It just means more
I was sitting in Lloyd
Carr’s office in August of 2008. He was officially a few weeks away from
retirement. I was a few weeks away from the end of my mid-life crisis. That had
come early for me, at 32 years of age. I quit my perfectly good job to drive 23,000
miles across 43 states, attend 17 college football games, and interview roughly
1,000 fans and a handful of coaches.
When I began by explaining what I was up to, he said “Wow,
this sport really means a lot do you to you, doesn’t it?” I was taken aback by
his obvious observation, and that I hadn’t realized quite how much I cared
about it until he framed it for me. If I had ever gotten my book finished, it
would have centered on the big question behind this. Why do we care so
much about college football?
There are many reasons, but I would posit that the simplest of them is
that it’s the sport that has consistently delivered the most drama every single
week. I don’t have to explain this to anyone who follows the game beyond just their
team. And if someone’s a die-hard of any team, part of college football has
always been keeping an eye on everyone else.
Nearly every one of those 1,000 fans I spoke to talked about
how much this sport matters to them. How it’s different than anything else. How
they love it because it is so many things that the NFL is not. The original premise
of that journey was about the inherent tension between tradition and progress.
Back then there was debate if the BCS should be changed to have a playoff. Coach
Carr even said he felt it had to happen. Relating to the playoff debate, a
Wisconsin fan named Ken Simmons told me, “Look at why the passion for college football is
so great. You don’t want to change a whole lot. You don’t want to harm that
passion. I think that’s why they’re moving as slowly as they are.”
Play Them Off
We’ll see more change in the leap to 2024 than the sport has
ever seen before. And it’s happening very quickly. Conference realignment previously
thought to be crazy will take hold, with nearly all surviving conferences going national.
The NIL era is approaching its initial level of stasis as people figure things
out. Already this year, they are shortening the games to protect time for
commercials (not to protect the players).
Yet the most important change has simply been accepted with
a general shrug. The system is moving to a 12-team playoff, which will do more
to upend what makes college football special than anything else.
We needed a playoff because we invented a BCS. Before the
BCS it was frustrating, but ultimately OK that teams occasionally had to share national
championships. We called them “mythical” for a reason. The BCS was meant to
solve all of that. Get the top two teams together and it’s solved. Except there
were various years when either the wrong teams were chosen, or a worthy third
team got left out of having their chance. Moving to a four-team playoff from
that point had to happen. Coach Carr and Ken Simmons, traditionalists though
they were, both said so.
Why do we need to go to a 12 team playoff? Aside from the
2014 season, when Baylor and TCU had an obliquely plausible argument, there has
been no deserving team left out of the playoff. So there is no problem
to solve. Like nearly every change happening today, it’s driven by TV money. It
is impossible for a 12-team playoff to pick a more worthy champion than the system today provides. This has
been proven.
Many fans are excited because they know they’re going to get
some great games. I can’t blame them. We haven’t had many great games recently.
Look at the entire list of AP Top 25 non-conference matchups for this year:
o
Ole Miss (22) vs Tulane (24) Sept 4
o
LSU
(5) vs FSU (8) Sept 4
o
Alabama (4) vs Texas (11) Sept 10
o
OSU
(3) vs Notre Dame (13) Sept 24
o
USC
(6) vs Notre Dame (13) Oct 14
Gah!
My team’s 2nd best home game this season is
against Purdue. The 3rd best is against Rutgers. It gets worse from
there… Gah-gah!
Nobody seems to recognize what we’re giving up. In college
football death is on the line every single week. Think about Ohio State’s loss
to Purdue in 2019. That one where they couldn’t tackle Rondale Moore? It kept
them out of the playoff even though they won every other game. Remember the Kick
Six? Remember when JT was short*? Remember when Stanford lost to Oregon by 2 in
2015? Or when Iowa lost the Big Ten Title game to Michigan State? When Clemson
lost last year to the Gamecocks by one point? All of those results had seismic
ramifications. With a 12-team playoff, they no longer matter at all.
*my opinion which is worth very little.
We got a taste of this last year when Ohio State suffered one
of the worst defeats imaginable in The Game* yet nearly won the National Championship
anyway? Everyone agrees that would have been weird to say the least. This is no
big deal in any of the big four American professional sports. They’ve all shifted
to a system whereby the regular season is a mere prelude to what really
matters.
*my opinion which also matters not.
One of the last non-goofy posts on this blog is when I urged
all fans to protect the sanctity of The Game when Dave Brandon seemingly wanted
to move it to October. I titled that post FREEDOM
IS SLAVERY for cryin’ out loud. Now? Who cares? Kick Six? Nice play, see
you in the semis. Lose The Game? Doesn’t matter, we have bonus lives. There is
no more living and dying with each play, at least not until we get to… what is
it? December? January?
In that meeting with Coach Carr, it was 20 months after The
Game of the Century in Columbus. You could tell that the
loss was still stinging him. And it stung me. For many years. Still kinda
stings. Always gonna sting. Next year? Just another game. On to the next one.
See you in the semis…
It’s All Over Now Baby Blue
So we come to the 2023 season. It’s the last season of College
Football. I’m not alone in this opinion. Every week I have lived and died with
my team since I first entered the stadium as a freshman in 1993. And every week
someone I met on the road 16 years ago is rejoicing or crying in their
beer. But next year the joy will be restrained. The tears will not flow.
Because the games don’t matter.
Michigan is poised for an incredible year. All the stars
seem to be aligning. If this is the last year of College Football, as a fan I’m
hoping I get to have an amazing ride into the sunset. They are an adorable
team, top to bottom, and they’ll matter for me as long as I live, regardless of
the result.
Will I still watch in 2024? Of course. Maybe on DVR to avoid
the commercials. But will I invest my hopes, dreams, fears, and angst? Will I
still care? That will inherently have to wait until the postseason. And if my
team is 13th, well, I don’t know if I’ll bother tuning in for the
top 12. Because officially, none of the rest of this matters.
The powers that be don’t care about me or people like me.
They want to increase the reach and get more eyeballs on screens for the big
matchups. It's the incremental eyeballs that drive the incremental revenue. The cost of those choices is grave damage to what made this sport
special.
That crazy trip I took was a huge success for me. I made new
friends. It led to
me meeting my wife, and one of my best friends meeting her husband. Now our
kids play together in the rare moments we can meet up on vacation. I got to
meet famous writers, ADs, Roy Kramer (who used his phone to show me the score
of the Michigan game – early technology adopter, that Roy), and many of you wonderful people.
Damn right this really means a lot to me.
So let’s enjoy this last ride before the shine is gone for
good.
Photo from 2008. Geez! I've aged a lot more than Lloyd in the interim.
Go Blue!
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