First off and for the record I love football but track and field is in my soul. (Figure that out you undedicated turds!) Anyway I can spend and entire weekend on the couch watching this competitive gladiator sport that only warfare rivals. You can't beat the strategy and battles that are being waged in various locations on the field. However, college football is way more authentic to me and I will state my case in my next poisonous paragraphs.
College football is football in is purest and represents football at it's most competitive level. I know you are saying how? Isn't it their goal since Pop Warner to play in the NFL? Here's how, only one in 1 in 2500 little snot nose twerps will get to play in the NFL. Most will play in high school and some will play at some level of the collegiate ranks. Heck, I'm a walking example of those figures. My budding and I say that loosely HS career was cut short due to constant injuries and being undersized. So you have a good number playing whether it's JUCO, NAIA, DIV III, II or FCS or FBS. The latter formerly none as DIV 1AA and DIV 1A respectively. Why did they do that? Heck the excuse is to remove the mindset that DIV 1AA is an inferior level of CFB than DIV 1A. Well it is actually and it's based on money and enrollment plus the 'your pretty good but you aren't amazing" premise.
How did that come about? Well it's true if you look at these examples. Every year some QB transfer from a big name school i.e. Oklahoma because of "lack of playing time". I used the QB because this happens more at this position and is more noteworthy than any other because they usually create an immediate impact once they play. The highly recruited QB transfers to a FCS (DIV 1AA) school and usually is an immediate starter through noted talented and he "wasn't given a chance to blossom" factors. They pick up the small school's not as complex offense and lights his new conference and foes on fire. However, if you aren't actively looking for the "where did so and so go" QB you won't know about his gaudy numbers that he could and should have posted at his previous level. No TV contracts, hardly any ESPN love and no BOWLS to play in. Just the very fair playoffs to carry his team through and hope they make it far enough to be in tv in the semi-finals. That's if his supporting cast is good enough to make to the playoffs.
The other issue is college football teams run a myriad of offenses and plays that I love. The NFL has been watered down to some variation of the Bill Walsh plague-lol! Yes, the West Coast Offense has been a full fledge pestilence in the NFL for well over 10yrs. While CFB teams line up in the Run n Shoot, Spread, Power I, Flexbone, Wishbone, West Coast and Multiple Set schemes. I love to see the option ran with perfection. A QB, FB and TB all doing a wonderful ballet of fakes, counters and pitches and when read properly it is lethal! So lethal I have problems winning on NCAA football if I don't have the personnel to run this play in some form. The service academies would have moved to the FCS years ago if they didn't keep their many variations of the option in their offense because the have weight restrictions and the option keeps them competitive, well Navy and now Air Force are competitive. Army is trying to go conventional but is struggling to get the best skill players to enroll.
I do digress because the Spread Offense is now littering the playbooks of major programs throughout the FBS. If they aren't using it they are tinkering with the possiblity of using it through hiring a coordinator with the skill to install it and recruiting players who fit the system. The offense is exactly what it says, spread the field creating gaps in the defense through play action fakes, option reads and good WR play and blocking. You need a ton of speed on your teams to make it unstoppable.
The bowl games and the FCS' playoff systems creates it's on drama throughout the season. However, greed has inflated the bowl system to an fiscal feeding frenzy. I personally don't feel a 6-6 teams has a place in a bowl. I grew up learning I wasn't rewarded for mediocrity but I guess my mentors were wrong in this case. You watch these bowl games and scratch your head why? Okay, it's an awesome recruiting tool to tell your prized recruit you played in a bowl the last six years but it was Nappa Autoparts Bowl, Ruby Tuesday Football Extraganza or the Montreal Madness Bowl. Which pretty much tells the recruit either you are just good enough to fund your other non-revenue sports and nifty uniforms for the football team or you are constantly on the cusp of being really good. I say do away with these low attendance bowl games and turn the top five into a play-off. We all know the BCS is a good ol boy system for the big boy conferences. Well, Hawaii didn't help the mid-major conferences cause this year either.
The players play harder in CFB as well because they are working towards goals at their level and the hopes of making it to the NFL. In the NFL you see players tip-toeing or taking downs off because it's a contract year. It's sickening! Then you see a "who the heck is that" have a great game in the play-offs and gets a huge contract only to disappear again. Can anyone say Tampa Bay's Larry Brown?
The one thing I would love to see is an offensive coordinator gutsy enough to run the option constantly in the NFL-lol!
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