But: I'm fairly certain my wife and I were more excited driving to the Charlotte live show than we were on our wedding day.
The Shutdown Fullcast cannot be explained, defined, or articulated in any meaningful way. It's just a way to think and feel about college football in podcast form that resembles nothing else connected to the sport. The chaos and irreverence that Spencer Hall, Ryan Nanni, Jason Kirk, Holly Anderson, and their various guests brought to our earbuds for the past several years was absolutely perfect. (It was a perfection of dubious audio quality and deranged musings, but perfection nonetheless.)
What they did was dig into the vast stupidity and sprawling brilliance of the game with eccentric credulity. My wife's best friend lived with us for a bit a few years ago, and she asked me once why I listened to a podcast about college football that clearly thought college football was insane and dumb. (Note: It is. We love it because humans are wired to be sentimental idiots.) I didn't have a response. You get the Fullcast or you don't. Plenty of college football diehards would fall into the latter category. Pity them.
We were sitting in a bar in Ketchikan, Alaska in 2019 on our honeymoon. The bar had good, free wifi. Our first thought was not to connect and catch up on news of the world, but to download the Ann Arbor live episode that had just dropped. We saw so much incredible beauty on that trip; it was a perfect week, but one of our favorite memories is laying in bed very drunk on a cruise ship listening to Ryan explain how Michigan birthed every other college football program and Jason explain how they conquered the entire B1G.
Or we were driving to Charlotte bumping previous 40-For-40 and/or Disaster episodes on the way to the live show. That night, we laughed our asses off for two hours and met the people who actually made this incredible thing and they were so kind and wonderful. We also had a genuinely great time with/made a new friend who happens to work for the South Carolina athletic department and rocks hard with Dawn Staley, which is dope because we are also women's hoops junkies. (S'up Don. You are the gaht-dang coolest and it was truly wonderful to hang with you. Ags and I are gonna get to a hoops game in Columbia and buy you dinner if this shit ends and we still have a functioning country.)
Or we were sitting on the porch talking about things that have nothing whatsoever to do with college football but doing it in our specific language which is at least 30% Fullcast jokes/references. (Oh no! OHHHHH NOOOOO!!!!!)
Look, it's a silly podcast about a silly sport. It's also bigger and more important and funnier and smarter than that. It's the thing I'd save until I left work so I could listen to it on drives home from bad days. It's the thing Ags and I have listened to collectively more than anything else. These brilliant lunatics have given us something beyond words, beyond coherent thought. It just is. It just was.
I have faith it will be back in some form, but if it's not: Y'all are a lovely bunch of genius misfits that taught us a new vocabulary for this game and gave immeasurable joy to innumerable people.
Listening to all these episodes feels like some sort of weird requiem. We're paying respects to something that is gone. But that ain't right. The Fullcast needs to be memorialized in song.
Just take those old records off the shelf.
Casio Dog, play "Neck."
