Before we begin: I'm a HUGE college football fan, if you haven't figured that out already, and while I freely admit that the sport is not perfect (It's terribly flawed to be perfectly honest) watching college football on Saturday can be one of life's great joys.
"Championship Week" is not one of those joys.
Let's look at the current lines (as of the time of this writing) for the games.
Oregon vs. Utah (-6.5)
Miami(OH) vs. Central Michigan (-6.5)
Baylor vs. OU (-9)
UAB vs FAU (-7.5)
Cincinnati vs Memphis (-10)
Hawaii vs. Boise State (-14.5
Georgia vs. LSU (-7)
Virginia vs. Celmson (-28.5)
Wisconsin vs. Ohio State (-16.5)
Not, the most interesting slate of games. And in two cases, the ACC and the B1G, it could be argued that the games are not going to be competitive. In one case, the AAC, we're getting the exact same game, in the same stadium, that we just saw last Saturday. The only reasons these games are played at all is because of TV money and the misplaced desire on behalf of all involved to try and name "one true champion".
The problem is two-fold. One, not every conference can produce two elite teams year after year. So quite often these games are unwatchable blowouts. Second, college football does not now, nor did it ever, need "One true champion" to be great.
What makes college football great is the atmosphere, the pageantry and the buzz that builds on campus during game week and on game day. In many cases, especially for the bigger conferences, these games are played in soulless NFL stadiums under the glare of TV lights hundreds of miles away from each college, and it's barely even worth it any more.
If you have to have "one true champion" then just get rid of this week and expand the playoff to eight teams. While I'm an advocate of eliminating the playoff altogether, and returning to the old bowl system, I realize that's not a popular sentiment in this era of "My school is better than yours" where no ambiguity can be tolerated and one's standing in the college football hierarchy is not only a measuring stick for how good the team is, but is also used to justify the societal, moral, and character superiority of one fan base versus another.
If your team wins the National Championship then you're allowed to lord that over other, less-good, fan-bases based solely on the results of a football game in which you had zero influence. It's much the same as the city of any sports championship acting as if that makes them superior to other cities because.....why?
Sports have become our cultural touch-stone in this age of moral superiority. We NEED winners, we identify with winners and society has trouble living without winners because we're, as individuals, winning so little in life right now. I won't delve into the political-science of this (Out of scope for this blog) but I will say that a lot of the reasons so many feel like losers is that we've now been conditioned to just give up by our ruling class.
Eliminating Championship Week in college football, and allowing their to be co-champions, would be but one small step in rolling back this trend. We don't need "one true champion" what we need are competitive games, communal experiences and things that bring us together as fans.
In a world that is increasingly about winning, losing and, more importantly, crushing your opponents to dust without a thought, eliminating one chance for sad people to lord something as silly as a conference championship over another group of sad people, might now be all that big in the grand scheme of things, but it wouldn't be that small either.
Let's just start having fun again, without all of the anger and vitriol.
Is that too much to ask?
