College football is back.
Forget about those silly ESPN ads suggesting that it's not until next week because they're wrong. College football came back last Saturday when UMass kicked off against Duquesne. Then North Carolina A&T won an outstanding game over Jacksonville State (which happened to feature my new favorite kicker) before Hawai'i donned some brilliant helmets and pulled the first upset of the year over Colorado State. Also, Rice kicked a field goal in overtime to beat Prairie View A&M who gave them the game with a safety and 4th quarter collapse, spoiling our first FCS upset alert.
The day was capped off by an outstanding performance by Wyoming over a New Mexico State team that has some offensive issues to work through.
Now, we take a breath, until Thursday, which starts 5 straight days of games, including the first "full" day of play on Saturday. You won't have enough televisions to watch all of the games.
It's back, and it's glorious, and it will be even better if you choose to ignore the talking heads and disavow the College Football Playoff.
The last few years I've cared about the CFP, gotten angry when the selection committee did stupid things to exclude certain teams from contention and gave us 4 teams that, to be honest, only the casual fan cared about.
Because it doesn't matter who wins the "National Championship" in College football, it never has. Were I king of football I'd eliminate the CFP and take us back to the old bowl system and balloting and arguments all off-season about who's really #1.
And that's the problem. Recently the powers that be in television and the big conferences have stopped catering to the hard-core fan, and have chased the casual fan in some damned-fool adventure to crown a "true champion", never realizing that they have not.
It started with the truly awful B(C)S, which was designed to get an SEC team in the "Championship" bowl game no matter what. Be honest, the SEC wasn't the behemoth we know it to be today until the B(C)S made it so. It was a strong conference, arguably the best in the country many years, but it had competition from the B1G and Pac-12 and Big XII and ACC almost every year. We rarely knew which one was better because we never got closure. It was great and glorious and it allowed for debate.
Then the B(C)S came along and put Kirk Herbstreit in front of the cameras to tell us that all debate was over and some super-computers and pollsters had ended the questioning. ESPN made a mint, the big colleges raked in the money and smaller schools took a beating. The casual fan stopped watching, or caring about, anyone not in the Power 5 conferences and the slow death spiral of a once great system started.
But that wasn't enough. Because there was still a chance, albeit slight, that a non B(C)S conference school could garner headlines.
Thus was created the CFP, which empaneled a board of 10 "August" football "experts" whose job it was to tell us who the "top 4 teams in the country" were at any given time. Nevermind that, from the jump, their lists were flawed and designed only to generate controversy, and ratings, for ESPN's "embrace debate" list of television shows.
Last year was the final straw. When Alabama, who lost to Auburn and couldn't even win their conference championship, gained entry into the CFP and then took advantage of a long prep window to win the whole thing many people walked away with a bitter taste in their mouths.
So this year, I don't care.
I don't care what the CFP says, I don't care who numbers 1-4 are come week 8 or 9 and I really don't care whose what or where except for in the conference standings. I'm going to watch as many games as I can every week, including Group of 5 games involving teams that might, or might not, be any good, and I'm going to enjoy the sheer spectacle of the games.
I WANT to see bad plays and hefty kickers and god-awful uniforms and half-full stadiums and Enter Sandman and "Auburn's gonna win the football game!!" and all of the pomp and circumstance that is going to fill my television screens every day.
I WANT to see Group of 5 bowls and will watch every one of them that I can.
I WANT to see rivalries and top matchups and FCS upsets over FBS teams and Hawai'i featuring a quarterback with blonde dreadlocks.
I'll watch all of this and enjoy it every weekend. And I won't care who the CFP committee ranks 1-4.
Oh, I'll watch the CFP because it's the last college football I'll get to see all year, but I won't recognize the ultimate winner as the National Champion because there will have been too many good teams excluded to really be sure.
Neither should you.
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