Colin Cowherd Hated The Thing I Wrote About Millennials, But We Actually Agree!

The reviews are in on my latest work of trenchant cultural commentary here at The Big Lead and, while the post seems to have enjoyed some commercial success, it does have one prominent and impassioned critic. I am speaking, of course, of FS1’s Colin Cowherd.

Specifically, Cowherd referred to my piece, “Now The Dang Millennials Are Killing College Football Attendance; Here’s Why,” as:

“The dumbest article ever posted on a blog.”

This hurts, Colin. Besides, it’s completely inaccurate. I’ve written things much, much dumber on this blog and others.

But I’m not mad. Because you know what I think happened here?

I think both Cowherd and his co-host Kristine Leahy made the mistake of thinking I was blaming Millennials for killing everything from bar soap to college football attendance, when in fact it was precisely that tendency I was lambasting with my post. As one friend put it, “He is in violent agreement with you.”

And I think it’s within the realm of possibility Cowherd and Leahy made that mistake because neither of them read the post for themselves before they started talking about it. I say that because I thought I made myself fairly clear with my first sentence: “It’s hard being a Millennial these days.” But I also sought to further clarify the distinction between what others say and what I am saying by including sentences like these:

• “To read the press coverage is to come away with the notion it is the responsibility of our generation to sustain, among other things: Casual dining restaurants, golf, napkins, bar soap, Home Depot, the housing market, the hang-out sitcom, Canadian tourism, answering the phony by saying ‘Yello,’ pudding.”
• “I only made up two of those. The rest were things Millennials have been accused in the media of killing.”
• “It’s not a particular generation of people that’s killing college football attendance.”

Cowherd went on to systematically dismantle an argument that not only wasn’t made by me, but was in fact the same argument I was laughing at. Teammates fighting over a rebound, us two.

I thought Gen X people were supposed to be fluent in snark. But maybe that’s another Millennial thing.