Tradition is so 10 minutes ago ...
And even then, college football lost its watch
An unanticipated spark of sanity from college football this week provided a useful jumping-off point for our look back at the season that ended Monday night, when Clemson did unto Alabama essentially what it had done unto an undone Pitt team a month earlier.
That’s your final scene, college football? A snooze-tempting four-touchdown romp concluding a two-round playoff in which the average margin of victory was 22 points?
As the younguns say, whatevs.
That flash of sanity — a declaration of “unanimous support” by Football Bowl Subdivision coaches for removing college football entirely from Friday nights out of respect for high school football — suggests there are power brokers inside the college game who still have enough working brain cells to fix some of the 5,000 other things that they’ve broken.
Not counting, of course, the College Football Hall of Fame, which this week inducted the Goodyear Blimp (how could I make that up?) “College players and fans know that when the Goodyear Blimp shows up, it’s a big game,” said Archie Manning, noted quarterback sire and chairman of the National Football Foundation. “Its presence is intrinsically known and tied to the traditions that make college football so great.”
More on the whole traditions thing in a moment, but first let’s note that the Goodyear Blimp, the first nonplayer or non-coach inducted, beat out the athletic supporter, the kicking tee and the Gatorade bucket on its float toward immortality in what I’m told was extremely close balloting.
OK that part I did make up. We might as well begin with the intractability of college football’s national championship, which is pretty much stuck on Bama, Clemson, Bama, Clemson, Bama, Auburn, Bama, Bama Bofanna banana-nanna foBama.
Alabama has won five of the past 10. Add Clemson and it’s seven of the past 10. In the NFL, by contrast, the previous 10 Super Bowls have been won by nine teams. Perhaps this collegiate sameness is related to the lowest TV ratings for a title game since 2012 and the plummeting ticket prices and the general malaise for the game metastasizing in many areas of the country outside of the Southeast.
The culmination of the college football season has to be more inclusive, unless the brains behind the operation are going to insist that a postseason that admits 3 percent of the teams is a fine idea.
Naturally, they do. “As far as expanding the number of teams in the playoff, it’s way too soon . . . to know if that is even a possibility,” said a statement issued the morning of Clemson-Alabama III by Mississippi State University president Mark Keenum, chairman of the playoff’s board of managers. “I’m not going to say everyone, [but] a consensus [of the board] is very pleased with the four-team format and the success, most importantly, that’s we’ve had over the past five years.”
Five years, meaning there have been 20 playoff slots awarded since the 2014 season. Fourteen of the 20 have gone to Alabama, Clemson, Oklahoma and Ohio State.
So you’re stuck on 3 percent of the 130 teams having a shot at the national championship, even though the corresponding figure in the NFL is 37.5 percent (12 of 32 teams make the playoffs), and in the NHL it’s 52 percent (16 of 31), and in the NBA it’s 53 percent (16 of 30), and in Major League Baseball it’s 33 percent (10 of 30)? You’re stuck on 3 percent?
Oh, those are professional sports.
Please.
How about the other intercollegiate governing bodies shepherding all the other flocks of “student-athletes?”
The insanely popular NCAA men’s basketball postseason admits 19 percent of all the teams to an annual free-for-all (68 of 351). The NCAA’s Football Championship Subdivision tournament starts with 24 teams. Division II starts with 28 and finishes the whole thing on five weekends. (Did you know that of the 45 national champions of the Division II tournament, 18 have had the word “North” in their name? Of course not.)
The marquee level of college football can easily retrofit December with a 16-team playoff that would include all worthy teams and do it on four consecutive weekends. The reason it won’t is maddeningly simple — the game’s oligarchic leadership just isn’t sure how the money is going to shift between the tournament and the bowl structure, and don’t even get me started about the bowl structure because if you’re reading this in a Starbucks that at this moment has at least 11 people in it, you are probably bowl eligible.
This abject fear of being somewhere other than downriver from the shifting revenue streams brought us conference realignment, conference coalescence, if you will, into the so-called power 5, and totally uprooted the primary purpose of college football — sustaining arguments between regional archrivals — Ohio State-Michigan, AuburnAlabama, USC-UCLA, Oklahoma-Nebraska, FloridaGeorgia, Army-Navy — that never cooled even in the bitterest winters and bloomed amid the color and pageantry of autumn foliage. Or something.
The impact locally is little short of appalling.
Pitt and Penn State, a boiling intrastate rivalry that perfectly defined the college game’s singular essence, will meet for the 100th and likely final time in September as a relatively meaningless matchup between the Citrus Bowl runner-up and the Sun Bowl runner-up.
Penn State wants nothing to do with Pitt, which wants nothing to do with the beloved Backyard Brawl against West Virginia, which continues to hope there are talented boys somewhere in the mountains who are growing up dreaming of playing road games in Waco, Texas, and Stillwater, Oklahoma.
The Blimp is an intrinsic tradition, I’m told by an actual Manning, but Pitt-Penn State and the Backyard Brawl are readily disposable if the alternative is even a whiff of increased income. In this way college football has spent most of the past 25 years systematically ridding itself of traditions large and small. The traditional Saturday game has turned up on Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday, and the national championship now gets decided late — very late — on a Monday night. The second half of Bama-Clemson III kicked off at 10:17 p.m. I hope nobody was late for class Tuesday morning (snort!).
While I’m complaining — was I complaining? — college football teams once wore traditional uniforms combining their traditional school colors, another tradition completely trivial at the approach of any fledgling gear merchant with an idea to boost your merchandise sales and your visual appeal to the recruiting base with something a little more edgy, a little more lit.
Ohio State will wear any goofy costume that comes its way in lieu of the hallowed scarlet and gray. The Temple Owls played their bowl game looking like the victims of sabotage by a university laundry that turned the cherry and white into 50 shades of black, gray, and is that cranberry? I don’t know what Maryland is wearing and every Oregon game looks like a commercial for suspect lawn chemicals.
The game itself retains many of its endemic charms. There wasn’t a more beauteous thing on any field anywhere this season than Clemson freshman Trevor Lawrence throwing to fellow freshman Justyn Ross, for example, even if the game seems devoted to up-tempo offenses in perpetual worship of the run-pass option.
When Alabama, trailing Clemson by five points late in the first half, went for it on fourth-and-1 from its 34, analyst Kirk Herbstreit correctly pointed out “this is where college football is in 2019,” going for it from your 34 out of respect for the opposing offense.
Bama converted, but produced a turnover a few plays later and never scored again, pretty amazing when you consider that this was the season in which Texas A&M beat LSU, 74-72, in seven overtimes. The capacity to hold Alabama to 16 points must be why Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables makes $2.2 million annually, and he’s not the college game’s highest paid coordinator. That would be LSU’s Dave Aranda at $2.5 million.
Head coaches can earn three and four times that figure, which would appear to be in conflict with the mission of the university, but that’s a whole other column, right?
Odds to win next year’s national championship were out this week. The favorites are (you’ll never guess) Clemson at 2-1 and Alabama at 5-2, and no one else was close (Georgia, Ohio State, and Michigan were at 12-1).
But fret not. It’s only 230 days until Penn State takes on Idaho, which is not necessarily two teams that don’t like each other, but more likely two teams who couldn’t find each other on a map. Pitt will open as the defending champion of the Coastal Division (I love going down to the boardwalk for a corn dog after the game, don’t you?) and probably settle comfortably among Others Not Receiving Votes, and new West Virginia coach Neal Brown will wonder how he got a job that gets him more air miles than the Secretary of State, whoever it is by then.
But oh by the way, those Alabama uniforms?
Still perfect.