College Football, We Hardly Knew Ye
Having discovered the pleasures of ten-minute game summaries on YouTube, few of which spoil the ending, I made something of a reacquaintance with college football in 2023. It proved to be a good year to do so, as a former Michigander, it gave me great pleasure to watch from a distance as the Wolverines finally put together that championship season we all know the school is capable of. Not so much for my sake – see the aforementioned “former” in my earlier self-description – but for the sake of my old friends from back in the hometown.
My interest in college football waned over the last decade, largely as a by-product of an awakening to the rakeness and fayness and getardeness of the modern world. Once you start to notice how little you can trust the analysis of the Clown Shoe Brigade in the media you can’t separate out the sports-staff from the rest of the guys in the tiny little car. Indeed, the more you notice, the more you realize that sports analysts may just be the worst apples in a very bad barrel. You can see this in the way they have spent the last few decades speaking new realities into being and nowhere is this more obvious than in the shift from the bowl system to its inevitable total replacement – the playoff system.
(Brief aside, their love of the SEC and its decades long trend of taking the easy roads to filling the coffers of the great Devil Mouse runs a close second. It is more than a little strange how many otherwise clear-eyed souls reject media analysis across the board, then cling to it on the issue of the SEC’s supposed ‘dominance’. As is always the case the rules get thrown out by the unelected Beltway Bureaucrats, and once more they hand delivered a berth to their Favored Sons. Fortunately for everyone, Michigan was able to overcome the margin of fraud and win on the field to lay that demon to rest.)
The system as it stands is a hybrid, and the creeping infection of the playoff system is set to spread next season. This year, as in recent years, the NCAA offered up a four team playoff. Next year it expands to twelve teams. This year, the non-playoff bowls lost more relevance as a FSU team was decimated by the NCAA’s message that what they do on the field doesn’t matter. The bulk of their starters wisely took the message to heart and sat out the last game of their season, leaving a Georgia team that usually benefits from the off-field criteria to field their regular starters. This lead to the worst sort of result for the bowl system – a 60-point blowout that put an exclamation point on the meaningless of the game.
The end result will be a continued push to do away with the bowl system altogether, a push led by that lazy and dull-witted parasite class called sportswriters. They lament that “there are too many games”, a word spell that easily swayed fans of college football will repeat. Which leads to a few pertinent questions:
- What kind of fan of a laments that they get too much of the thing the claim to love?
- Too many games…for who?
As to the latter, the only real answer is: lazy reporters who just want to get to the next sport season. They don’t want the extra work, and are convinced that everyone should agree with them. But what about the players on the field? The athletes who earn and are rewarded with one last chance to shine. Those who get one last working vacation without the pressures of classes and books. What about the fans and alumni of those mid-tier schools who use bowl games to keep their department afloat, or as an excuse for a vacation among their sports tribe? The bowl system provides great benefits to tens of thousands of people, but none of them are members of the Professional Media Class, so screw them, right?
It’s frankly disgusting, and even my limited exposure to the corruption of the NCAA and its media handlers has reminded my that the death of the university system can’t come soon enough. If it only costs us the damage done by sportswriters, the high price will be worth it.
Meanwhile, congratulations both to Washington – whose team put up a ferocious fight and truly deserved to be in that game – and to the new Nation Champion Wolverines.
2023 was a fun ride, but not enough to get me to overlook all the warts in the system.