And this was a particularly good year in some ways, at least
for Curmie: Cortland State, the team from the town where Curmie went to high
school and where he did a few shows as an actor and technician, won the national championship in Division 3. Dartmouth, Curmie’s undergrad alma mater,
tied for the Ivy League championship.
And Curmie’s PhD school, the Kansas Jayhawks, after years of being a doormat
in the Big 12 and a national laughingstock, continued their improvement,
finishing 9-4 with a win over traditional power Oklahoma, a bowl victory, and a
top-25 ranking at the end of the season.
Ah, Gentle Reader, but the news is not all good. Indeed, other than the success of teams
Curmie cheers for, it’s a disaster. The
head coach of the national champion was suspended for literally half of the
regular season for two separate violations; if Michigan keeps cheating like
this, the SEC is going to sue for trademark violation.
But ultimately, that’s the least (well, among the least) of
our worries. The combination of the
transfer portal and NIL (name, image, and likeness) deals have made the game
all but unrecognizable. The problem
isn’t specifically related to football, of course: Curmie watched a basketball
game the other night in which the total number of non-freshman “scholarship”
players (for both teams combined) who were playing for the team where they
started their collegiate career was two, and one of them had committed
elsewhere before changing his mind before actually enrolling.
But if unlimited movement weren’t bad enough, the NIL
business is worse, not even counting the way the system lends itself to abuse. Let me count the ways. First, NIL allows virtually unlimited funding
for jocks, meaning that the schools with the most rabid and wealthy fans will
always get the best athletes because they can and do offer the most money. And by “always,” Curmie means both
“universally” and “in perpetuity.”
Second, it devalues those traits the sports are allegedly
designed to inculcate: loyalty, perseverance, teamwork, and so on. Third, it places an inordinant emphasis on
so-called “revenue-producing sports,” football and men’s basketball. We’ll leave aside the observation that for
most universities, even—or perhaps especially—these sports are net drains on
the school’s financial resources.
Women’s sports are especially overlooked in NIL.
Most importantly, of course, these deals exacerbate the
already precipitous decline of the university into what what one quipster has
called “a sporting franchise with a side hustle in tertiary education.” The best high school physics student in the
state won’t get as sweet a deal as someone destined to be the backup punter,
especially if the latter is a handsome and well-spoken lad. Even (or, again, perhaps especially) outstanding
students with public-facing skillsets—journalists, actors, musicians, et al.—aren’t
going to compete with the third-string linebacker. This is because, not to put too fine a point
on it, most universities have dropped even the pretense of caring about excellence
within academic disciplines. They’ll
give their often wildly corrupt athletic programs whatever they want, and History,
Chemistry, Philosophy, et al., are left to fight over the scraps.
If we want to see the clearest manifestation of the problems
with college football, it’s the bowl games.
First off, there are far too many of them. 62% of FBS (i.e., Division 1) teams
went to a bowl this year. How’d that
happen if you have to be at least 6-6, you ask?
Well, first off, there were a couple of 5-7 teams that got bowl
invitations because there weren’t enough 6-win teams to play in the Ty-D-Bol in
Bismarck in January. (OK, Curmie made
that one up, but a baker’s dozen bowl teams ended the season with losing records.) More frequently, teams became eligible by beating
up on the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Those games count towards the necessary six victories, even though no
rational person think that a win over Chattanooga or UT-Martin means much to a
major conference team.
And some of the games are played in ridiculous
locations. Memphis got a bowl game on
their own field this year. That’s absurd
enough, but imagine playing for Georgia State and having a decent year. Your reward: playing in a 2/3 empty outdoor stadium
in Boise in late December. Or you’re
SMU, finish the regular season ranked in the top 25, and get to play in a 2/3
empty baseball stadium in Boston. Against
Boston College. In late December. In the morning, Eastern time. Or, frankly, if you’re any team in about any
bowl game that nobody has ever heard of, which is to say most of them.
The biggest problem in these terms, however, was the number
of players who “opted out” of their bowl games.
This year’s Heisman Trophy winner, Jayden Daniels of LSU, didn’t
play. Neither did last year’s Heisman
winner, Caleb Williams of USC. Ohio
State lost their bowl game in part because their starting quarterback and their
top receiver (the leading Heisman vote-getter other than quarterbacks) opted
out. Curmie’s beloved Jayhawks played
without their best offensive lineman and their best defensive lineman.
The list goes on and on.
The biggest story, though, was Florida State. The Seminoles had a reasonable case (see
below) that they should have been in the four-team playoff for the national
title, but when they didn’t make the cut, players abandoned ship en masse. Over 30 players, including their top three
receivers, best running back, and backup quarterback (their starter was
actually injured, so he has an excuse) opted out to enter either the NFL draft
or the transfer portal. Playing a bunch
of second- and third-stringers, FSU was crushed by 60 points in the Orange
Bowl (oops… sorry) the Capital One Orange Bowl by Georgia, who also
had a lot of opt-outs, but nowhere near as many really important ones.
Curmie is old enough to remember when playing for the team
mattered, when a bowl victory, even if “only” a regular bowl game, especially a
New Year’s Day game, mattered. Hell, people
two generations younger than Curmie can remember that. Not anymore.
Particularly despicable are the players—including both Jayhawks mentioned
above—who opted out of their team’s bowl game but will play in one of those
inane all-star games that will happen over the next couple of weeks. Guess what: you can get injured in one of them,
too.
OK, so about Florida State’s plaint. One of the big questions about how the
playoff teams are chosen is whether the committee was looking for the four best
teams or the four most deserving teams.
They managed to choose neither. Two
of the four best teams—Michigan and Alabama—made the cut. The other two would be Georgia and Ohio State. The former was the #1 team in the country
before losing to Alabama by a single score in the SEC title game; the latter
was relegated to #7 (!) because they lost by a single score on the road against
the ultimate #1 team. But they happen to
be in the same division of the same conference as Michigan, so they didn’t even
compete for the league title, even though they were one of the best four teams
in the country. And “the committee” places
a ridiculous amount of emphasis on being a conference champion. Except, of course, when they don’t care at all
(see: FSU).
You want to make a case for Texas? Curmie will listen. After all, it took a remarkably stupid
strategy by Auburn’s defensive coordinator to keep Bama from picking up a
second loss, but picking the Longhorns over the Tide solely because they won a
head-to-head game early in the season is downright silly. Let’s play that game a little further. Texas lost to Oklahoma, who lost to Kansas,
who lost to Texas Tech, who lost to Wyoming… anybody wanna say Wyoming should
have been in the playoff? Texas beat
Alabama before the latter had figured out their quarterback situation. That single game should matter, but not much
if the goal is getting the best teams.
More to the point, the committee’s logic is
inconsistent. They claim they want the
best teams, but they went with TCU last year.
TCU was one of the four most deserving teams, but not one of the
best. Washington wasn’t one of the best
teams this year, either, but they were at least deserving, since they went
undefeated and won their conference title game.
Of course, so did Florida State, who beat a ranked Louisville team by
double digits on a neutral site behind a third-string quarterback (the
second-stringer would have been available for a playoff game). But with the third-stringer, they “didn’t
look like they could win the national title.”
In other words, what’s happening right now is what matters, unless we’re
talking about Texas and Alabama, in which case what matters is what happened in
early September.
Curmie could go on, put he’ll spare you, Gentle Reader.
In Part Two: some solutions.
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