I know that I announced previously on this blog that I wouldn’t be writing about college football, in part because I don’t have an allegiance to any team. What I only half-mentioned is that during the college football season, I spend most Saturdays watching Penn State, as a good friend of mine went to State College and is a huge proponent of everything Joe Pa related.
Thus, I was out at a bar in Santa Monica (not going to say which one because it’s embarrassing) at 9:00am on Saturday morning to drink beer and watch Penn State play LeBron’s boys from Akron. What I indirectly experienced reminded me why I’ll never be a fan of college football - unless, say, I have a son at some point, and he ends up playing.
Here’s what I saw: people cheering insanely for teams winning by scores of 31-7 (Penn State), 35-0 (Notre Dame), 56-3 (USC), 62-3 (Florida), and 59-20 (Texas). Unsurprisingly, there was a huge disparity in the level of talent between the teams playing one another. Competition - which I believe to be a fundamental component of sports - was non-existent.
This year was no different than any other. In effect, almost all opening week games are essentially pre-season contests. A college with an actual football program throws a bone to a school that doesn’t have one in exchange for some cash and some publicity. Decimation ensues.
Once the real season starts, things only get worse.
Generally colleges only play other schools within their conference. And when they do go outside of the conference, either by choice or by making it to a bowl game, the winningest teams in some conferences will routinely get torched by the winningest teams in other conferences (Big Eleven, I’m looking at you).
This forces us to believe that there’s a deep disparity between the talent level across the various conferences as well, kinda like the difference between Varsity and JV - except all of the conferences are playing in the same league and under the same system.
In other words, if Penn State goes undefeated this year, I have no doubt in my mind that they will not be a better football team than Florida, but the NCAA and the BCS system will insure that they’re considered as much if Florida loses a game.
I’m not railing against the BCS or the NCAA, I’m simply expressing my frustration with the level of competition in college football, in which powerhouse schools and conferences arrange their schedules so that they can win as many games as possible, line their pockets, and feed their fanbase. What other sport doesn’t make their teams play an equal number of home and away games (this year, OSU has 8 games at home - if you include their game in Cleveland against Toledo - and 4 games on the road)?
What makes all of this problematic for someone like me, who enjoys watching sporting events for the excitement of watching a competition in which only one person or team will win, is that there’s no way to judge the value of winning. OSU beat Navy? Great. Iowa almost lost to Northern Iowa? Fantastic.
What does any of this mean?
Even if OSU loses to USC on Saturday as I fully expect them to, how does it really fit into the puzzle? Ohio State will have to beat Penn State to win the Big Eleven, but look at PSU’s schedule - they don’t play any notable teams outside of the conference, so how can we judge them by the same criteria as Ohio State? We can’t. And since we can’t even adequately compare teams to their competition within the conference, how can we really compare them to teams in other conferences?
The answer is that it’s impossible - until the bowl games when colleges are forced to compete against one another - and even those games are an imperfect measure because a single game never tells the whole story and because teams are awarded those games under the assumption that they’re all playing under a relatively equal system, which isn’t true at all.
All of this leaves me utterly confused about how to root for anything. How can I get excited when UCLA beats San Diego State? The only way I really can is if I went to UCLA, adore it to no end, and believe in intangibles like loyalty, playing for the love of the game, and the purity of amateur athletics…
I know, that sounded funny to me, too.
My point: college football and college sports in general are amateur hour (quite literally). I’ll stick to the pros, where I can watch the most talented athletes in the world play their sport at the highest level imaginable within a system that at least attempts to grade success in competition equally.
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