Can We Just Admit that College Football Sucks?
Posted by
Kevin
I am sorry, but it does, and last night’s game just proves it. Somehow, college football fans want to claim that Florida proved they were champions last night. Yeah, right. They had to beat one team — a team that hadn’t played in fifty one days — in one game more than a month after the regular season had ended. Yeah, I can see how that is a good way to determine who the best team in the previous season was! In fact, the college football championship has to be the easiest one to win in sports. It requires just a handful of things:
- A “pedigree”. This is because the national champion has to be rated high before the season starts, and be from a “major” conference. Coaches and sports writers, after all, are well known for their objectivity and keen analytical insight, so it makes perfect sense to make their pre-season opinions the first measure of greatness.
- Winning three, maybe four real games and not falling asleep during the contests with the cupcakes that make up most of the remainign schedule
- Win one game a month or more after the season has ended, which is like having the World Series not being played until the first day of next season’s spring training
All Powerful Florida beat essentially no one to get the number two ranking. And, please, spare me the “they had the toughest schedule” nonsense. They played no one outside of their conference, played their toughest opponents at home, and played in a confernece whose teams fatten their resumes by beating up on cupcakes from smaller, weaker conferences — usually at home. I mean, Florida beat quality opponents like a 1-AA school and, I believe, St. Mary’s Home for Paraplegic and Blind Schoolgirls. How impressive. (The saddest part? Except for the fact that Ohio State went to Texas and won, I could make the same argument about Ohio State’s schedule.) And then they had to play one game and only one game and play that game literally months after the season ended to be declared the National Champion. Whoop-dee-doo. So very, very impressive.
And that doesn’t even get to the quality of the games. Most college games suck. The play is generally of poor quality (the Powerful Gators field goal kicker was 4 for 13 before the bowl game last night. Yeah, that’s quality) with unimaginative play calling and pedestrian plays. Watch a college football game and you will see more dropped passes, missed coverages, and poor tackles than you can count. The officiating is almost uniformly terrible and way, way too susceptible to intimidation by the home crowds. Most games are blow outs because the teams aren’t even close to being physically matched.
Because of that last fact, college coaching generally sucks. Success in college coaching rests on being able to recruit better players than your opponents, scheduling easy games, and occasionally beating your big rival. Do that, and your a nine to eleven win coach with almost lifetime security and no actual reason to try and coach. There is a reason that most college football coaches flame out in the NFL: because the talent disparity largely doesn’t exist in the NFL and it actually matters if the coach can, you know, coach every week. In fact, Florida didn’t really have a better team than Ohio state, they just had one of the handful of actual coaches in college football. If Urban Meyer coached Ohio state and Jim Tressel coached Florida, I would bet anything that Ohio state would have crushed Florida. Tressel made absolutely no adjustments to what Meyers was doing at any point in the game. He is sadly not unique among college coaches in his inability to actually deal with the challenges of playing another team that isn’t half your size and twice as slow.
The whole edifice is a joke. Its regular season is a yawn-fest consisting almost entirely of mis-matched blowouts and pedestrian play whose post season is determined by writers and coaches seeped in conflicts of interest and whose fans and pundits expect us to take seriously the notion that game splayed after a one or two month layoff are somehow meaningful measures of a team.
So Florida won the BCS Championship. Great. Take half a holiday, college football fan. And then, please, sit down, shut up, and let the rest of us enjoy watching teams in competent leagues compete for real championships at the actual end of their seasons on the real field of play against the full range of top competition.
Boo Hoo Hoo! LOL
Comment 1/9/2007
Fred:
We get it, you’re a bad winner. We understand.
Setting that aside for a minute, do you really think anyone other than Florida fans (or SEC fans too wishy-washy to pick a single team and stick with it) enjoyed that game? If you’re a sports fan, last night’s game sucked, and it would have sucked equally badly if the teams had been reversed.
Comment 1/9/2007
We get it; you’re a big crybaby. We understand.
I don’t care whether other fans enjoyed it or not. Those pulling for Florida did. The purpose of playing a game is to defeat your opponent, not to make it “a good game.”
Comment 1/9/2007
Hey, the goal of the BCS is not to evaluate which is the best team in college football, it’s to produce an enormous amount of money for the people who control the BCS.
And that’s a goal that is achieved every season!
But on the square, what do you expect, without a playoff system the whole concept of a national championship is a joke. The current system makes a lot of money, and the powers that control this thing believe, perhaps correctly, that a playoff would generate less revenue. That’s all there is to it.
Comment 1/9/2007
Tim, you are right. That’s why the game was played on Jan. 8. It’s all about the money, not only for the BCS but for the schools involved.
Comment 1/9/2007
I have absolutely no interest in college sports, although I admit I somewhat followed Rutgers’ run this season, but not by watching except for that field goal battle, which was hela-lame.
Comment 1/9/2007
There is no question that the college football bowl season is a joke (in comparison to a playoff), but you have to be kidding with this:
Did you watch the bowl games? Did you watch Urban Meyer’s play calling? What about the play calling from Boise State?
Interesting…LSU, Auburn, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas. Yup - they all suck and are “no one”.
I am not Florida apologist, and I was not sure that they belonged in the championship game. I also want a playoff. But I must say that your analysis of college football it a bit off.
Comment 1/9/2007
Kevin you must be living on anotheer planet if you don’t think Fla played anyone.. I guarantee you if Ohio STate, Boise St or Michigan played in the SEc they would never go undefeated, ever.. It is a rarity for the SEC to get to the championship game becuase the beat up on each other. If you had to pick another BCS champion it would have been LSU.. These good ole southern boys played their butts off and won.. Why do you even report on football if you have such negative attitude? Take it like a man!!
Comment 1/9/2007
Dave you must be from Mars if you don’t think Fla played no one.. I guess you think Ohio State played a tough schedule.. Come down here and play Fla’s schedule and see how you make it.
poor loser
Comment 1/9/2007
Dave:
It’s called hyperbole. Every heard of it?
Anyway, didn’t Auburn beat Florida? Well, Tennessee had four losses this year — a bad year by College Football standards (never mind SEC standards), and almost beat Florida. And Arkansas lost their bowl game despite outgaining their opponent and holding them to -5 yards rushing. Maybe not “nobody,” but certainly not top-quality opponents either. In fact, prior to Ohio State, I’d rank LSU as Florida’s only quality win.
Anyway, you need to take off your “SEC rules, everyone else drools” glasses for a moment and notice that Kevin said he could make the same argument about Ohio State. I can tell you first-hand that he has no rooting interest in either team, and often complains about how much college football in general sucks.
Fred:
I’ve said that the game would have been equally bad if the result had been reversed. How does that make me a crybaby poor loser? We’re suddenly not allowed to comment on the entertainment value of a particular game? You’re marginalizing the vast majority of sports fans here. Pretty bold for a guy who’s too chicken to say who he roots for until after the games are played…
Comment 1/9/2007
Football sucks altogether. Hockey, now that’s where it’s at. Minnesota Gophers are on a 22 game unbeaten streak. I rule.
Comment 1/10/2007
Dave
I did say generally, and I did point out that Meyer was one of a handful of competnt coaches at the college level. Nothing is entirely bad, but the majority of college football coaches are unimaginative and boring.
Jb and Dave
Notice that you had to list all SEC teams in that list? Notice that Florida didn’t play anyone out of their own conference, thus making it next to impossible to get a sense of how good the team really as compared to other national teams? And notice how they play in a conference were the majority of their opponents play almost exclusively cupcakes (except for Arkansas, and good for them)? See why, maybe, casual fans would think this system is a joke?
Comment 1/10/2007
“And notice how they play in a conference were the majority of their opponents play almost exclusively cupcakes”
OSU got beat by a cupcake beater. Doesn’t say much for Ohio State.
Comment 1/10/2007
“Pretty bold for a guy who’s too chicken to say who he roots for until after the games are played…”
You’ve never asked me who I am fan of.
Comment 1/10/2007
Well, I’m a sports lamer and I save all my blinding insights for ethics and politics. But is it possible to have a football playoff system?
It would obviously have to be single-elimination - even four teams in a round-robin format would need a month of constant play to pick a winner; 8 teams would take two months. In SE, 4 teams could finish in 2 weeks, and 8 teams in 3. (Obviously, multi-game playoff series are out of the question.) Either way, though, you are extending the playing season considerably, and in SE you force teams to stake their entire championship hopes on maybe a single bad play in a single game out of a series of weeks and weeks of life-or-death competition. It would be expensive, time-consuming, debilitating to the players, and I don’t think anybody would have any confidence that the process resulted in a real champion.
As things stand, at least the teams that get to the bowls are chosen based on an entire season’s worth of play. With some exceptions, they can usually make a reasonable claim that they have earned their place there with consistent success. They face only one do-or-die game, and it is the championship. Forcing a large number of teams, almost all of which would not get a bowl bid at all under the current system, into an extended series of do-or-die games - in a sport in which, famously, any team can beat any other team “on any given Sunday” - simply guarantees that nobody will ever agree on the best team, and every team will have a right to complain they were robbed by bad luck.
Comment 1/10/2007
I-AA has a playoff that works well. However, money interests won’t allow that system to work in I-A play.
Comment 1/10/2007
“a guy who’s too chicken”
That will be funny when I tell you who my favorite team is.
Comment 1/10/2007
You’ve never asked me who I am fan of.
Haven’t I? I guess you’re right. I merely asked whether had a particular favorite team, not which team was your favorite. But your answer to that was the wishy-washy “I root for some teams sometimes, and other teams other times.”
In any case, you haven’t volunteered the information, as most true sports fans would have long ago. It’s not a state secret, you know. Instead, you’ve just crowed about sore losers and “ha-ha-ha your team lost” (despite the loser not having been anyone’s “team” here…).
I thought the thread was about OSU and Florida.
No, the thread is about college football in general sucking. The OSU-Florida game was just one recent example of why it sucks, more often than not.
[Tgirsch calling Fred “too chicken”] will be funny when I tell you who my favorite team is.
Why? Do you root for San Diego?
However, money interests won’t allow that system to work in I-A play.
See, something we can agree on!
KTK:
The problem is, the current system isn’t just based on a season’s worth of play. Florida or Ohio State winning all of their games means more than, say, Boise State winning all of their games in large part because of the reputation of the program, which in an ideal world would reset to zero each new season (but it does not). And every other level of college football below Div I-A does a playoff, so I don’t see why I-A couldn’t do it, too. In any case, the current system is still single-elimination, except that six fewer teams are invited to the tournament.
Comment 1/10/2007
“Do you root for San Diego?”
No, I don’t.
Comment 1/10/2007
“I merely asked whether (you)had a particular favorite team, not which team was your favorite. But your answer to that was the wishy-washy ‘I root for some teams sometimes, and other teams other times.’”
As usual, you don’t get it right. What I said was, “I pull for (prefer) various teams at various times for various reasons.” Since I watch games where my favorite team is not playing, I usually prefer one team over another of the teams that are playing. That’s shouldn’t be hard for even you to understand.
Comment 1/10/2007
(Fred: I thought the thread was about OSU and Florida.
TG: No, the thread is about college football in general sucking. The OSU-Florida game was just one recent example of why it sucks, more often than not.)
Can’t you get anything right? The quote above about OSU and Florida was made in a different thread than this one. It was one called “Another Reason to Hate Ohio State”
It appears that that thread is about the OSU/UF game.
Comment 1/10/2007
College football sucks. How can we even call it a sport when everyone knows the winner of 90%+ of the games played. Just look at the rankings!!! Ranked teams virtually always beat unranked teams. Teams ranked higher win a vast majority of the time. The proof is in the fact that when we have an upset there’s mass shock in the sports media. OMG a team that wasnt supposed to win won!!!! How did this happen, not like this is a sport where the winner isn’t known going into the game. College football is a forum or gambling, its all about the spread because picking an underdog and winning is like winning the lottery. It’s a shame it’s come to this.
Comment 9/1/2007
dude, you are totally right. college football blows. nfl has better quality play, harder hits, more skill, more variety in plays, competant coaches, no bands, stronger and faster players, better rules, closer competition, and the list goes on and on!!!!! learn a man’s sport you college fan panzie!!!!!
Comment 10/24/2007