members, with about 50 users regularly active each week. They work together to create Sickos game watch lists and to discuss whatever Sickos-adjacent topic is popular that day. Earlier this week, committee members were discussing Jim Mora’s ghost-hunting, on the heels of news that the UConn coach’s allegedly haunted house would be the subject of a “College GameDay” feature this weekend.
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Together, the group of 50-ish decides which are the must-see games for their very specific interests. Midweek action in the MAC or Sun Belt always gets consideration. This week’s top game, unsurprisingly, is Iowa-Northwestern, a matchup between the nation’s worst offense (Iowa) and a team that hasn’t won a game on U.S. soil in more than 12 months (Northwestern).
“They take on the very official bureaucratic-like way that college football governs itself — we have conferences and committees and NCAA subcommittees and like all these important-sounding things that ultimately are about trying to make sense of the dumbest sport in the world,” said Kirk. “That, to me, is the single funniest thing they do. Official watch lists. Official rankings. Taking it as a sacred duty. It is ridiculous.
“They use very stuffy language to do nothing but post memes and GIFs of people failing. It’s a great addition to our corner of the internet.”
During Conference Championship Week the Sickos Committee Weather Service will dedicate themselves to providing you with Sickos updates on all the Conference Championship games. Here is a breakdown of the Sickos Game Risk Categories of Warning, Watch and Advisory. pic.twitter.com/ko1PvPromK
— Sickos Committee (@SickosCommittee) December 1, 2021
The committee members have had to think quite a bit about striking the right tone with the Twitter account. They started posting more intentionally in 2021, using graphics created by committee member Jordan Edmonson, who superimposes teams, logos, mascots and coaches onto the Sickos cartoon; Sutton himself has blessed their usage of his cartoon as long as they do not make money off of it in the form of merchandise. The meme has prompted a number of fan creations, too.
https://t.co/QDOSZKHuei pic.twitter.com/w3k7BgrUQx
— Sickos Committee (@SickosCommittee) October 22, 2022
“It was mind-blowing to see how it spread and the different places it would appear,” Sutton wrote. “I’m grateful it doesn’t seem to have been used for any really negative purposes – from what I’ve seen it’s mostly all in fun.”
No team has earned more attention from the Sickos this year than Iowa. Nebraska won the honors a season ago, as Huskers game after Huskers game ended in a very painful one-possession loss. The Sickos Committee ended up raising nearly $2,000 to donate to the Lincoln food bank on behalf of the Huskers.
“Maybe it was a bit of relief for some of the Nebraska fans that they came to us last year, looking for some sort of way that they could still enjoy their team — because you’re not going to stop being a fan of a team if they’re bad,” said Smith. “You need to find some sort of enjoyment in it. … They ended up embracing us, which is amazing. And they actually understand what we were trying to do, that we were not trying to make fun of them.
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“We’re almost like therapy.”
Smith said he’s always been partial to the teams at the bottom of the standings, in large part because he grew up in Louisiana and went to Louisiana Monroe, where a 6-6 season is rare and cherished. He insists he’s “not an ironic fan” at all — he really loves the fans of programs he deems forgotten.
“Our big thing was, we don’t punch down. We’re not mean,” said Edmonson, whose personal fandoms include Dartmouth, North Texas and the University of Texas. “We’re about enjoying all the craziness. We are not about being, you know how these teams are bad, right? Because everyone has these teams they love, like, ‘We’re huge UConn or UMass fans,’ things like that. Because when they win, it means so much to them, and it’s so much fun to watch that.
“If it were about being sassy and sarcastic, that would get old fast.”
One of the Sickos Committee’s top tweets this week was a color-coded breakdown of the one very specific scenario that would result in a seven-way tie atop the Big Ten West Division, with a 4-8 Northwestern heading to Indianapolis for the Big Ten title game.
Here’s the Big Ten West 7-Way tie scenario with 4-8 Northwestern winning the Big Ten West. It involves Northwestern going 1-8 then rattling off three straight wins. Enjoy!!!
Green = Win
Red = Loss. pic.twitter.com/3e87cgndhg
— Sickos Committee (@SickosCommittee) October 24, 2022
If you don’t have a rooting interest in the division, why not root for chaos? And, if you happen to be a fan of Northwestern, why not dream of a longshot like this? It’s a win-win for college football fans whose fandom is not tied to College Football Playoff rankings or any of the major emblems of success at the uppermost levels of the sport.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s all beautiful in the eyes of these beholders.
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“We’re the Sickos because we watch everything,” Edmonson said. “It’s not the teams who are Sickos. We’re the ones who are sick. We’re the ones at the window looking in, going, ‘Ha Ha Ha … Yes!’ at all these great games.”
(Top illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; photo from Matthew Holst / Getty Images)
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