Five Things I Hate About College Football

[dlgood]

Watching the Kentucky-Louisville game, I've reminded of some things I do really dislike about college football. In the absence of finishing my solicited lists of five I figured I'd add a list of my own.

Five things I hate about College Football:

1. Cupcake non-conference games. Kudos to Vandy and Cal for being willing to go play at Michigan and Tennessee, even though they'd lost. I am seriously annoyed that Maryland has gone with cake for yet another season. Home games this month against William & Mary, Middle Tennesse State, and Florida International. (What, the Culinary Institute was unavailable?)
   
   They aren't going to be useful competition for the players. They aren't going to be entertaining to watch. They won't add any value or cache to the program. And they don't even have good storylines or local flavor, as Maryland-Navy did last year.
   
   When you have a long season, as college basketball does - such season opening stretches are perfectly acceptable if you've got one or two legit games as well. In football - you only have four open dates on the schedule. Making three of them home cucpakes is a travesty.
   
   
2. Hideous Uniforms. Louisville's black jerseys are actually not so bad. But if your school mascot are "The Cardinals" you need to be wearing red. At least you aren't Syracuse Ugly. Or Oregon.
   
   
3. Lou Holtz. I hate Lou Holtz. Faux-folksiness out of a guy who's always run very shady programs, most which go on probation as soon as he leaves (for things he did). Oh, and stop mumbling.
   
   
4. Season Ending Injuries. While it's true that they get scholarships many of them couldn't otherwise earn, college football players do not get paid. (Unless they go to Oklahoma or USC) I hate seeing a guy have his year ended in September - as happened for Clemson's Anthony Waters and Michael Bush of Louisville.
   
   BCS Does anyone not hate the Bowl Champonship Series? Given that all of College Football's teams cannot possibly play each other, or even more than one or two common opponents - there pretty much would have to be a playoff in order to have anything resembling a consensus champion. In the absence of that, I'd rather see the old school bowl system, with traditional conference champion matchups - with all of the attendant hullaballoo then the sad attempt to have both (and getting neither) that is the BCS.

Comments

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

I was there at the beginning of the era when big schools stopped scheduling cupcakes. It was largely a money thing then too. You could get more people to come watch Minnesota vs Ole Miss, than California vs Who-knows College of beauty and dog grooming. Things started changing back again when you had a combination of lousy schools like Kansas State that got tired of losing every game, and big successful one's like Penn State that refused to schedule an away game if the opponent wouldn't play them two or three times more often at State College.

Some of the uniforms these days are unbelievable. Again I think it's a matter of money, the major schools getting paid to wear whatever the manufacturer wants them to, so they can make their money selling to smaller schools and high schools.

I can put up with Lou Holtz, though he does tend to bend the truth in what he says as well as in his actions. Woody Hayes was worse. Managed to project an image to people as someone concerned about his team, when he really was only concerned about whether he got what he wanted or not. Not a nice person at all.

The lengthening schedule scares me. When is enough enough? When no star player can make it whole through a season?

The whole championship idea is nonsense. I admit it was frustrating rooting for teams that got less than their due in the polls, but no one but the TV networks and sports reporters win with any sort of BCS or playoff. College football has been the plaything of sports writers since Walter Camp started calling the best players from a small area in the East "All-Americans." So the sportswriter will eventually get their way. There will be a playoff, but it's just another lengthening of a season that's already too long for the sport.

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

1. The odd thing about such schedules. Maryland can't get TV coverage for games like William & Mary, and I would think - long term - there'd be more money in it for them to schedule anyone else.

(In the case of Penn State, they ended the 30-year series with Maryland when they joined the Big East. Sad for us because it was a neighboring state power that gets all of our best prospects. Good for us because we are 1-30-1 against them...)

2. Unis really vary. Some are great. Pretty much everything from Nike these days, with their ridiculous template (Arizona, Miami & a number of schools wear the same uniforms with only difference color scheme...) really annoys me.

5. The long season doesn't necessarily ring to me as an argument against playoffs. Every other Division of College Football has a 16-team playoff. I think they have 11 games instead of 12, but otherwise... If it's okay for the Ivy League, then it's okay for me for the ACC.

[kalbear.livejournal.com]

I'm a huge Oregon fan, and the uniforms are starting to bug. Some of it is because the players have a big say on what goes on on their uniform, and those unis attract recruits, get more people interested, etc.

But they're uuuuugly.

Sigh.

Cupcake games piss me off. Okay, fine, you can't play an awesome team all the time, and this year's cupcake might be next year's Fresno State or TCU or whatever, so it's good for the cupcake schools - at least sometimes. But in general? You're Nebraska - play someone with clout. Sheesh.

BCS championship: eh. I miss the Pac-10/Big-10 Rose Bowl, which appears to not be likely to happen any time reasonably given the likelihood of a champion coming out of the Pac-10 or the Big-10 every year. Really, I don't see the need for a unified and undisputed champion of College. At least the BCS is a step away from the idiotic polling system, but I really don't want playoffs in college football. The bowls feel...right. Even if they're not the best bowls ever. Oregon going to the Independence Bowl after 33 years of not being in any bowl game was something special. I don't want to deny that to teams.

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

Do you ever read Uni Watch (http://www.uniwatchblog.com/), because they had a thing on that. And while I rage on some number of the combos -- I find the yellow really bad -- I think I might have liked some of the various permutations if they'd just picked one instead of what they've got. I don't mind a team breaking out a third jersey for a special game every so often (such as Maryland wearing black vs. Virginia) but after a point it gets silly.