Complaining About the New College Football Championship Playoffs already......Seriously??!

After years and years and years of complaining about the lack of a college football playoff at the highest competitive level, it's finally here!  (College Football Playoff 101 courtesy of ESPN)  Therefore, all is right now in the world of big-time college football, right?!

 

Well, the argument over the last 15 years or so has been that "choosing" the  top two teams to play for the National Championship would often leave a 3rd team sitting on the sidelines.  And yes, I said choosing...if you don't follow college football, you really wouldn't believe how this was (is?) done.   Then again, you really, really wouldn't believe how it was done before that!  So there was always some sort of controversy after the so-called championship game, particularly when one team was crushed and the #3 team wins handily as well.  The fans were always left basically one game short of knowing who was truly the best team each year.

 

Unfortunately, controversy sells, even if you have to manufacture it.  So for the last few weeks, the new "argument" is about how to pick the #4 team and who will be left out now!!  Seriously???!!!!  So why not add a wild card game for the #4 and #5 team?  But then you have to worry about leaving out the #6...the #7...#8...etc, etc, until you end up with the 64 teams (or is it 65 teams?) like the NCAA basketball playoffs?

 

I get it...sports news is just like any other news...bad news or controversial talk gets people watching.  But come on, there has to be limit...even to stupidity, you would think.  First of all, it isn't all that hard to pick out the top 3 or 4 teams.  And I don't remember a time when there was any mention that the #5 team should somehow have been included in the championship game.  So this Tuesday (10/28/2014) the first rankings from this new super committee will come out, which will decide who plays who. 
 

 Naturally, all hell is breaking lose on the sports talk shows because there is still much uncertainty at the top.  But as my old boss, the Dean, used to say...it's just trying to create some artificial urgency!  Anyone seriously looking at ranking the teams would know instantly that, not only do we have weeks of games still to play, but almost every team bunched up at the top is going to play at least a game or two against the others.  Time will clear up any doubts about at least half these teams and what will be left would never be confused with the #1 team in the country.  And the bottom line is that the only reason a team should be considered for the playoffs is if you could rationally argue for that team to be #1.  If not...well, then they don't need to be in it anyway , so who cares!!

 

For now then, we...the fans...just need to tolerate the noise coming from the talking sports heads and realize that soon enough the answer will be obvious...even to them.  Unfortunately, that only means we'll have to endure the next manufactured debate.  Oh well....maybe what we really should have is a debate about that!

Stop Ruining My College Football!!

Now, I'm no expert on the NCAA rules for college football, let alone college sports in general.  Apparently though, neither are the colleges and universities.  And certainly not the players!  The one thing that I DO know, the NCAA rules are exactly that, "rules"....not laws.  Violation of these rules, while potentially creating an "unfair advantage", sometimes known as cheating, they do not necessarily (and very likely don't) indicate a violation of law.  The net result of these rules though, is that at any point in the season, your favorite team...your Alma Mater that you live and die for every Sat...could suddenly have it's star player disappear from the roster due to some infraction of rule 136.33.222.25.459A(sub12).

 

Most people seem to get this law vs. rule thing confused...even one of the top ESPN college football analysts (big thanks to Kirk Herbstreit for the immediate on-air correction!).  Not that I'm an anarchist about college sports, ok.  But many of these rules were instituted decades ago and apparently unnoticed by the NCAA governing body, the world has changed.  Not to mention the money involved! 

 

2014 has finally brought us the college football playoffs most fans have been looking for all these long years.  As far as I know, this is last college sport to do away with the idea that you don't really need to play a football game to see who's better (for anyone not catching the dripping sarcasm, see week 6 where we had, what, 5 out of the top 8 schools lose).  Yet, they still cling to an outdated and all-but-unenforceable, image of the amateur college athlete.  Hey, even the Olympics finally caught up to the real world years ago and for all intents and purposes, trashed the idea of trying to legislate who was a pro and who was an amateur.  By the way, Legal 101, the more you try to legislate, the more loopholes and inconsistencies you create.

So my problem isn't whether the rules were violated, but the fact that the rules are ridiculous...and un-American to boot (yes, I really went there)!  Or maybe it's actually very American after all...using money (read: power) to retain dominance and advantage....hmmm.....but I digress.  The rules would also seem to be applied arbitrarily.  A college football player receives tuition, room and board and, if qualified, a stipend...which would probably allow him to go to the movies once a week...alone.  The argument being, that while they are playing football for the School, they are afforded all these benefits and receiving ANY outside income would somehow tarnish the "pristine" image of The Game.  Meanwhile, a scholastic scholarship student from say, Harvard, could hypothetically create oh, a mega-billion dollar social media site and rake in millions of dollars, without raising an eyebrow (although, I would expect that the School's Office of Development would be hoping to help the old endowment account somewhere in there).

 

And don't even get me started about the difference between making a few bucks from a legal, but unauthorized, means and the subject of sexual attacks or violence.  Right now there are players getting ready to suit up for Sat that face these types of allegations, while someone that sold a few signatures are touching up their NFL resumes while sitting out suspensions.  It's mind-boggling, to me anyway.
 

I understand, the Colleges and Universities want to protect their revenue...and protect their brand.  But losing top athletes doesn't bring in fans to watch your games...it disheartens them and creates controversy over something that doesn't need to be there.  While at the same time, the brand, and the images of athletes in general, are tarnished by the inability or unwillingness of the Schools or the NCAA to police and discipline those whose violent and sexually abusive actions perpetuate the image of the animal-athlete. We can only hope that someday, it will stop being all about the money...but then again, I've always been a dreamer.