Had a great weekend. Went out of town with the wife, had good food, saw some sights, went to a concert. It definitely helped there was no Pitt game but I still tried to keep up with the scores from yesterday and caught the second half of the SEC game.
I was planning on writing down some thoughts on the whole FSU screw job that took place and how the committee is a literal hodge podge of random ADs, ex players who are now businessmen, and a sportswriter who altogether probably don’t have time to watch many games throughout the season aside from the ones this weekend. But figured since the 12 team playoff starts next year and there’s actually some criteria to it I’ll just hold off.
BUT my first point would be then how long will this 12 team playoff era last? I would imagine the SEC and Big10 break off at some point in the next what, 3-5 years? Will the winner of that league really be the college football national champion? The big 10 (and SEC this year) has literally 3 above average teams in it in a given year. But unfortunately that’s what this whole business has become. Viewership and brand name trumping actual results. What other sport or industry is like this, where results don’t really matter? I guess politics (sweet! yay college football).
Which leads me to my next depressing point…player movement and NIL. Maybe I should’ve led with this but I’m having a really tough time the last two seasons with this whole “they got or didn’t get the bag” culture we got going on right now across CFB after the regular season is over. And I get it, if I was 10 years younger and had a shot to make $ in college playing football I would appreciate being compensated. But man is it nauseating having to worry about if like an average offensive lineman gets “taken care of” out of the fear he might go somewhere else and leave. Was that really what NIL was intended to be? Makes me feel hollow. The beauty of college sports was to see a kid commit to the school you attended or root for and watch him grow into a good player and representative of the university by the time he graduates. With the thought being if your football team did this consistently enough it could keep attracting more talent and with some luck you could compete for a conference and maybe a national championship. And now that all seems lost or will be lost in a few years for the majority of schools.
And that just sucks man. Things right now feel more in despair than even 2 years ago. We went from college football being a cesspool to Chernobyl in that time span. So I just wanted to get these thoughts out there in case anyone else was feeling the same way.
But hey, at least we’ll always have 2021. A team that was the direct result of a built culture, featured 3 first round draft picks, and a bunch of guys I would consider to be great Pitt representatives.
H2P
I was planning on writing down some thoughts on the whole FSU screw job that took place and how the committee is a literal hodge podge of random ADs, ex players who are now businessmen, and a sportswriter who altogether probably don’t have time to watch many games throughout the season aside from the ones this weekend. But figured since the 12 team playoff starts next year and there’s actually some criteria to it I’ll just hold off.
BUT my first point would be then how long will this 12 team playoff era last? I would imagine the SEC and Big10 break off at some point in the next what, 3-5 years? Will the winner of that league really be the college football national champion? The big 10 (and SEC this year) has literally 3 above average teams in it in a given year. But unfortunately that’s what this whole business has become. Viewership and brand name trumping actual results. What other sport or industry is like this, where results don’t really matter? I guess politics (sweet! yay college football).
Which leads me to my next depressing point…player movement and NIL. Maybe I should’ve led with this but I’m having a really tough time the last two seasons with this whole “they got or didn’t get the bag” culture we got going on right now across CFB after the regular season is over. And I get it, if I was 10 years younger and had a shot to make $ in college playing football I would appreciate being compensated. But man is it nauseating having to worry about if like an average offensive lineman gets “taken care of” out of the fear he might go somewhere else and leave. Was that really what NIL was intended to be? Makes me feel hollow. The beauty of college sports was to see a kid commit to the school you attended or root for and watch him grow into a good player and representative of the university by the time he graduates. With the thought being if your football team did this consistently enough it could keep attracting more talent and with some luck you could compete for a conference and maybe a national championship. And now that all seems lost or will be lost in a few years for the majority of schools.
And that just sucks man. Things right now feel more in despair than even 2 years ago. We went from college football being a cesspool to Chernobyl in that time span. So I just wanted to get these thoughts out there in case anyone else was feeling the same way.
But hey, at least we’ll always have 2021. A team that was the direct result of a built culture, featured 3 first round draft picks, and a bunch of guys I would consider to be great Pitt representatives.
H2P
