Saw a tweet from the homie Joel Anderson this morning that got me thinking. (Check out Joel’s work at Slate including Slow Burn Season 6: The L.A. Riots and Slow Burn Season 3: Biggie and Tupac.)
Joel’s tweet:
And as I pondered it over my morning cup of coffee, I had to admit that he’s right. Outside of the freedom of movement now allowed to athletes (at least for their first transfer), and name, image and likeness money, college football does not seem to be in a better place.
At one point, a long time ago, I was an advocate for a playoff system for FBS football. In my naivete, I thought it was the best way to determine a champion. It would be settled on the field. Get the conference champions together, throw in a few at-large teams from a selection committee and let the players play.
Again, naïve. I recognize that now.
Instead, the half-assed playoff system we have now exists. Let me walk that back a bit. Because half-assed implies that little thought was given to the design of the current FBS playoff system. In reality it was carefully thought through to be as byzantine as possible. What are the rules? There are no rules.
The playoff has sucked the oxygen out of the season. Part of it is because ESPN’s coverage is only focused on the playoffs, it feels like a lot of the dialogue about any team’s performance is drawn back to that. Not just teams, but conferences. Remember after the first couple of weeks when the Pac-12 had a couple of bad losses? Well, there went their playoff hopes, right? Right?!
But when all that matters is winning and making the top four, and when that is all you want to talk about for some reason, you miss the fun that can be had. The absurdity of the sport gets lost.
Maybe it’s the prevailing culture now, where everything has become viewed through the prism of being a zero-sum game. I must win and others must lose and winning is the only acceptable outcome. If we don’t have a perfect season and make the playoffs—even if that is something that we historically have never done and are very likely to never do—then we have failed.
It’s how you wind up with schools paying over half a billion dollars in dead money to coaches. Outsized and unrealistic expectations take down more coaches and programs than you can imagine. Sometimes the trigger gets pulled too soon, and then the next coach must build quickly but he can’t do it, so the trigger gets pulled again, and the next thing you know you’re churning through coaches in a quixotic quest to be something you are not.
But a reckoning will have to come at some point. Expectations need to be recalibrated. Some programs are just going to have to accept that 8-4 is okay and if you get to 10 or 11 wins in a season, you had a good year. Because financially, the current track is unsustainable.
Maybe we need to hit the cliff with college football. That might be the only chance to make it kind of fun again.
Test For Echo 
Leave a comment