Is That Inflation?

Growing up, I learned that “prices went up” is one of those phrases people use the way they use “The dog ate my homework.”  That’s a catch-all excuse that explains everything and therefore explains nothing.  It’s a little like saying, “History happened.” 

But if you listen to the public conversation long enough, you’ll notice that we jam at least three different ideas into that one phrase:

• A plain old price increase (the thing you buy got more expensive),
• A relative price change (the thing you buy got more expensive compared with other things), and
• Systemic inflation (damn near everything went up).

And because we treat these as interchangeable, we end up arguing past each other like two professors who are debating whether Plato would have liked TikTok.  (He would not.  He’d have published a dialogue about it and then banned it.)

So, let’s untangle this, and do it with enough humor to keep your blood pressure below “breaking news.”

“Prices Went Up”: The Great American Catch-All.  When someone says, “Prices are up,” they might mean one price is up.  Like eggs.  Or gasoline.  Or the kind of coffee beans that now require a co-signer.  That’s a price increase—often caused by something specific: drought, war, shipping snarls, avian flu, or a mysterious shortage of whatever it is my grandson collects.

A price increase is usually local to a product, or a small set of products, and it often has an identifiable, concrete cause.  The price rose because something got scarcer, or demand surged, or a regulator woke up feeling ambitious, or some jackass in California discovered that if you ate a half-ton of it within a single week it caused cancer.   In other words: a price increase is a micro story.  It’s just about that thing.

This is different from inflation, which is the macro story.  Inflation is when the overall purchasing power of money declines, and a broad swath of prices rise—goods, services, and finally and a little later, wages.

So, the first key distinction is:

• Price increase: “This thing costs more.”
• Inflation: “Money buys less across the economy, and it keeps doing that for a while.”

If you want a quick gut-check:  if only a few items are spiking, you’re likely looking at price increases and relative price changes.  If everything is creeping up, and it won’t stop creeping, you might be dealing with systemic inflation.

Relative Prices: The Ratio That Ruins Your Dinner Plans.  Now let’s talk about relative price changes, which are the economic equivalent of your neighbor buying a new pickup: the problem isn’t the truck; it’s what it does to the neighborhood pecking order.

A relative price is the price of one thing compared to other things.  Economists love ratios because ratios don’t care about your feelings.  So, when we say “beef got expensive,” what we often mean in practice is: beef got expensive relative to chicken.  Suddenly chicken starts looking more attractive, and beef starts looking like something you buy only on anniversaries, funerals, and when your brother-in-law is trying to impress someone.

Relative price changes are important because they change behavior.  People substitute:

·      Chicken for beef,

·      Store-brand for name-brand,

·      “Maybe we don’t need a new bigger iPad” for “fine, I’ll just keep squinting.”

This is not “inflation” in the big, systemic sense.  It’s the economy doing what it does: rearranging who buys what, and at what price.  The prices of goods relative to other goods are constantly changing.  It might be disconcerting, but it is normal.

Episodic Price Increases: The Price Spike With a Plot Twist.  Now we add a wrinkle: episodic price increases.  “Episodic” isn’t about whether something is expensive compared to other things.  It’s about the shape over time.  An episodic price increase looks like this:

·      A spike,

·      A surge,

·      A brief moment of panic,

·      Then a leveling off, and sometimes a partial retreat.

Think gasoline after a refinery outage.  Think eggs during an avian flu wave.  Think airfare around the holidays when airlines decide to test the outer limits of human patience.

So: Episodic price increase is a description of timing (“it jumped in a burst”).  Relative price change is a description of comparison (“it rose compared to other prices”).  These can overlap, but they don’t have to.  You can have an episodic spike that changes relative prices, or you can have a broader inflation flare where lots of prices rise together, leaving relative prices mostly unchanged.

Inflation: When the Whole Price Level Decides to Get Ideas.  Now we get to the big evil one: systemic inflation.  Inflation isn’t just “prices are higher.”  It’s persistent, broad-based increases in the general price level.  A classic feature of systemic inflation is that it tends to show up across many categories:

·      Goods,

·      Services,

·      Housing costs,

·      And anything else that makes you ask, “Is that what I used to pay?”

Inflation often involves feedback loops:  Businesses raise prices because costs are rising and they expect others to raise prices, and then, workers ask for higher wages because the cost of living is up, and next, higher wages push up costs for labor-intensive services, till finally, prices rise again restarting the entire cycle.

That’s not a single product’s story…that’s a whole economy’s story.  And here’s the part people forget: inflation is a rate, not a level.  If prices jump once and then stabilize, you can end up with high prices, but with low inflation (it’s expensive, but it’s not getting more expensive every few weeks).

This is why you can hear someone say, “Inflation is down!” and hear someone else shout, “Then why is everything still so expensive?!” and both can be right.  The first person is talking about the rate of price increase.  The second is staring at the new, higher level of prices like it personally insulted their retirement plan.

Tariffs: The Political Version of “Hold My Beer”.   Now to the big question:  If prices increase because of tariffs, is that not inflation?  The most honest answer is, “usually not”, at least not by definition—but a tariff can contribute, depending on how it plays out.  A tariff is a policy that raises the cost of imported goods (and sometimes key inputs), which often raises the prices of:

·      The tariffed imported items,

·      Domestic substitutes because producers can now charge more,

·      And downstream products that use those imports as inputs.

That’s first and foremost a relative price change:  the tariffed goods become more expensive relative to other goods.  It can also be a one-time increase in the overall price level if it hits a meaningful chunk of the consumer basket.  But here’s the key:  a one-time increase in the price level is not automatically a self-sustaining inflation process.  Whether it becomes “systemic inflation” depends on breadth, persistence, and reinforcement.

Tariffs look more like “a price shock” when:

·      The tariff is narrow (a few products)

·      People can substitute away easily

·      Firms absorb some of the cost by lowering margins

·      The central bank doesn’t “accommodate” it by letting overall demand run hot

·      Wages and broad pricing expectations don’t spiral

That scenario gives you:  “These things got pricier.”  Annoying.  Very real.  But not necessarily systemic inflation.

Tariffs can feed inflation when:  They’re broad and large, they hit key inputs across industries, they raise costs for lots of businesses at once, businesses start raising prices more generally “because everybody is,” and workers bargain for higher wages to keep up.  At that point, tariffs can become part of a broader inflation story, not because tariffs are “inflation,” but because they can act like a cost shock that spreads and gets reinforced.

So, the best way to say it is: Tariffs are not “inflation” by definition.  They are a policy-driven cost shock and a relative-price change.  But they can show up in inflation measures, and in some conditions, they can contribute to inflation persistence.

Perhaps an example would help.  If America imported all the widgets needed for manufacturing and every industry used them, a tariff on widgets would be inflationary.  But, if manufacturers could substitute American made flanges for imported widgets, or it spurs domestic production of widgets at a competitive price, this is not inflationary as the cost of production is only temporarily increased.

This is all very confusing, so let’s put that into A Field Guide for Normal People.

If you want to decide what you’re looking at in real life, try this:

Is it broad?  If only a few categories are jumping, it’s likely price increases and relative price changes.  If lots of categories are rising, especially services, inflation is more likely.

Is it persistent?  If it spikes and then settles, think episodic.  If it keeps rolling month after month, think systemic.

Are wages chasing it?  Broad inflation often involves wages rising too (even if they lag).  A narrow price shock often doesn’t.

Can you substitute away?  If you can dodge the pain by switching products, it’s often a relative-price story.  If everything you switch to is also climbing, you’re in inflation territory.

Conclusion: Words Matter, Because Wallets Matter.  So, yes, “prices went up” is true in the same way “water is wet” is true.  But if we want to be precise (and occasionally sane), we should ask:

·      Is this a price increase in a particular market?

·      Is it a relative price change changing what people buy?

·      Is it an episodic spike tied to a specific shock?

·      Or is it systemic inflation, where the general price level rises broadly and persistently?

And if the culprit is tariffs, we can say that tariffs typically create relative price changes and often a one-time bump in some prices, and sometimes in the overall price level.  Whether that becomes systemic inflation depends on whether it spreads, sticks, and gets reinforced by expectations, wage dynamics, and overall demand.

In other words, tariffs are not automatically inflationary—they’re more like the economic equivalent of tossing a wrench into the machine and then acting surprised when the machine makes a new noise.

Which, come to think of it, describes a lot of public policy.

The Wellerman

If you spend more than fifteen minutes browsing the internet, you are likely to find a video of large, bearded baritones thumping a table while singing an old sea shanty, “The Wellerman.”  It’s a catchy tune, but some of the historical references are obscure.  Obscure historical terms are my métier. 

The lyrics of “Wellerman” first lumbered into writing not in some brine-soaked 1830s logbook, but in the late twentieth century, when New Zealand folk collector Neil Colquhoun wrote down a version he heard from Frank R. Woods of Wairoa—a man who obligingly remembered the song but neglected to remember who wrote it.  This is why the song lives in that legal limbo beloved of folk music, where everything is “traditional,” nobody gets a royalty check, and copyright lawyers begin to sweat.  It might preserve scraps of an older whaling song, or it might be a comparatively modern composition with antique manners; the evidence is as thin as boarding house soup, the paper trail begins suspiciously late, and by the time anyone thought to ask, the author was either dead, fictional, or had wandered off with the sugar, tea, and rum.  As a result, Wellerman remains uncopyrighted in spirit (if not always in performance), floating serenely between the nineteenth century and TikTok, owned by everyone and no one at all.

It is not at all clear whether my quoting one version of the lyrics here is a copyright violation.  With that in mind, let me make it abundantly clear that I am NOT the author of any version of the song (most particularly the one I quote here).  If pressed, I’m not even sure if I am the author of this blog.

“Soon May the Wellerman Come” (usually just shortened to “Wellerman”) is a New Zealand folk song about the shore-whaling world of the early 1800s.  In modern pop culture it’s usually called a sea shanty, but it’s better described as a sea song/ballad (something you sing about maritime life, rather than a strict work-song timed to hauling).  In the age of sail, hauling was rarely a one-person job.  Dozens of sailors would pull together on the same line and timing mattered—everyone had to lean back and pull at the same moment.

That’s where work songs came in. A strict hauling song (a true sea shanty) has a strong, regular beat or call-and-response pattern so the crew knows exactly when to pull.  The shantyman sings a line, the crew answers, and everyone hauls on the beat.  If the timing was off, the work slowed—or someone got hurt.

So, let’s take the song a verse at a time.

There once was a ship that put to sea
The name of the ship was the Billy of Tea
The winds blew up, her bow dipped down
O blow, my bully boys, blow (Huh!)

In New Zealand, the whaling season generally began in late autumn to early winter—around May or June—and ran through spring, or roughly October.  It is therefore the 1830s, and a whaling ship with the highly improbable name “Billy o’ Tea” has put to sea in foul winter weather, crewed by what the song cheerfully calls bully boys—that is, sturdy, high-spirited sailors, with bully meaning “fine” or “excellent,” not men inclined to steal lunch money.  A billy, for those unfamiliar with antipodean slang, is a metal pot used to boil water for tea, which means the vessel’s name translates more or less to “the Teapot.”  If we take the shanty at its word, this is almost certainly a nickname rather than a christened name, as there is no historical evidence for a whaling ship formally registered under anything quite that ridiculous.

After every verse comes the chorus, but I’ll just show it this one time:

Soon may the Wellerman come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tonguin' is done
We'll take our leave and go

The chorus shifts the scene from danger to anticipation, as the crew looks shoreward rather than seaward and pins its hopes on the arrival of the Wellerman, the supply agent associated with the Weller brothers’ New Zealand whaling network, sort of an ocean-going grocery store that sold supplies to the whaling ships.  “Soon may the Wellerman come” is less a prediction than a prayer: the men are stuck in the grim, oily business of “tonguing”—the nasty job of cutting blubber into strips for rendering—and morale depends on the promise that, once the gory work is finished, relief will arrive.  The refrain is not a hauling song but a waiting song, sung by men whose work cannot be hurried, only endured, and who know that supplies, not heroics, will decide how tolerable the season becomes.

The promised comforts—sugar, tea, and rum—were not luxuries in the modern sense but psychological necessities in an isolated, freezing, and monotonous world.  Sugar turned bitter tea drinkable, tea itself provided warmth and routine, and rum (usually diluted with water into grog) offered both calories and the temporary forgetfulness of drunken stupor.  These items were small, lightweight, and easily traded, making them ideal shipborne currency, and their mention in the chorus is telling: the crew does not dream of gold or glory, only of sweetened tea, a warm buzz, and a brief return to civilization before the next whale appears offshore.

She'd not been two weeks from shore
When down on her, a right whale bore
The captain called all hands and swore
He'd take that whale in tow (Huh!)

The second verse brings the song abruptly back to business.  Barely “two weeks from shore,” the lookout spots a right whale, the very species whalers most wanted, and the captain immediately commits to the chase.  The verse compresses into a few lines what was, in reality, a carefully choreographed plan of attack: boats lowered, gear readied, orders shouted, and every man was suddenly alert.  There is nothing romantic here—this is a calculated decision driven by economics.  A right whale meant oil, baleen, wages, and justification for the risks already taken by sailing out in winter seas.

Baleen—often misleadingly called whalebone—was the plastic of the nineteenth century, a tough, flexible form of keratin that grew in comb-like plates from the upper jaws of baleen whales such as the right whale.  Light, resilient, and springy, it could be cut, shaped, and bent, making it indispensable for corset stays, hoop skirts, umbrella ribs, buggy whips, and countless everyday goods in an age before synthetics.  By the mid-1800s, high-quality baleen could fetch several dollars per pound—a substantial sum at the time—and on a single large whale the baleen alone might exceed the value of the oil rendered from its blubber.  That economic reality explains why a cry of “right whale!” instantly transformed a cold, miserable season into a moment of grim opportunity: the whale was not just meat and oil, but a floating cargo of the era’s most versatile industrial material.

The choice of a right whale is historically correct.  Right whales were slow-moving, migrated close to shore during the New Zealand winter, and—crucially—tended to float when killed, making them “right” from a whaler’s brutally practical point of view.  For shore-based stations and near-coastal ships, they were ideal prey: large enough to be worth the effort, predictable enough to plan around, and valuable enough to sustain an entire season.  The verse’s casual tone masks a grim reality—once the whale is sighted, the season’s waiting ends, and the real danger begins.   (If this distresses you, it might be comforting to know that no nation currently hunts right whales, they are protected by several international treaties.)

Before the boat had hit the water
The whale's tail came up and caught her
All hands to the side, harpooned and fought her
When she dived down low (Huh!)

This verse cheerfully dispenses with suspense and dives straight into catastrophe: the boats are dropped, the men pull hard, and almost immediately the whale reminds everyone who is in charge by bringing its tail down like an airborne barn door.  In song logic, this happens in about three seconds, which neatly skips the screaming, rowing, and horror that usually preceded such moments.  Historically, this is perfectly plausible—whales did smash boats, flip them, stove them in, and occasionally scatter sailors like loose cutlery—but the verse presents it with the impending horror of a twister approaching a trailer park.  One moment the crew is confident, the next they are airborne, wet, and reconsidering their career choices.  It’s a harsh reminder that in whaling narratives, the whale always gets to land the first punch.

No line was cut, no whale was freed
The Captain's mind was not of greed
But he belonged to the whaleman's creed
She took that ship in tow (Huh!)

The following verse is where the song leaves history and dives into heroic nonsense: despite danger, exhaustion, and every sensible instinct screaming otherwise, no line is cut and the captain absolutely refuses to quit.  In real whaling, cutting the line was a standard survival technique, not an act of cowardice—better to lose a whale than a boat, a crew, or one’s internal organs—but folk songs are written by survivors, not by safety officers.  Here the captain becomes a symbol of stubborn resolve, the sort of man who would rather be dragged to the ends of the earth than admit defeat, while the crew loyally clings on and hopes the line holds.  It’s less a documentary moment than a moral lesson delivered at sea: true grit is measured not by good judgment, but by how long you can ignore it before something expensive breaks.

For forty days, or even more
The line went slack, then tight once more
All boats were lost, there were only four
But still that whale did go (Huh!)

The next verse totally abandons history altogether and plunges into the realm of epic exaggeration, announcing that the struggle lasted “forty days or even more,” which is roughly thirty-nine days longer than any whale, crew, rope, or ship could reasonably tolerate.  Real hunts took hours, sometimes a very bad day, but never a biblical testing period complete with slack lines, taut lines, and the gradual disappearance of boats.  This is folk-song timekeeping at its finest, where endurance replaces chronology and suffering is measured in round numbers.  By the end of the verse the ship is somehow still afloat, most of its boats are gone, and everyone involved has achieved legendary status simply by not drowning—proof that when sailors tell stories, duration expands in direct proportion to discomfort and distance from the nearest bottle of rum.

As far as I've heard, the fight's still on
The line's not cut and the whale's not gone
The Wellerman makes his regular call
To encourage the Captain, crew, and all (Huh!)

The final verse cheerfully waves goodbye to time, logic, and maritime accounting, insisting that the fight is somehow still going on while the Wellerman continues to show up on schedule like a dependable delivery service in the middle of an ongoing disaster.  At this point the whale has become less an animal than a plot device, eternally towing the ship while supplies arrive as if nothing unusual were happening.  Historically, this is nonsense, but narratively, it’s perfect.  The verse turns the whole affair into folklore, where the real struggle is no longer with the whale but with boredom, hunger, and the faint hope that someone will eventually bring tea, sugar, and rum before the song itself finally runs out of breath.

By this point, you are probably comparing Wellerman to Moby-Dick—and it is hard not to.  The song is set in the whaling world of the 1830s, while Melville published his novel in 1851.  Was the song written first?  Probably not, though the evidence is thin enough that no one can prove it either way.  The one certainty is this: listening to Wellerman requires far less of your life than reading Moby-Dick.

Coffee Cans, Pickup Trucks, and the Slow March of Shrinkflation

When I was growing up in Texas, every family had a pickup truck.  Long before I ever had a driver’s license, I knew how to handle “three on the tree,” and I knew that the lug nuts on the driver’s side of Dodge pickups had reverse threads.  I also knew that the glove compartment held a flashlight, and I knew that under the seat you could find a lug wrench, a bumper jack, and—wedged into the seat springs—a coffee can containing a roll of toilet paper.

To be completely honest, that can also contained a handful of napkins and a couple of books of matches.  Every truck had that coffee can.  When my wife and I bought an old ’63 Ford pickup back in 1973, it came with such a can already under the seat.  Hell, the automakers should have made it standard equipment.

So, when my boys—What’s-His-Name and The-Other-One—recently each bought themselves a new pickup, I thought I would send them the essential equipment needed for any proper truck.  Not jumper cables.  Not a tire gauge.  That coffee can.  The rest they can figure out for themselves.

It turns out I can’t.  They don’t make that coffee can anymore!

If we go back to the late 1800s, coffee was sold in whatever quantity you wanted.  The clerk would pull the beans from a wooden barrel, scooping out a pound, and pouring them into a sack.  Some stores roasted and ground the beans for you, or you could take them home and roast them yourself (usually badly).

In 1890, John Arbuckle began selling pre-roasted coffee—Arbuckle’s Ariosa—in paper bags.  It didn’t take long for competitors to follow suit and begin roasting coffee commercially.  There was, however, a problem:  Once roasted, coffee beans immediately begin to lose flavor when exposed to air.

Hills Bros. solved that problem around 1900 by selling coffee in vacuum-sealed one-pound steel cans.  This innovation is widely credited as the beginning of modern coffee packaging and paved the way for the standard one pound can that dominated American grocery shelves for most of the 20th century.  (If you are wondering, Arbuckle—once the largest coffee company in the world—continued selling coffee in paper bags and was eventually eclipsed by competitors.  History is cruel that way.)

And that’s how things stayed for roughly seventy years.  You bought coffee in one-, two-, or three-pound cans, opened them with a key, and when the coffee was gone, the can went to work holding nails, loose change, toy soldiers, marbles, or a roll of toilet paper destined for truck duty.  It is no exaggeration to say there may have been people who drank coffee primarily to acquire that steel can.

Once opened, of course, the freshness of the coffee began an immediate and irreversible decline.  There was no factory-supplied reseal.  People improvised with wax paper, folded cardboard, saucers, rubber bands, or simply left the can open and hoped for the best.  Freshness was… aspirational.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, coffee companies began including free snap-on plastic lids to reseal the cans—an idea most prominently associated with Maxwell House and quickly copied by Folgers and everyone else.  Even now, I would wager that one of those plastic lids is lurking in your kitchen junk drawer.

Then came the inflationary 1970s, when the price of everything rose sharply.  By the end of the decade, the price of coffee had increased by roughly 40 percent, and the bean counters at the coffee companies began to worry.  Would consumers balk at higher prices? Would sticker shock kill sales?

The answer was no.  Coffee is what economists call an inelastic good.  If you are dependent on caffeine, you will buy your morning cup of coffee even if it requires selling your children to pharmaceutical companies for product testing.  Cigarettes, coffee, insulin, and water are all inelastic goods—the quantity demanded doesn’t change much when prices rise.  Consumers might change brands, but they don’t quit.

So… Instead of raising prices too visibly, coffee companies made the one pound can just a little smaller.  Sixteen ounces quietly became fourteen and a half.  Keep the can looking familiar, make it slightly thinner, and hope no one notices.

This kind of thievery—I mean marketing—is called, “shrinkflation”.  Candy bars, cereal boxes, laundry detergent, toilet paper rolls, potato chips—you name it—we got less of it for the same price.  Almost overnight, the half-gallon tub of ice cream was replaced by the 1.5-quart tub.  This is also when advertisers discovered phrases like “convenient size” and “portion control.” (The latter roughly translates to, “we want credit for your self-restraint.”)

The truly ironic part is that coffee wasn’t actually getting more expensive in real terms.  While inflation raised prices, it also raised wages.  Measured in hours worked, coffee became cheaper.  In 1970, a minimum-wage worker needed about 28 minutes of labor to buy a pound of coffee.  In 1980, it took only about 20 minutes.  Shrinkflation was deployed to fight the perception of higher prices, not the reality.

Shrinkflation didn’t stop, of course.  By the mid-1980s, the can had shrunk again, to about 13 ounces, accompanied by cheerful announcements about “packaging efficiency” and “improved roasting.” While roasting technology has improved over the last half-century, those improvements are about consistency and cost control, not about taste.

By the early 1990s, rising steel prices doomed the classic can altogether.  In its place came the 11.5-ounce plastic “Aromaseal” container.  To disguise the smaller size, the plastic was molded with deep finger dents—because who doesn’t remember how impossible it was to pick up a one-pound metal coffee can?

Within a decade, coffee began appearing in “canisters,” meaning cardboard tubes marketed as environmentally friendly.  They are not.  The interior of those canisters is lined with a metallicized aluminum-polymer barrier bonded with industrial adhesive.  They are no more recyclable than the plastic containers they replaced.

Nor is the latest incarnation any better.  Coffee is now commonly sold in 10-ounce foil bags.  It took 130 years, but we’ve come full circle: we’re back to buying coffee in bags, just like John Arbuckle sold.  The difference is that Arbuckle’s bags were paper, while modern “foil bags” are laminated composites—plastic films, metallicized aluminum layers, inner plastic sealants, inks, and adhesives that are chemically bonded

together.  After a century in a landfill, all they’ll get is dirty.

I have a modest proposal.  Let’s go back to the steel one-pound coffee can.  When I eventually tire of using it to store nuts and bolts, I can recycle it—because nothing is more recyclable than steel.  Yes, it will cost more than a 10-ounce bag of coffee.  I don’t mind.

And you don’t even have to give me a plastic lid.  I still have one.

So when my boys ask why their brand-new pickups don’t have that coffee can under the seat, I’m tempted to tell them it’s because modern trucks are more “efficient.”  Lighter.  Streamlined.  Optimized.  All the words we use when something useful quietly disappears.  They’ve got heated seats, backup cameras, and dashboards that look like flight simulators, but they don’t have a place for a roll of toilet paper and a book of matches.  Progress, I suppose.

Should Enema U Football Drop Down a Division?

Every year around this time, as another Enema U football season limps toward its inevitable “rebuilding phase,” a strange idea bubbles up in the minds of Aggie fans everywhere:  Would it make more sense for Enema U to drop down a football division?

Spoiler Alert!  We probably should and we definitely won’t.

For those unfamiliar with the alphabet soup of football:

• FBS stands for the Football Bowl Subdivision: the top tier of college football, where teams dream of playing in fancy bowl games but often just dream of not losing by 50.  Enema U is currently in the FBS.

• FCS stands for the Football Championship Subdivision: the slightly smaller pond where schools can actually win games and compete for actual championships, a concept most Enema U fans have only read about in dusty history books or have seen in documentaries featuring teams not wearing crimson.

•  NIL, or Name, Image, and Likeness: the set of legal rights that now allows college athletes to earn money from endorsements, appearances, and other commercial uses of their personal identity while still retaining their eligibility.  In some cases, they are paid more than the faculty.

Whenever the suggestion of dropping a division is floated, certain reactions follow:  Boosters faint!  Administrators gasp!  And someone inevitably shouts, “We can’t drop divisions!  We beat Fresno State during the Carter administration!”

And yet, here we are—still asking the question… Because deep down inside, in the quiet recesses of the desiccated Aggie heart, we all know something uncomfortable:  Enema U football has almost no actual history of being good at the FBS level.

There.  I said it.  Let the hate mail begin.  As usual, I’ll grade it and return it.

A Brief History of Enema U Football (or, The Desert Is Dry and So Is Our Win Column).  Since Dwight Eisenhower was president, Enema U has had:

• Only two bowl game victories (2017 and 2022, courtesy of Coach Jerry Kill, who must have made a deal with the football gods).

• A 57-year streak without a bowl appearance.

• Multiple seasons that can only be described as “character-building,” “challenging,” or “legally classified as cruel and unusual.”

Let’s put that another way (other than those miraculous wins under Coach Jerry Kill), the last time Enema U won a bowl game, most of today’s students’ grandparents had not yet met.  That’s not hyperbole, I did the math.

Every few years, a new coach arrives and announces a “rebuilding year”—a phrase traditionally uttered by programs that once had something worth rebuilding.  But rebuilding only makes sense when you actually once had a building.  Enema U football, on the other hand, has spent decades rebuilding the same house, using the same bent nails and hoping this time the roof doesn’t fall in.

Are we really “rebuilding”?  Sure, but only in the sense that Sisyphus was rebuilding every time he rolled the boulder back up the hill.

And like Sisyphus, it is unlikely that we are ever going to get that boulder all the way up the hill.  This state simply can’t afford it.  If you look at the top twenty FBS schools, they have something in common:  a large tax base.  For the top twenty schools, there are an average of 1.2 million taxpayers for each FBS school in that state, but for New Mexico, there are only 470,000.  Sadly, the average income in those states is higher than in New Mexico, too.  (To be fair, both Louisiana and Alabama are at the bottom of both categories, too, but let’s face it—those two states are batshit crazy.)

What would happen if the school dropped a division to FCS?  Let’s talk logic, a substance rarely found in college athletics but one we should at least attempt to apply.

Coverage: Please stop laughing at us!  As a FBS team, we make the news when someone makes a joke, such as in 1992 when Sports Illustrated put us on their cover as the worst football team in America. 

But as a FCS team, national coverage would go up, which sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true.  ESPN, desperate for content, loves FCS playoff teams.  And local media loves winners, so Enema U would get real coverage during playoff runs, respect for being competitive, and lot fewer late-night punchlines

Recruiting Base: The desert does not overflow with talent.  Texas produces hundreds of FBS-caliber players every year and California produces even more.  New Mexico produces…somewhere between 8 and 12, and the majority of those sign up at other schools (usually out of state).  Right now, we recruit potential athletes by politely whispering, “Would you like to come to Enema U, lose 8 or 9 games, and spend Thanksgiving being flattened by Auburn for money?”

But in the FCS world?  Suddenly Enema U looks like a recruiting giant, a beacon of opportunity with actual scholarships and a stadium larger than a high school.  We’d finally be the shiny object, not the afterthought.  Our sales pitch to potential players is, “Want to win? Want to be in the playoffs? Want to play meaningful football in November?”

Suddenly, the average 2-star or lower 3-star kid says, “Oh! That sounds like an actual football experience and not a physics demonstration on impact force.”  Transfers also take FCS contenders seriously—especially QBs and skill players looking for tape.

Facilities: Competitive in FCS, modest in FBS.  Aggie Memorial Stadium is respectable, but the support infrastructure—weight rooms, nutrition programs, athletic budgets, and NIL funds—are all on the modest end of the FBS spectrum.  In the FCS, we’d look like a well-resourced, big-time program.  Everything that kills Enema U in FBS becomes a comparative advantage in FCS

Actual Winning: A foreign concept.  In FBS, we measure victory by losing by fewer than three touchdowns or holding an opponent to under 50!  If we were to drop to FCS, Enema U could regularly and consistently win games, making the playoffs most seasons. 

An Enema U team with its current defensive talent, its current offensive flashes, and a slightly simplified system, would likely finish in the top 16–20 teams nationally, putting them squarely in the playoff bracket.  Aggie fans seeing a postseason bracket would faint dead away.

Financial Reality: FCS is cheaper to play.  Enema U football, like the vast majority of college football teams, currently regularly loses money—not because of mismanagement, but because the economics of being a small FBS school in the middle of the desert are inherently ridiculous.

An FBS program requires 85 scholarships, higher-paid coaches, higher travel costs, and higher costs of damn near everything.  By comparison, an FCS program requires only 63 scholarships, fewer assistants, and smaller travel budgets.

Let’s talk about those scholarships for a minute.  Currently, Enema U awards 85 scholarships for a team of 105 players.  We can’t tell how many of those went to players from New Mexico, but in the entire roster, there are only six students from this state.  Let’s be generous and say that 6% of those 85 scholarships went to students from this state.  We have to do some fancy modeling which would take too long to explain, but I guesstimate that if we went to the FCS, 35% of the scholarships would go to New Mexico residents.

In the FCS, Enema U would spend less, lose less, and face fewer teams that treat us like tackling dummies wearing maroon.

So Why Don’t We Do It?  There are several “minor” reasons, such as image and prestige.  Universities hate moving down in division because it feels like giving up.  Among university presidents, regents, and donors—none of them want to answer the question, “Why aren’t you big-time anymore?”

Never mind that we never really were big-time.  Prestige is powerful—especially administrative prestige.  And no university president was ever hired away by a larger university for taking a school down a division.  Since most upper-level administrative jobs are filled following a costly national search, the only reason that most of our recent upper management hires came to the Harvard on the Rio Grande was to polish their resumes and continue moving upward, no administration is likely to admit reality.

But the REAL REASON Enema U will never drop a division is that we can’t afford it.  Even a bad FBS team gets:

• Payouts from being clobbered by SEC schools (blood games)
• TV revenue from Conference USA
• A trickle of College Football Playoff money
• Attention and scheduling opportunities that FCS schools never see

It’s an odd business model, but for a university, LOSING in FBS pays better than winning in FCS.  Once again, I don’t have the space here to show my financial modeling, but by my calculations, while our operating costs would drop dramatically, if Enema U dropped to FCS, the school would lose roughly $4 to $5.5 million per year by dropping to FCS.

The president of the NCAA gets paid over $3 million a year and runs an organization of 600 employees where the average pay is over $150,000 a year.  I guarantee you that chief among their concerns is setting up a system where small schools can’t afford to economize. 

Even if Enema U went 8–3 and made the playoffs.  Even if the fans were happier.  Even if players were safer.  Even if the games were more fun.

Financially, it’s not remotely close.  FBS is a money classification, not a competitive sport classification.