College football is back, baby, and that means we are treated to some of the worst games of the sporting year. Sure, you’ve got University of Georgia v. Clemson University and LSU v. TCU last week. But everything else just plain sucked.
Did you catch the riveting affair between Elon University and Georgia Tech that looked like a basketball score where one team forgot to show up? I’m pretty sure the team from my high school could have fared better against the Yellow Jackets.
As I’m writing this, I’m watching the Ohio State University beat down San Diego State University. Oh, and they’re doing it all without their star quarterback Braxton Miller. Even the backup quarterback for the Buckeyes is in a whole different league than any player on the Aztecs.
The disparity in the talent levels of Division I college football programs is sickening. The gap is worse than at any other level of any other sport. It makes the games wicked hard to watch sometimes.
As the great fake quarterback Paul Crewe once said: “In college, we’d start every season against Appalachian State or some slack Division II team. Kick the living sh*t out of them.” This is the makeup of 90 percent of college football games early in the season (although the words Appalachian State probably give University of Michigan fans a sick feeling). These games are disgusting. Why would I ever want to watch this?
What’s even worse is the fact that they insult us by calling these games part of the regular season. They are not. They’re just glorified preseason games. The fact that Georgia Tech and Ohio State actually get to put a game in the win column is absurd.
The Miami Heat isn’t able to begin the season 1-0 by playing the scrubs that ball at FitRec every day. The New England Patriots aren’t able to begin the season 1-0 by beating up on my intramural flag football team — although the rest of the AFC East probably isn’t much better (kidding!).
Scheduling is a major problem in college football. I don’t know exactly what the solution is, but something has to be done. Top schools cannot keep padding their records by playing these Powderpuff games.
We’re probably already moving toward this anyways, but the top programs in college football need to break away from the rest of the pack and form their own, separate league. Make four major conferences and only allow them to play each other. The winners of each conference can make some four-team playoff. There, it’s perfect. This would fix both the scheduling issue and the never-ending playoff formatting issue.
I do not understand people who are opposed to this. Sure, your lower-level Division I FBS teams would be slighted. But they have no chance of ever winning a National Championship anyway, so who cares?
This isn’t college basketball where everyone has a chance to make some noise in the tournament. The University of Massachusetts is never once in a million years going to beat the University of Alabama. Then why should they ever play each other in a game that counts, and why should they even be in the same league?
How awesome would it be if Saturdays were filled with incredible games, instead of only a handful of marquee matchups? Imagine the intensity of an SEC schedule all year long. Imagine if every game really did matter (as the college football marketing team would like to have you believe).
But until the whole format is fixed, this will remain yet another reason why college football will never hold a candle to the NFL in this part of the country.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
