On “Matriculate”
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
-Syme, Ministry of Truth philologist, from 1984 by George Orwell
It is not usually my practice to delve deep into the peculiarities of the English language when I’m writing about football, though I would happily do so more often if I thought it meant that it would attract readers. I know it will not, and as such, I do not. (Not usually).
But the time has come to set the record straight for a particular sprig on the towering tree that is the American football lexicon. It’s an entry in the gridiron wordbook which such a great number of people seem incapable of understanding the true meaning of, or grasping their own inaccurate usages and employments of, that it stands in peril of actually losing its initial, necessarily niche, scrupulously specific, true meaning to the far less lettered version that now gets bandied about by any sportswriter, broadcaster, coach, or player at a loss for (or at a permanent creative incapability to produce) a more intelligent, fitting word. The word in question is in the title. “Matriculate.” As in,
“Matriculate The Ball Down The Field.”
You may know where this is going, but for those who don’t, let’s examine how the Football Cognoscenti and associated conspiratorial corruptors of the King’s English employ this word in their descriptions of the game of ball.
“Just keep matriculating the ball down the field, boys.”
-Hank Stram, Kansas City Chiefs head coach 1960-74; first known use of “matriculate” in a football context
“They’ve gotta matriculate all the way down the field – you’d love to get a sack, a turnover, or some penalty [...] they’ve gotta MATRICULATE.”
-Tony Romo, NFL quarterback (2003-16), CBS broadcaster
“He [Ravens running back Mark Ingram] is a power runner, doesn’t have blazing speed, but he knows how important it is to keep...y’know...matriculating the ball down the field, if you will.”
-Dan Fouts, NFL quarterback (1973-87), CBS broadcaster
“They matriculate the ball all the way down the field, then they find ways to punch it in.”
-J. J. Watt, NFL defensive end (2021-22), CBS broadcaster
“Ooohhh, a little MATRICULATION?”
-Nate Burleson, NFL wide receiver (2003-14), CBS broadcaster, in response to J. J. Watt
You get the idea. Even though it can be safely assumed most of these ministers of malapropism did not trouble themselves with studying a formal denotation of the word, it seems that context clues rule the day when it comes to this individual word’s use and misuse in the footballian context, and context is probably all we need to figure out the general thrust of what these gabblers are getting at. To matriculate means, in the context of American football, to move the football in small-to-midsize increments of yardage down the field towards the opponent’s end zone. This definition conflicts with the established, centuries-old definition of the term, which according to Merriam-Webster is to be enrolled at a college or university, or, very similarly, to admit a student to a college or university. There.
We could end the piece here, and give you back some time. At this juncture you could close the browser, pandiculate or gesticulate a bit, and go about the rest of your day. I could then close out this writing by suggesting that we sub-in the slightly more metaphorically fitting if equally ludicrous “defenestrate the ball through a passing window” for passing plays and “defibrillate the ball through the heart of the defense” for runs as replacements “matriculate the ball down the field,” and that would be that. Hank Stram could rest easy knowing that I have at long last proffered a sequel to his weirdo warping of the unsuspecting spoken word. Fin.
But there’s more to this story than just a high-strung, ostentatiously dressed, victory-enlivened coach’s spur-of-the-moment misplacement of obscure vocabulary in unfamiliar lexicographic territory. For one, on the surface, it really doesn’t make any sense whatsoever why Hank Stram would, first, even know this word, second, be on familiar-enough terms with this word to think to use it himself in any setting, and third, choose to use it in such an outlandish and inappropriate context as a pep-rally-esque exhortation to his football team’s offense. It just doesn’t quite make sense, on paper. But off paper, in real life, there seems to me to be a fairly logical explanation for how this word ended up on the lips of the third-ever Super Bowl-winning head coach.
First, we need to remember that this was the 1960’s, and football in the 1960’s, even in the supposedly wide-open offensive world of the American Football League (AFL), was much different than the passing-dominated, long-touchdown-desirous world we live in in the mid-21st century. Scoring on offense, even for a unit brimming with Hall of Famers like the 1969 Kansas City Chiefs, was often hard to come by. As such, coaches possessed a general expectation that an average scoring drive would take a while to go from the taking of possession to the scoring of the points. One fills this time, naturally, through running plays from scrimmage. And if it takes a while to score, these plays by extension won’t be long gains of 40 or 50 yards, but smaller ones of two, three, four, five, maybe six or even seven yards. Anything beyond that was a happy but unexpected windfall of momentarily magical offensive prosperity. We can assess our preceding statement of facts thus: in the late 60’s, scoring on offense took a while, which meant you had to run a lot of plays, which by themselves did not garner significant acreage but once strung together did, before you scored. In a highly abstractive, metaphorical sense, this process could seem like an offense trickling down the field.
I posit that the resemblance in sound between the words matriculate and trickle is the chief culprit guilty for the slap-happy mangling of the language wrought by Hank Stram on that gray day in New Orleans some 60 years ago. Of course, any motivational firebrand worth his salt is not going to use such a passive and blasé word as “trickle” to illustrate what he wants his offense to do, even though in his mind, the motion of trickling – slowly, surely, in droplets of action separated by short periods of time – is what he expects and intends his offense to do. Seizing upon this association and hoping somehow to emboss this gelatinous amalgam with a more formidable oratorical gleam, a profound and eldritch firing of synaptic electricity conveyed the strange, ephemerally meaningless slate of a word “matriculate” to the fore of the man’s cognition, and out came the evermore immortal words: “Just keep matriculating the ball down the field, boys.” How Hank Stram, a graduate of Purdue University, even came across the word matriculate in its old meaning in the first place is of some interest, though we’ll never know for sure; perhaps if he had matriculated at Indiana University, a school with a superior English department to Purdue according to US News and World Report, he would have known not to fire the word off so heedlessly in the first place. But I digress.
Hank Stram was the first coach ever to be “mic’d up” on the sideline, so his saying this isn’t just a moment of fleeting linguistic afflatus that a microphone happened to catch. It was a vocabular gamble of great moment, object and import. This guy could have made himself out to be a total buffoon, the world’s first-ever mic’d up dunce, the Ur-Fool of NFL Films for all time, with a serious slip-up here. Instead, he authored a monumentally resonant saying that sixty years on is not only flourishing in usage but may actually be in the process of supplanting the original denotation of the key word in his turn of phrase. And that – that second part – is why I think writing this is important.
See, it’s one thing for a word to be misused and to take on a new, or additional, meaning, as matriculate has. A cursory search of the term on YouTube, just the term “matriculate” by itself, reveals nine videos uploaded in the past year (roughly May 2024 – April 2025) featuring the word in their title, none of which refer to football. Cumulatively these videos tallied up about 95,000 views as of this article’s writing. That’s 95,000 people who have at least been exposed to this word’s dictionary definition; whether anyone was educated on the word’s meaning for the first time by watching any of these videos is unclear, since most of the videos are of university enrollment ceremonies featuring new students, and as such are probably watched mostly by the students’ parents or the students themselves. Maybe a few hundred or thousand views came as a result of someone’s YouTube algorithm procedurally presenting these videos to them, but if so, it’s an extremely small number; this is a niche topic after all. Compare the 95,000 views of nine videos from the previous year featuring the word in the title with the following tweet:
Source: Will Levis
See that bold, white number on the bottom? The last bit of text in frame? That means that this tweet, a throwaway, postgame shower thought from a second-round QB who went 5-16 in two seasons and averaged under 200 total yards per game, garnered 27 times more eyeballs than the combined yearly output of all the YouTube videos in the previous year discussing the same exact word. Are there other people on Twitter with large platforms using the word “matriculate” in its original sense? Maybe, but being a veteran user of data analytics and advanced social media search tools I’m in no mood to tread back down the weary path I’d need to tread to figure out just how many people, if any, are fighting this good fight on that pestiferous platform, and I don’t think I need to. After all, have you seen anyone use this word in the academic context any time recently?
The number of people who have seen Will Levis’s apologetically misbegotten postgame statement shown above is only one side of this issue’s metaphorical coin. The other piece of this, which is more troubling, is the fact that he misused a different word when he meant to misuse a totally separate word. Even if he had been “right,” he would have been wrong. Exacerbating the linguistic misfire is the word he accidentally used in substitute, “capitulate,” which is about the worst word you could accidentally use in this instance, since to capitulate means to surrender. “Capitulating the ball down the field” is something that Will Levis has some experience in, but that’s not the meaning he meant to convey in this particular comment. There are layers of illiteracy to his statement. The only saving grace of the tweet was the final sentence, “I apologize to all my former English teachers.” Will was right to apologize, but not for the reason he thought.
Source: @Old_Humble
I want to take a minute to differentiate between the insidious defacement of “matriculate” with some other terminology that has arisen in the description of American football over the years. Terms like “sack,” or “ice,” or “blitz,” or “pancake,” or any number of other well-worn terms that are technically slang, or began their lives as slang, that are nonetheless “common to the game,” to borrow an NFL rulebook phrase, are permissible. Why? Because no one could possibly mistake their football-world meanings with their real-life meanings. No one has forgotten what the term “sack” has meant outside of the game, nor “pancake [block],” nor “ice [the kicker].” These are common terms that can withstand whatever vernacular damage the football-watching-and-writing public inflict on them – their lexical necessity and omnipresence is cemented. “Blitz” is something of a special case, as there are probably a lot of people out there who don’t know where the term originated from, but this is still acceptable since the term as it applies to warfare strategy is analogous in general meaning to the term as it applies to American football. There’s also the fact that “blitz” is a happily Anglicized and less threatening diminution of the original term, “blitzkrieg,” which, y’know, has connotations. That said, it wouldn’t be an unwelcome act of language-lending, in my view, if we borrowed more obscure terms from German military argot – maybe we could call a game-deciding fourth-down stop a vernichtungsschlacht.
But the case of “matriculate” is different – pernicious and unwelcome – and it gets even worse. To matriculate a ball down a field is one thing – even if we ignore most of the foregoing and think solely about the “context clues” part of this equation (which, truth be told, allows us humans with our deft pattern-seeking brains to ascribe meaning to even the most spurious or half-built phrases, such that doing anything to make a ball go down the field would probably give us sufficient meaning to understand what’s happening), we can probably divorce the scholarly meaning of the word “matriculate” from the directional meaning invested in it by Coach Stram. If the rot could just stop here – if the erosion of the word’s meaning could be stayed where it is and not allowed to progress any further, keeping its aberrant second meaning as a misinformed and counterfeited synonym for methodical, staccato shuttling of a prolate spheroid hither and thither on a gridiron-meshed field – we could at least be somewhat content in the knowledge that we’ve applied a different transitive meaning, though wrongheaded, to an existing transitive verb. Not to get too grammatical here, but the original sense of “matriculate” requires an object, in the language of English mechanics, to complete its meaning, as does the football version: “Terrell Suggs matriculated at Ball So Hard University,” “The Jacksonville Jaguars matriculated the ball down the field.” It’s vexing, but it is not so illogical as to be totally stupefying. But the level of endangerment this word suffers from changed on May 11, 2025, as I was in the process of writing this article.
I was watching Game 4 of the NBA’s Western Conference Semifinals between the Denver Nuggets and the Oklahoma City Thunder on the night in question. I don’t follow basketball anywhere near as closely as I follow the NFL and college football, and I rarely tune into non-Pacers or non-Hoosiers broadcasts before the playoffs (hardly ever, in fact). I’m not terribly well-versed in the illustrative armamentaria of basketball broadcasters, analysts, color- and play-by-play guys, et cetera, but in any case I hadn’t imagined that the oft-eccentric patois of commentator terminology specific to the quirks and quiddities of American football had seeped so miasmatically into a totally different sport. Imagine my surprise when I heard the following late in the game, with the Thunder leading 88-81, down 2 games to 1, looking to pull even at 2 wins each in the series:
“Jalen Williams will walk it across for the Thunder, trying to even the series at two games apiece...
“...the youngest team in the NBA...
“...trying to matriculate.”
That was all. After this there were a few seconds of silence before more standard play-by-play resumed (OKC would win 92-87). But the result, the last two minutes of action, the entire presentation of the playoffs were lost on me. What the HELL did I just hear that commentator say? What in the blue blazes did he MEAN when he said that???
The commentator in question was Mark Jones (this was a surprisingly difficult detail to figure out online after the fact), who spoke the mystifying words moments before a scoreless Oklahoma City possession gave Denver the ball back with at least a ghost of a chance to tie the game in the waning moments. I thought perhaps the game scenario could give me a clue as to the essence of what Jones was attempting to convey, but it didn’t really. He could not have meant advance – the Thunder were trying to tie the series and in any event would need to win two more games before they advanced to the conference finals. He didn’t mean tie, as in tie the game, since the Thunder were up by seven points when he said that. It seems unlikely that Jones meant matriculate in a similar fashion to the way a football broadcaster would mislay the term, since moving a basketball from one end of the court to the other can usually be done easily, if not effortlessly, since the opposing team (the one on defense) typically won’t even contest the offense on their own end of the court save for end-of-game scenarios when they need to steal possessions quickly and are forced into full court press tactics.
What, then, did Jones mean? A charitable interpretive assessment of this comment might lead one to believe that he actually employed the term, through some flash of magnificence, correctly – that is, according to Merriam-Webster’s take on the word. A young team, which the Thunder are (“youngest in the NBA” according to Jones, whose word I will trust on this matter), may be said to be matriculating in or at the academy of the NBA postseason by advancing through different rounds (in this metaphor, the university’s “courses,” perhaps) of the playoffs; by defeating the Thunder and progressing to the Conference Finals, they might be understood to be matriculating at a higher level or grade than before. It's a stretch, but okay, maybe. But let’s say that’s not what he meant, since it’s quite a leap to assume he was weaving such a winding analogy on-air in the final seconds of a major playoff game. If not this, it could have meant several other things in-context, with two distinct possibilities I find worthy of mention. First, the use of matriculate here may have meant something after the fashion of “hang onto this lead and win,” which might have made some sense in the moment if you were able to catch the meaning on the fly. Announcers say stuff along the lines of “trying to hang on to this lead” a whole lot, as anyone who’s watched an ample amount of sports broadcasts knows, so Jones may have chosen to elide this slightly longer-winded version of the saying and simply indicate what the Thunder were trying to do with a whole new word. Weird, but also, maybe. However, I think the most likely explicans for Jones’s jarring utterance is the simplest one: they were trying to win, period, and do anything and everything that goes along with winning, whether that be scoring, possessing the ball to kill the clock, drawing a foul, and so forth. That’s what I think Mark Jones was saying, rather neglectfully. It was a bespattering of a word onto many different potential meanings, a purpose-dissolving entreaty to the watchful audience to interpret the word in whichever way they liked. Like the biohazard symbol, “matriculate” became, for Mark Jones, as for those before him, an unattended icon, annihilated of inherent meaning but left intact for anyone to harness for whatever purpose or verbalization, a panpharmacon for inattentive and uninspired sports announcers who want to say everything – while saying nothing.
I could say more about how this reflects a broader trend of far greater enormity in the present American landscape, about how the chipping-away of fixed, scholarly meanings should concern you and how the importance of well-established truths is under dire threat, about how unaccountable, irresponsible, florid, and exclamatorily-asserted statements of unfalsifiable, unchallenged, and outright cockamamy positions are contaminating not just our language but our reality and our collective consciousness, about the potential extinction event-level movement towards mass disregard for scientific inquiry, rationality, expertise, learning, teaching, and scholarship – but I don’t think anyone wants that, at least not here. But I will say this. The reason I care so much about this trend, and the reason I’m putting Hank Stram, Will Levis, and Mark Jones under the scrutinizing microscope, is that this case study exemplifies how language can change – in bad ways. People misuse words so long that they forget the original meaning, and if this persists long enough, they begin to misuse other words on accident, meaning to use a different word, whose usage would have also been inappropriate. It’s a linguicidal ripple effect that adulterates the lexicon. And ultimately, it makes everyone dumber. Will Levis, Mark Jones, J. J. Watt, Tony Romo, and so many others – these guys picked up the word from hearing it used by other similarly ill-advised and under-informed pundits who made the same mistake that everyone going back to Hank Stram did. They spoke carelessly. When you have a platform, that can be damaging. When you have a massive platform, that can be disastrous. And when you have multifarious different people, all with massive platforms, all making the same rhetorical mistake over and over, it can be language-shattering.
For the sake of eloquence, for the love of language, and for the cause of common sense, let’s give matriculate back its real meaning. Let’s find new pathways of imagination with which to light the landscapes of football. And let’s all make sure, if we are lucky enough to matriculate at a school with a good liberal arts department, to pay attention.
At the heart of this matter, I want more than anything to remind whoever reads this that individuality, expressiveness, creative trailblazing and discarding of easily-purchased but anodyne clichés is what’s important – not just in sports announcing, not just in sportswriting, not just in sports, but in all writing, in all conversation; in life as we know it. For all we know, that shopworn thing you’ve heard everyone say may not mean anything close to what it really means. You may have lost something along the way by just going with the flow and never stopping to look around or look back at where you’ve come from to figure out where you’ve gotten to and where you might be going. Meaning is important in life – it gives things beauty. And the question I keep coming back to, that I hope everyone ask themselves at some point in their football life, is this:
“Is football beautiful?”
I, at Personal Vowels, think it is. And I’m happy to share it with you, whoever is reading this, as we matriculate down the hallways in the schools of life, sports, and language.