The Most Important Article Ever Written About College Sports*

Teams bidding for the services of a 35-year-old former college and former NFL QB to be an "employee" of their university is much worse than a couple of 21-year-old kids from two unbeaten teams sharing a title. Two figure skaters post the same scores in the Olympics, they share the title. Life goes on, and it was a good show.

Because to me college football has never been about THE TITLE. You don't have 120-team pro leagues playing 12 games with zero common opponents and then deciding how to select the "best" eight to compete for THE TITLE. There's no common ground from which to select. You can be a dogshit team (No. 79 in the country) and go unbeaten in your conference. Or you can be the sixth best team in the nation and lose two conference games. But "unbeaten" demands his chance at THE TITLE.

More people remember last year's Auburn-Alabama game than remember who won the FCS title. Or even the BCS title. Because Auburn-Alabama is what college football is about. Not Auburn-Oregon.

 

Why is that worse, BTE? I really see no moral problem with it. What's the difference between hiring a guy to be good at playing football, and giving some guy a professor's salary not to teach, but because he's good at writing poetry or performing music, which colleges do all the time?

 

People have known the system is broken. But without the pressure of publicity, there wouldn't be any impetus to fix the system.

 

He's right. 95% of college athletes will have their "payment" be free tuition, room and board. The other 5% will be the Cam Newtons who might be paid $100,000 by the university or the shooting guard who makes $10,000 a year.

Heck, this might be a paycut for some of these guys.

The local car dealer wants to give them a car? Fine. Mama a job? Fine.

 

I imagine an age maximum or the eligibility clock, five years after high school to complete four years of playing, could stay in place to prevent Vinny Testaverde and Brett Favre from going back to college.

 

So it's not about determining who's the best.
In which case it practically ceases to be sports.
I totally agree.
Repeat: A waste of time.

 

Right.

And those Cam Newtons aren't going to the MAC anyways, so discussions about competitive balance is moot.

 

Sure it is.

Auburn and Alabama line up each year to see which one can say it's the best. Do you really think an Auburn fan's most vivid memory of last season is the Oregon game?

Teams line up against one another every week to see which one is the best.

As fans, we enjoy the competition as it's being played.

Nowhere is it written that it has to go beyond that. Not everything has to be macro in scale. Especially when the macro involves teams and conferences of such varied talents that you can have one beat the other 85-0 and nobody will blink an eye.

Nowhere is it written that just because 120 or so "large" schools happen to be playing this sport that we MUST, at the end of the season, create a "new" season in which 8 of them will be invited to participate.

And we know this . . . how exactly?

In the current setup, maybe. But open the doors to "non-students", and every failed or former pro athlete will be coming back to school (not as a student, but as an employee), and that 18-year-old high school All-American is out of luck, because the school would rather pay the 30-year-old receiver $40,000 a year than give a $40,000 scholarship to an unproven kid who will need a couple of years to develop.

 

Then let's give them a participation plaque and a ticket for free ice cream at the concession stand.
Just don't call it meaningful, or interesting, or compelling.
Why do other sports take the tremendous burden of crowning a champion properly?

 

Fans at Michigan Stadium last week might disagree.

Ah, but those teams were flawed and not really good enough to compete for THE TITLE . . . so it's inconsequential. Victory was meaningless. Celebration was stupid. Gotcha.

In every other sport you can play several games a week and even on consecutive days. That opens the door to 68-team basketball tournaments and 64-team baseball regionals and the like. Football can't do that. Oh, the FCS puts on a little show that doesn't draw flies on this board. And matchups aren't even determined by seedings because (horrors!) it might result in too much travel (that's what I call big-time football!!)
FBS football has champions. Conference champions. Champions that are largely determined by teams playing relatively similar schedules. Legitimate champions rarely up for debate. Used to be the goal every season. Win your conference. Don't know why that's not enough.

 

Still haven't read it, huh?

 

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