CotW: College Football is Just No Good

I know this may be blasphemous on this site, but…

I just don’t care for college football. At all.

Relax, man, it's just my opinion

I won’t say I hate it, because, hey it’s football. I can sit down and watch a college football game and recognize that it at least resembles a sport I enjoy. Also, a team, Boise State, plays on blue turf. While I shudder to consider the environmental consequences of creating that abomination against nature, that’s pretty neat. So, clearly, it’s not NASCAR. That…that I hate. But that’s a Complaint for a different time.

Natural? Certainly not. Beautiful? Umm... Awesome? Definitely!

Anyway, I do love professional football. You know, the kind brought to you by the NFL. The Giants are my team, but unlike almost any other sport—the only possible exception I can think of is college basketball—I will watch pretty much any team play any other team if I find myself some free time. So it is not an anti-football thing.

I don’t think it is an anti-collegiate sports thing either. I love me some college basketball, as eluded to above, and March Madness might be, honestly, one of my favorite times of year. But, to put it simply, college football just ain’t college basketball.

Part of the issue is, no doubt, that I grew up in Connecticut. Here in the CT, college football was not a big deal when I was a kid. UConn would not go D-1A in football until 2000 and believe me when I say that they are pretty much the only act in town (or state, as it was) when it comes to college sports. (My apologies to Trinity squash, Conn College’s 1998-2000 men’s basketball teams, CCSU’s 2000, 2002, and 2007 men’s basketball team, the current UHa women’s basketball team, and Yale’s mathletes.) We heard rumors of this thing called college football being played in Connecticut, but it was kind of like the Loch Ness Monster. We did not doubt that people who reported seeing it played had seen something, we just doubted they saw what they thought they saw.

On the other hand, my alum mater does now have this fierce new logo.

Then, I went to Connecticut College which played sports in NESCAC, a D-3 college athletic conference where the last place college was largely considered to be the worst college football team in the country in that. And, in this conference, Conn never bothered to field a team. My current school, the University of Hartford, is similarly bereft of pigskin players.

So, it is true, I did not “come up” with college ball. But I think it runs deeper than that.

For one thing, there is the whole Bowl system. When even fans of the game hate this, it tells me that maybe, just maybe, a change might not be a bad idea. Teams need to go more or less undefeated to be considered for #1 and sometimes, even then, they have no real chance. The NFL has had two undefeated teams in more than 60 years and only one of them won the Super Bowl. The NCAA has at least one approximately 80% of the time. Between 1998 and 2009, 15 teams finished the year undefeated. Of those 10, 5 were not even given the chance to play for the #1 spot while others who were not undefeated were. Worse, one of those five was the only team undefeated that year and they still couldn’t play for the Championship. Forgive me, but that’s just dumb.

I Google Image-d "Classic College Football Moments" and this image (which I've edited a bit) was one of the first five. Not sure what to make of that.

The size of college football troubles me. First, there are those Bowls. Are there a 100? 200? Honestly, you could tell me there were 1,000 and, while I might not believe you outright, I’d certainly take it under advisement. It is great to give these college athletes another game, but come on! I think at a certain point even the players reach the point that staying home for the holidays would be preferable to traveling to Minot, North Dakota to play in the John Deere Blistering Cold Classic Bowl. (If that doesn’t exist, I TOTALLY copyright it this moment!) And to play in those 1,000 Bowls, there are 6,000 teams. With 100 players on each of them. I do not have the specific numbers in front of me, but there are more college football players in America right now than there are people, period, in the whole of Luxembourg. That’s right…from September through January, the equivalent of an entire country is rumbling from goal line to goal line every Saturday. I’m not sure why this affects my enjoyment of college football, but it certainly does. And while I am not here to tell you how to live your life, it really ought to bother you, too.

But here’s the part that bothers me the most. Notre Dame always goes to a Bowl game. Always! And they have not been good since, I don’t know, 1990?

No amount of joy at seeing someone still run the option offense can erase that hideousness.

As always Tim can be reached at parallax2 [at] juno [dot] com, followed on Twitter @UnGajje, or friended on Facebook. Please feel free to do so or comment below.