College football is broken and shows no signs of being fixed
College football is broken. Unless you’re a fan of LSU, the team that just won the national championship.
Or Clemson, the team that just lost the national championship, but won the season before.
Or Ohio State, the team that made the College Football Playoff … for the third time in six years and won the CFP title in 2015.
Or Alabama, the team that missed the playoff this year … for the first time ever. Also, the team that won five titles in 10 years. And the team that wins the recruiting battle almost every year. And the team that replaces one future NFL prospect with another.
Or even Oklahoma, bless its Sooner heart. All that program has done is make the College Football Playoff four times. Sure, the Sooners have lost big in three of the four games, but they keep getting there, giving their fans hope.
Something few other fan bases have.
Except for Georgia, another program that has been to the playoff and hoards high-level recruits. And possibly Oregon and Notre Dame, each of whom have made a run to the playoff and attract a handful of promising recruits.
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Link: College football is broken and shows no signs of being fixed
Bring back tie games, only 10 bowl games chosen by bowl committees not nationwide pole of supposed experts. Get back to regional conferences with real, closely located schools. Put teeth back in the NCAA by firing the current staff. Make tv televise the real 2 hour game (not 3 and half) without needless breaks for tv commercials.
yell at the (great) grandkids for cheering and making noise with the tv on?
Fix your own house and shut up.
If you look at a short term window throughout history there are always the same handful of schools that stick out in that timeframe.
In those timeframes usually the names of those schools vary. Some are pretty constant but there is movement.
USC, Texas, Florida, UT, Auburn, Michigan, Penn State, FSU, Miami, Oregon, and hopefully ND will all move in and out of that top 6 group he suggests. And there will be your outlier programs that have their occasional runs.
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As for his bball comparison. Upsets are a product of the game itself, not lack talent accumulation. Small rosters leave more talent for other schools but make no mistake, the same schools are getting the best players every year.
10 different programs have won titles in the last 20 years in bball. 6 of then 1 time winners. The other 14 split between 4 programs.
We have a playoff to emphasize it.
In the past it was not that big a deal that there were only 5 or 6 elite football programs. Sure, we always know there are only a handful of teams that can win a National Championship at the beginning of each year. From 1989-1993, ND was one of that handful. We got a little fortunate in 2012 and 2018, too, but probably not a real threat. In the past, this didn't matter so much because the other 110 teams were playing for prestigious bowls instead, and playing for position on the top 25 ranking. We cared about No. 1, but the teams playing for no. 1 just played a bowl game like everyone else.
With the playoff, there is so much more emphasis on the playoff itself that no one cares what happens to the other 118 teams. Positioning in the top 25 just doesn't seem to be important anymore. Expanding the playoff is not the answer to that, since you are just polishing the same turd.
In order to achieve football success. Something that won't happen ever, for whatever reason.
Reality is that a whole lot of schools are at risk of going bankrupt due to debt for capital projects, right at the time college enrollment is falling. Every year since 2011, college attendance has fallen. Oregon may aspire to be a national contender, but the academic side is running a deficit, and is projected to have that continue. UOwe admins have warned to be ready for cuts to the academic side, while the athletic department gets anything they need.
Same has occurred at LSU. The state is cutting higher education budgets, but the AD remains intact. Oklahoma's pres said two years ago that he has $1 billion in construction bond debt that he can't pay, and he can't raise tuition because that'll mean a lot fewer students. The cost for football excellence is being paid with a degraded academic institution...
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Most parents north of the Mason Dixon line do not want their kids playing this brutal waste of their youth... and there are a infinite variety of other forms of entertainment available. Perhaps allowing corporate endorsements will suffice to lure the best recruits north to put on a gladiatorial spectacle in sport's ancient and venerable venues... but it is ultimately as doomed to a slow irrelevance as was boxing.
About halfway through his annual letter, he talks about the challenges related to the overall student body.
Link: https://www.purdue.edu/president/messages/annual-open-letters/2001-med-openletter-full.php
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Gary, Indiana, Detroit from their peaks. Illinois is witnessing a substantial drop in population. As the economy gets worse, other Midwest states/cities will also have fewer people.
What all this means is that the high school recruits that filled the rosters of a lot of football programs will no longer exist. Colleges need to use more resources to attract talent from other parts of the nation. Won't work...
The South still glorifies high school and college football players. Not so much elsewhere.
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their stadiums. And, naturally, no one goes to the high school games, either.
If nearly 20% of seats are complimentary, for the Granddaddy of all bowl games, there's a problem...
Look at the recruiting rankings and the final AP poll Only OSU cracks the the top team for non-southern teams. But more telling is the high school participation decline:
Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2019/08/29/high-school-football-participation-is-on-a-decade-long-decline/#45e14f1133de