But its funny when those little schools score an upset with the big ones. For example this year South Dakota beat KU.
Someone beating Kansas is an upset? Who knew?
For spectacle and passion, there is nothing that beats a college game, late in the season when everything is on the line between two bitter ‘neighborhood rivals’ (ie Michigan vs Michigan State) and every young man on that field is playing at the utmost limit of his skill and abilities. The crowd is on its feet for the entire fourth quarter, the game is close, and it will take something special to pull out the win for either side. That’s a little piece of sports nirvana.
But an NFL game can be amazing in another way. You are dealing with professionals, who by and large are not leaving their everything on the field, but they are the cream of the crop athletes, at the peak of their playing ability and game knowledge, led by (hopefully) a masterful tactician and strategist (the coach), sending out envelope-pushing, state of the art plays. When it all works right, it’s akin to standing on a hill with the commanding general in the heat of battle as he calls upon all his experience an knowledge to wage a successful battle.
So I find value in both. If I want to study the game, I’ll watch the NFL. If I want to get caught up in the passion, I’ll watch collegiate ball.
Heh. My Spartan brother-in-law uses that line all the time, and I have no doubt Oregon State fans use it against us. Still reminds me of the classic Onion shirt “I appreciate the Muppets on a much deeper level than you do”.
I can’t see how you can call college football the heart and soul of the game.
If you want to say the heart and soul is where the game is being played at its best, then you have to go to the NFL. College football teams are not as good as NFL teams.
If you want to say that the heart and soul of the game is not about being the best but about some spiritual value like teams playing for the love of the game, then I’d tell you to go watch high school football. College football is a multi-billion dollar commercial business - it’s minor-league professional football - so pretending it’s a “pure” sport is ridiculous.
Those of us advocating for college football aren’t at all denying that in some ways (athleticism, skill, etc…) pro football is better. It would be absurd to say so.
What we’re saying is that the game is more than the sum of its parts- the actual play on the field is one (albeit large) part of the equation. And college has more parts of that equation- colleges have marching bands, real rivalries, absurdly dedicated fans who are more connected to their teams than merely buying a t-shirt, yells, chants, traditions that span a century or more, weird school specific oddities, etc… Stuff that transcends college football having become a large business in the past several decades. College football is passionate and soulful in a way that pro football can’t even dream of. 99% of those guys are playing because they want to play, and realized from the get-go that they’re unlikely to even make a combine, much less play in the NFL. Yet they put in the hours in-season and off, to play for *their *school.
Pro football, on the other hand, has ALWAYS been a commercial enterprise. Everything about is… commercialized and pored over by marketing wonks and merchandising people. Their whole goal is to fill seats and sell merchandise… to anyone who’ll buy. Colleges have that goal to some degree, but in large part they’re funded by rich alumni who don’t get a damn thing out of it other than pride in their alma mater. NFL teams are pretty much funded by themselves and the league, and the players are playing for that team because they pay the most, or because they can’t get out of their contract for one reason or another.
I agree that high school football is probably the real heart and soul of the sport, much like the way that pond hockey is probably the heart and soul of hockey, and games like in “The Sandlot” are probably the heart and soul of baseball. But the OP was basically to choose between college and pro football for that title, and of those two, college wins hands down in my book, even if the on-field play is better in the pros.
Spot on.
You’ve made several great posts. You get it. NFL guy never will.
Go Blue.
As an aussie with more than a passing interest in NFL (lo-o-ong before Jarryd Hayne), I just don’t understand one part in particular of College Football.
The Championship. How can you have a (multi-multi-million dollar) sport, which has a scoreboard for every game, with the result in Black and White - yet the teams that make it to the championship round are decided by subjective judgement. It puts it at the same level as Ice Dancing, Synchronised swimming or Ballroom.
Obviously, the individual games are great. Just stick to those, play your local rivals, have the parades etc - but if you cant organise a playoff system that doesn’t involve subjective judgement, just don’t bother.
I understand the point. But to me college football has most of the commercialization of the NFL but without the high play level to compensate. And I have to feel that the NFL is at least more honest with its commercialism - they admit they’re a business and the players get to participate in the financial rewards.
As for fanbases, I think that comes down to geography. I live on the west side of Rochester and I’m a Buffalo Bills fan. Maybe if I lived on the east side of Rochester, I’d be a Syracuse Orange fan. Let’s face facts, very few fans have any rational reason for why they feel an emotional connection to a team that has no real connection to their life. It’s invented tribalism.
Plus, as a bonus, your shirt you wear for a football game is also the same one you wear for a schools basketball game or any other sport.
Would a person wear say a New York Jets shirt to a New York Knicks game or to a New York Yankees game?
It was even worse when it was a subjective choice for the top 2 candidates instead of the top 4.
Part of the issue is the sheer size of college football. With 121 teams and 12 games, all teams can’t play each other. So which is the better team, the team that went 11-1 against a bunch of cupcakes (and who gets to define cupcake?) or the team that went 10-2 against nothing but top 10 ranked teams (of course the rankings are subjective as well). Not to mention the Division 2 and 3 teams that have their own championship.
I have long thought that college football should reorganize itself - Split Div 1 into “Elite conferences” - 4 conferences of 16 colleges - and “Tier 2” - the rest of Div 1. Allow 4 schools that are champs from Tier 2 to move into the elite conferences, and the 4 schools with the worst records in Elite have to move down. (Before people complain about how this will destroy scheduling, this is what soccer leagues in England do every year and they make it work, so it can work here too). Each conference of 16 has 2 divisions - each team plays all 7 of their division mates, 3 games against conference mates not in their division, and 2 games against other conferences to allow for rivalry games. Division champs by record (8 of them) play for conference championships. The 4 conference champs have a playoff for the title. There, no subjective decision on who’s the best, it’s just a win-loss record and an 8 team playoff.
Of course, that idea makes sense, so it will never happen.
That idea would also obliterate the traditions that have built up for generations regarding conference affiliations. Obviously they’ve shifted over the years, but any plan that requires, say, Ohio State and Michigan or Alabama and Auburn to be in different conferences would ruin what makes college football so special.
yellowjacket, the idea makes sense for professional football, but not really for college. College players are there for four years at most, so rosters are in a constant state of flux. A team that plays well enough to achieve promotion one year will likely see all of its best players leave for the NFL and be awful the next year.
Take my school (UCF) as an example. In 2013, we went 12-1 and won the AAC championship and the Fiesta Bowl. By almost any reasonably metric we would have been promoted from Tier 2 to Tier 1. In 2014, without Blake Bortles, we won the AAC again but went 9-4 overall and lost all but one game against Power 5 teams. In the offseason, we lost another half dozen players to the NFL (for a total of 12 from the 2013 team). This year, we haven’t won a game and probably won’t.
This is just silly. Nobody from Princeton or Rutgers would recognize anything about the modern game, and college football hasn’t really done anything to advance the game since the forward pass in 1906. College football games are basically just background noise for tailgate parties.
That is also just silly. There is far more energy and passion at big time college football games, not just tailgates, than at professional football games.
Obviously we disagree. I don’t think conference affiliations are all that important to colleges outside of the rivalry games. Even then, as the conferences shift (as you point out, they do already) 4 years later everyone has forgotten those “storied conference rivalries” and care about the new rivalries that come with a new conference.
Not to mention that nothing prevents teams from playing each other as non-conference opponents. Florida and FSU have never been in the same conference (in fact, UF blackballed FSU from the 1990 SEC expansion) but their rivalry works just fine.
You may see that as a bonus. But some of us put a new shirt on every day just as part of our regular routine.
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But the game itself is dull. Everyone runs the same offensive and defensive sets for the most part, all the players are pretty much the same skill level, and the league mercilessly cracks down on anything that would let a team or player really set themselves apart by being goofy or what-not.
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This is utterly ass-backwards. First off, you you confuse a specific play – the “read/option,” more properly called a zone read – with an offensive set. Yes, pretty much everyone uses it … just like pretty much every playbook from pop warner on up has a sweep, a dive, an iso, a QB sneak, and other basic plays. They’re good fundamental plays that can integrate with most any system. If you look at, say Baylor, Cal, Ohio State, and Arizona and all you see is “hey, it’s a spread formation that uses zone-read action, so they are all the same,” you’re profoundly wrong; those offenses have commonalities, but they have different governing philosophies and come from differerent traditions.
Even a casual fan that looks at nothing but formations can see more diversity in the college ranks; on offense, you have teams that almost never leave the spread set, teams that use both spread and standard sets; teams that spend most of their time in the Pistol; and teams that run the flexbone. Nowhere near that diversity in the NFL. On defense, everyone in the NFL is either a 3-4 or 4-3 base defense(most are really hybrids of those two); in college, you have 3-3-5 and 4-2-5 base defenses.
In contrast, the NFL, especially before the last few years and especially on offense, has usually been pretty homogenized. Some teams ran a passing game that was 70% Walsh and 30% Coryell, and they got called “west coast offenses,” and other teams ran 30% Walsh and 70% Coryell and they got called “vertical offenses.” Don’t take my word for it:
Heck, just look at playcalling: nobody in the NFL runs the ball as much as Georgia Tech, nobody passes as much as Washington State, and nobody runs package plays as much as Baylor.
None of which is to say that college is better or more interesting or that college coaches are smarter or something. Tastes vary, and there are good, logical reasons why NFL teams work with a smaller palette. But if you think there’s more X-and-Os diversity in the NFL, you’re simply wrong by miles.
My understanding (and I won’t pretend I’m an expert) is that a lot of college plays are designed to exploit weaknesses in the opposing team. And in the NFL, even the bad teams are playing at a level where these weaknesses don’t exist. So NFL coaches have to work with a smaller set of plays that can work even against a skilled opponent.
Some of that is true. But I think a bigger factor is that an NFL team can practice for 40 hours a week and send scouts to every game an opponent plays and can analyze opposing team’s play calling down to the yard. Plus, you play the same teams several times in a season (those in your division).
That doesn’t happen in college. In college player practice time is limited by the NCAA, there’s not the budget or the staff to analyze every opposing team’s last 8 games, etc. So an unusual offensive scheme can catch a lot of opponents off guard simple because they don’t have time to prepare for it. In the NFL anything out of the ordinary will be analyzed down to the move of every player in every down, so a team can prepare for a wacky offense and exploit weaknesses much more effectively.
So you can try something suboptimal but unusual in college and probably get away with it against a lot of teams. Georgia Tech did this with the a heavily option-based offense for several years. This year it’s not working so much because teams that play have had time to prepare for the offense and know it’s counters better.