The College Football Fizzle

It happens to me every year about this time. Maybe I’m the only one? I don’t think so though…I like to call it the college football fizzle.

Every other sport – college or pro – builds up to an amazing finale. In NCAA basketball, you have March Madness. In the NFL you have playoffs and the Super Bowl. College football isn’t like that, though.

First, there’s the regular season. That’s all fine and good, even if it is a bit daunting to have so many teams. Most people just follow the conference they like best or even just their favorite team. Then there’s a bit of downtime – a few weeks that most teams have off.

Then bowl season starts and everyone gets excited. There are some awesome match ups, every year. But you know what?

I don’t care how evenly match Team A and Team B are. If they’re the teams ranked fourth in the Pac-10 and second in the Sun Belt, who the hell cares? In other words, they aren’t playing for any reason. It doesn’t matter how good the game is if there isn’t really a point.

So, after about two weeks of bowl games, we enter the college football fizzle. Sure, we still care about “our” team. Oh, and of course, there are games that are exciting to watch, like the BCS bowls. In general, though…who cares who wins the International Bowl or the Papajohns.com Bowl or any of the other dozens of ridiculous bowl games? Do you even know who is PLAYING in those bowls?

I don’t want to get into a whole argument about a playoff system. Why? Because at this point, I don’t think there really is an argument to be had. There are multiple different ways to do this, it just needs to be done. We don’t HAVE to have a 16-team play off. We don’t HAVE to have conference championship games. We just have to have SOMETHING that doesn’t lead to a big fizzle right before the national title game is held!

And you know what? I’d bet a million dollars on it that they’re working on something. I know that the people at the top keep saying “no playoffs!” but let’s not be silly – they know the BCS system we have right now doesn’t work. Even the colleges are complaining, and if people start to jump ship, refusing to play in bowls at an alarming rate, we’ll have a real problem on our hands. So you bet your ass that they’re working on something.