What Makes a College Town? Lucy Rohden Has Figured It Out

0:00We're coming, and we ain't back enough. We don't need a bunch of cats in here. We're looking in the mirror. Everybody do their job. That's the end. Hey, will you shut up? I'm bitterly disappointed with the officiating today. Guys being dudes. And they run through our, like, like, through a 10 horn, man. Ah, fuck it, man. Thank you, Lee. And thank you, Lucy. I cannot believe this is Lucy Rodin's first appearance on Spitzer Doe. Is it, in fact, for the first time? Yeah, which is crazy, because, like, we're besties. That makes sense. It's, we've dropped, we've dropped the ball. That's on us. Hand up. It's on us. We'll get it fixed. We went to a death metal show together before we did Spitzer Doe together. We did. We did. The great Lucy Rodin, the incomparable Lucy Rodin on social media. At CFB Lucy, you simply must follow her. There is a very high chance that you do, if you listen to this podcast, she is in the extended Spitzer Doe cinematic universe, via home field and via friends of the show, Jess Montana, who's been on this show multiple times.

1:02Obviously, you know Lucy. We love Lucy. Lucy and I had a good old time at the death metal show in question before the National Championship game down in Miami. And we were talking yelling, screaming, about college towns. It was loud. Something, obviously, that I am intimately familiar with. I am quite literally from a college town. If you are new here, Spitzer Doe, a born and raised games with Florida. Lucy has been games with multiple times, but she's also been to dozens, literally dozens of college towns. I've looked through your list of 50. You've gotten me beat. I've done about, I think, like, 35 or 40 as far as back of napkin is concerned through my travels through the years. But Lucy has opinions on college towns. Lucy is, I would say, one of our foremost experts on college towns. So Lucy, I've brought you here on the show to lend your expertise on college towns. Welcome to Spitzer Doe. This is the honor of a lifetime. My two favorite passions are urbanism and college football. Absolutely.

2:02That's it. You, they often don't intersect, but they do here. All right, let's start here to you because this was the crux of our argument the night in question. What makes a college town? Let's define college town. So first, there's what makes us a college town in general versus what makes a great college town. So a lot of people will just say, well, there is a city. There's a college in that town. So I am from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where Wake Forest is. That is not a college town because the way I view it is if you took the university away from that city, would that city still exist? Winston-Salem would be pretty much exactly the same. If Wake Forest was not there. Well, we built this city on cigarettes, baby. Not our day Reynolds. If you took Gainesville and you took the University of Florida away from Gainesville, it would probably not exist as a city. So if it is like the core of what that city is, then that is a college town.

3:03Now, what makes a great college town is when the city and the university are the same. So Madison is kind of the example everyone gives for a phenomenal college town, which it is one. When you're on Wisconsin's campus, you cannot tell whether you are technically in Madison or on the campus because they're so intertwined with one another. When they become one and the same, that is when I think you've reached like the ultimate level of college town. For me, those are Madison, Athens, Iowa City. When you have that or the university is so much a part of the city, then you have reached the trifecta, the perfect college town. So let's talk about what a college town isn't because this, again, the crux of the argument the night, in question was, I think we were talking about Columbia. So Columbia, South Carolina, for those who have not been, Lucy does not consider Columbia a college town. Lucy considers Columbia, South Carolina a city or a town with a college in it.

4:03Williams Brice is notably not on campus. I don't know if that figures into your calculus, but Williams Brice is not on campus the middle of South Carolina fairgrounds off of campus. And Carolina's campus is also kind of winding. It's sort of like winds through downtown. It's not really, a lot of colleges have like defined borders and Carolina doesn't have that. So why is Columbia and the air go, I imagine Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle, places like that? Why are those not college towns? So Columbia has almost a million people. I think it's like 900,000 population. I could just be making that number up, but Columbia is a very big city. Same thing with Columbus. These are two cities that I kind of think fit this sort of like same area where there is a neighborhood of Columbus that is Ohio State and it is a perfect college neighborhood. And there is a neighborhood of Columbia that is South Carolina. You know when you're on campus. When I stayed in Columbia, I stayed in downtown Columbia and which was lovely. I went to the little soda city market had a great time,

5:06but you did not feel like you were in a college town. You didn't feel like you were close to a college campus. Proximity to sort of the downtown area is something that I think makes a good college job. Where Columbia has five points and that's awesome in a really good time. But downtown Columbia and the University of South Carolina, they are not the same. They aren't even close. And so when there's so much of the city that doesn't revolve around the university, I think that is what you lose the college town aspect to it. Because I think most colleges have a college area, like a college neighborhood. But when it becomes the town is when I think that you reach just sort of what makes it like a really good college town. So obviously you have struck L.A. Miami, the big ones off the list. I think that goes without saying, right? Atlanta. Yep. Okay, all right. So they're not on the list. They don't count. No. What are in your research and your travels? What makes a bad college town?

6:06But that fits in the definition of college town as you have it. That is a really good question. What makes a bad college town for me? Like an example of this that I might upset some people with is South Bend is not a college town. Oh, it's not a college town. Oh, because they're not going to like that in the comments. They are not going to like it. But the proximity from campus to the commercial areas, Notre Dame, if you want to go from Notre Dame's campus to South Bend, you have to hop in a car and you have to take an Uber. So if you lack the ability to walk to your centralized business district, then I think you lose the college town. Because what makes a college town so great is that it's a like smaller area that everything is walkable. And when you lose the walkability of it, that's when I think you really lose the college town area. Because Notre Dame's campus is beautiful. They do have like a small area there, but it's not like an Athens. It's not like a Madison.

7:07You will literally have to, if you want to go to the bars from Notre Dame's campus, hop in an Uber and go to South Bend. And once that happens, when you lose the ability to walk everywhere, I think that takes away from the aspect of college town. I had a weird Notre Dame experience in that I didn't really see much of it. Like I stayed in Chicago the night before. The game was, it was a night game, I think. And so I drove in from Chicago, but I stayed like halfway between Chicago and South Bend. So I didn't actually go through South Bend. I came like on the interstator, whatever, some bat roads. And I literally, the stadium at Notre Dame, the stadium is kind of like on a corner of campus or an outskirts of campus. And so I drove into the stadium, covered the game, and then left. And so I didn't really get to see any much of South Bend. So I can't actually speak to your proximity argument, but I do in theory understand because Notre Dame, the campus of, is kind of cordoned off. Yeah. Where like if you go to like Florida State,

8:08Tallahassee, it's like right there. Yeah, that's why I haven't been to Tallahassee. Really? I haven't heard good things that I haven't been. Tallahassee is a good old time if you're looking for a specific type of good old time. I heard it's insane. It is, that's one way to put it. Tallahassee is like not directly in downtown, but it's not far off. You could sort of walk it. It's probably a stretch. You could sort of walk it, but Tallahassee is kind of where it's at. Okay, more examples of like college towns that don't exactly fit kind of your schema that may surprise people. That is a good question. So I think, so like this one, it is a college town, but I think it like doesn't eat. You reach a point where you become too isolated where if like Penn State is sort of an example, I do think, I do think it's a college town. I'm not saying it's not a college town. If they call it in a college town, it's not anything else. But what I find interesting is state college never really gets mentioned

9:10in those conversations of greatest college town. Like you kind of hear the ones that you normally get and state college isn't there. And I think because it's so difficult to access and so like this is the, part of the ranking series is travel, how easy it is to get somewhere or not. And Penn State is the most difficult place to get and college football from where I, from my travels. But I would agree. It's awesome. I would agree and I can drive it. And it's still brutal. It's insane. Penn State is, we can both drive it obviously from New York City. Penn State for those of you who don't know, like, man, I've been to Bama, I've been to some of the promoter SEC. It's not like everywhere in the SECs, particularly easy to get to, I get it. But it's not even like Gainesville's easy to get to, but man, Penn State is smack dab middle of the state. You either fly into Pittsburgh or you fly into Philly or you leave from New York City and it's like four or four and a half from each. The problem with Penn State though more than anything is there is just nowhere to stay. There's nowhere to stay and because of that,

10:11you lose the aspect of people coming in and the ability to leave. And just for some reason, like, not having the, like, something that I loved about, like, you know, I went to the University of Iowa. So like, I do feel like I've experienced, like, kind of the perfect college sound in, when I was in school, is there's constantly alumni coming in. And there's like, sort of this, hey, I know that I can go to Chicago if I need to. I know I can go to Cedar Rapids or Des Moines if I need to. With Penn State, it is so isolated that for some reason, like, I don't like the way that this is gonna sound but it makes you feel a little trapped because you can't leave. There's nothing to do outside of what you have there. And so easy access and an out, I actually do think makes a big difference in like what makes a good college sound because if it's not accessible, like, what are you, like, what are you gonna do? All right, let's talk about the series itself. Break down how you have broken down your 50 college sounds. Yeah, so I put together a bunch of categories and then I was like, Lucy, you can't do a video with 15 categories. That's just not gonna be helpful for everybody. So I tried to do it like the first half of this video

11:15is the actual college football experience. So I do think that matters. And so that's in-game atmosphere, tradition, tailgating, and the stadium, like just the actual stadium itself, which sometimes those overlap a little bit. And then the second half of it is, how do I rank it as a college sound? Not how do I rank it as a city? Cause like, I think Seattle's awesome. Love Seattle, great city, terrible college sound. That's not a college sound. And then we do food, campus rankings of just, and that one's always the most interesting cause it's so subjective. It's just what I think. And then travel, how easy is it to get there? And so it's funny because there's always a direct correlation between whether it's a college sound and whether the travel is easy or not, to get to. But so I do that. I don't do like a final score or anything because I do think all these places are so unique that you can compare like categories of them in a sense, but it's so subjective and what I'm doing. For the most part, I think people have agreed with some of the things I've said, others they've been very upset about.

12:15But like, that's kind of what the beauty of it is. It's where you chose to go to school. It's the team you put your investment in to be a fan of. So like, you're going to have a different experience than I have had. What, what has been the most controversial so far? So I was expecting this one to be more controversial than it was. I have one that I'm dropping soon that is going to upset some people. We are. So it's February 19th right now as we're recording this. This episode is not going to come out until probably the beginning of March. I think first week of March we have it pegged. So you've got time. So tell by the time this comes out, this episode will have dropped. What do you expect to be the one? Like Columbus in general, I actually think it's a lovely city. And I enjoyed my time there. You know, Ohio State Game Day experience is like, not that good. Oh, they're going to come. They're going to cut the tailgating is like, the tailgating is fine. The end game atmosphere is fine. The traditions are fine. Everything there was just fine.

13:16Like even when so and I've been to more Ohio State games, I think than any other team on this list that I didn't attend. And so I feel like I have a good sample size for like what it is. And even the last game I went to, which was the Ohio State Penn State game this year, Penn State students came up to me because I had a microphone and they thought they could, you know, trust me. And they were like, where are the tailgates? Like, are they not even tailgating here? And I was like the vibe. And I think that it's because students are really far away from like they already in tailgate elsewhere. So it just like kills the vibe a little bit. So Columbus, I don't think is a great in game atmosphere. I think that the big house is the most overrated stadium in college football. Thank you. It's, thank you. It's literally, it's too big. It's too big that you lose everything. Yes, it is too big. It's way too big. Thank you for listening. This has been a free preview of a subscriber episode for our subscribers at splitzoneduo.com. If you'd like to become a paid subscriber today, you can do that at www.splitzoneduo.com slash subscribe.