College football — the tradition remains

Its worst traditions

Look folks, life ain't fair. Same goes for the game of football.

College football is broken. Still exists, of course, but it is a broken sport.

Quick reminder: the "covid" season of 2020 saw universities and conference panic writ large because of what turned out to be a giant nothingburger.

Some small college conferences moved their seasons to the springtime. The Big 10 played a 6-game season. Many teams, including Michigan, decided to quit. Whatever games they had left on the schedule, they simply abandoned.

Bowl games were cancelled. "Rivalry" games were not played in large part.

Consider. How important—really—are "traditional rivalries" in college football in today's landscape?

When iterations of “The Game” (Ohio St – Michigan & Harvard-Yale) and the main intersectional rivalry between USC and Notre Dame are never contested, how important could it really be? Seriously.

Not to say that it is fake, but it doesn’t really matter like it may once have.

Bowl games used to be the pinnacle of a team’s season-long achievement. Historically, there were less than ten of them, meaning some teams in the Top 20 may not even qualify for postseason.

I don’t place a value judgment on whether more bowls are good or bad—they can be really fun—but when a team finishes the season at 5-7 and gets to play in a postseason game, we may want to reconsider what it is all about.

At the end of that 2020 regular season, several schools who "qualified" for bowl appearances decided to end their seasons.

Yet, the SEC operated as close to (pre-coronamania) normal as anything in society. Perhaps sanity should be rewarded at some stage?

For, college football was traditionally a regional game. In broad strokes, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Midwest, and the West all played different "brands" or styles of football.

To figure out who the best was, the top team in the "East" would traditionally play the leading team in the "West" on New Year's Day in Pasadena to determine the National Champion.

Eventually, the Big 10 and the Pac 10 served as "East" versus "West." Such was the tradition. For decades.

Tradition busted up in the 1990s when the Bowl Coalition, Bowl Alliance, and the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) came about. Traditional games and rivalries were destroyed, either slowly or immediately.

Conference realignment rendered traditional bowl berths irrelevant. No longer would the Big 8 champ play on New Year's in the Orange Bowl. For there was no longer a Big 8.

The Cotton Bowl became a second-tier bowl once the Southwestern Conference was torpedoed.

The dominoes kept falling and the biggest mess came this year and during the college football season.

As of 2024, there will no longer be "western" football in any semblance of what previously existed. The four major draws will now be a part of the midwestern conference, the Big 10 (which will have around twice as many teams as its name suggests).

Cal and Stanford, both schools mere miles away from the Pacific Ocean have been introduced as the newest members of the Atlantic Coast Conference—one whose name became a bit dubious when you look at a map and consider the location of Louisville and Notre Dame (a member outside of football) on the map. But, since the Atlantic was once known as the Great Western Ocean, I guess we'll let it slide for now.

On Sunday, the "Committee" picked four teams—Michigan, Washington, Alabama, and Texas—for its invitational tournament, also known as the College Football Playoff.

Many people in my circles are bellyaching that an undefeated ACC champion Florida State team did not get in to the final four. The Seminoles did everything they had to do. They won all their games...except they didn't play in a good conference.

Can we or should we hold that against the boys from Tallahassee?

In a normal season, the ACC is pretty good—it is, after all, a Power 5 so-called—and spawned the Clemson semi-dynasty which saw the Tigers reach the "Playoff" 6 consecutive years with two national championships to show for it.

Florida State has been on the scene for national championship contention for most of the last 30 years. They've won 3 "official" titles and have legitimate claims to at least a half-dozen more "natty-level" seasons.

Miami, now an ACC member, was the dominant football school several times over the last 4 or 5 decades. Several other schools in the conference claim national championships since the—mythical—titles were awarded...by some amalgamation of sportswriter opinion.

So, there's no shortage of tradition or strong programs in the ACC. Heck, my alma mater Boston College gave FSU the biggest test this season.

If the Eagles didn't commit a school-record number of penalties—18 was when I stopped counting—the word Seminoles wouldn't even be in the mouths of the playoff punditry class.

The ACC was a bad league this year.

"What do you mean? How can you say that?" asks Conference Guy (the fellow we all know whose second-favorite team is anyone in "his" team's conference).

Uh, because it was bad football that was played and the teams weren't very good up and down the standings table.

In the opening game, the "No. 8" Seminoles beat the "No. 5" ranked LSU Tigers. The rankings at this part of the season are completely arbitrary. It turns out the vaunted Tigers and their complete fraud of a coach lost against 3 of the 4 ranked teams they played in 2023.

The only ranked team the Tigers defeated was the No. 21 team at the time, Missouri—a team that climbed up the rankings as far as No. 9 at some point...and those Mizzou Tigers (or perhaps their sportswriter sycophants) have been perpetrating a fraud all season long.

Getting back to the Seminoles, they beat an unranked Clemson in overtime, beat a No. 16 Duke squad and beat the No. 14 Louisville Cardinals in the ACC Championship. Duke's coach just left to go to greener pastures in College Station, Texas.

Remember, anytime "Duke" and "successful football season" are in the same sentence, watch out! Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback from University of Florida, Steve Spurrier, parlayed a little early success with the Blue Devils into winning national titles as the Head Ball Coach at his old stomping grounds in Gainesville.

Anyhow, this season Florida State beat the teams they were supposed to beat. They had a crummy schedule this season.

If we were to score on points, their coach is a jerk...and that's a big minus. He's nothing like long-time coach, Bobby Bowden, who players and the media respected.

It's the way things are going. Be a jerk, get good players (or not), win some ballgames (or not), move on to the next job after alienating everyone in your current orbit. Call it failing upward.

No doubt Norvell at FSU will fail upward soon enough...the numbers and the "tradition" are there.

As for the aforementioned Boston College, there was a supreme jerk in charge of football for 7 years who—on occasion—recruited pretty good players and had a bunch of good assistant coaches come and work with him. Ryan Day comes to mind.

Not that this guy was a good coach, he wasn’t. The great move was that he did what many of those in the industry do well: insinuated himself into some situations within the profession that boosted his status—which in reality shouldn't have been much higher than a gym coach.

It is fair to say that high school gym coaches don’t usually get paid multi-million-dollar salaries from their unwitting administrators. They do, however, when they move to college.

Thus, college sports—particularly football—may be one of the biggest cons that currently exist. The con requires the victims to be ignorant of the reality at hand.

The typical College Football Fan of today is a strange and ignorant beast. He cares about his team—perhaps to an irrational degree—yet knows little of the game, whether it be strategy, history, or anything else.

The conference is paramount. The traditions of the game are secondary.

The bottom line is that the sport of college football is broken. It was never pristine, but when a bunch of midwits gain power, things go sideways.

And that's what you have at the conference level, the Committee level, and at the top of the administration at many of these universities. Moderate intelligence, degrees which suggest a higher level of competence, but actions that suggest they are in way over their heads.

As for where that gets us? Probably nowhere since the broken system will only get destroyed when its injured limbs turn gangrenous and must be lopped off altogether.

Fans, however, should be welcome to complain and debate all they want.

Whining and complaining about everything wrong with the sport are the traditions within college football that remain and won't ever go away.

As always,

Brian