What percentage of NFL athletes would you say are criminals?
30?
40?
80 percent?!
Granted these dog-fighting, vehicular-manslaughtering, VH1-reality-show-personality-dating-and-subsequently-beating icons didn’t develop this bad behavior over night, but I don’t remember any pit bulls coming up missing when Mike Vick was at Virginia Tech.
In all seriousness though, Vick was probably KOing K-9s long before VT was even an option.
But heck, if nothing else, at least college football does a better job of masking its problem children.
The truth is, comparing college football to the professional ranks is no tougher than estimating the number of games until newly-anointed starter Vince Young mentally breaks his way out of Tennessee.
What do you have invested in your favorite pro football team?
Is it the $3,000 season ticket package you bought for those eight home games?
Is it the Capital One credit card you boast, where the only thing bigger than you teams’ logo is the plan’s interest rate?
Or did you simply purchase the Gold Rush’s swimsuit calendar for the low, low price of $39.99?
Now what about your alma mater?
Never mind the twenty grand or so that you, your parents, or a combination of the two spent for four, sometimes five, years.
Collegiate loyalty can never be measured in dollars.
The ups and downs of college life—midterms, parties, late nights with the homies, broken and re-built relationships—everything you were about for four years was spurred on by the city, the campus, the institution that lured you in with the promise of education but provided you with so much more.
Your blood, sweat, tears and perhaps other bodily discharges that somehow found their way elsewhere on a Friday night, have all gone into creating this college era in your life; an era heavily influenced by what YOUR team did on Saturday.
I emphasize YOUR because it’s just that.
Being a student or an alum gives you ownership—you’ve been through the rites of passage and as a reward, you get to live and die by (Cal) athletics.
What possession does the NFL provide?
In recent days, owners of the Cleveland Browns and Washington Redskins (the fact that that is still the name of an NFL team almost makes my argument for me) have approached fans about bettering their disasters of franchises.
But allow me to impart some wisdom on the topic: Neither Randy Lerner, Dan Snyder, or any other member of management on any of the 32 professional teams gives a lick about you, the fan (insert joke about BLACKOUTS here).
Because hard-working fans can’t afford their tickets, NFL franchises have taken away their right to BBQ in front of a TV screen on Sunday afternoon…how’s that for loyalty?
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DC for the NFL
In the movie "Office Space" Peter explains in his evaluation to the Bob's that he has eight different bosses. And when he makes a mistake, he's got eight different people coming by to tell him about it. His real motivation is not to get hassled as he sums up, "But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough to get fired."
College Football almost functions in the same way. You see in college football there are four polls that determine who the best teams are, and eventually a national champion. You have the AP Writers poll, the USA Today/ESPN Coaches Poll, the Harris Poll and the most controversial poll, the BCS. The BCS has completely taken over the college football landscape and turned each Saturday into a political nightmare. If a team loses 1 game, then it has 4 polls (including 1 computer) essentially “coming by to tell them about it.” Lose 2 games and you are completely out of the national championship picture, which leads to this:
There are 119 FBS schools in the country. There are six “major” conferences (i.e. Pac-10, Big 12, ACC, Big 10, Big East and SEC) that already have a pre-determined best chance of playing for a national title. Right now there are two teams that are still undefeated (TCU and Boise State) that are in the “mid-major” conferences (Mountain West and WAC, respectively). Yet their undefeated records don’t matter in the eyes of the voters and computers because of their schedules and conference they are affiliated with. How is this fair? Even more convoluted is the process of how a team in a “major” conference gets preferential treatment, even with one loss. Take for example over a month ago when Oklahoma, of the Big 12, lost its opening game of the season to BYU. The Sooners fell out of the top-10 before winning its next two games over Idaho State and Tulsa to move to 2-1. Suddenly Oklahoma was back in the national picture and had a road date with Miami. Now Miami at the time was 2-1 and had wins over two ranked teams. Had Oklahoma beaten Miami, the computers would have said, 1-loss Oklahoma is better than say undefeated TCU because it beat a team, Miami, which had two wins over ranked opponents. Explain how 1-loss is better than undefeated?
The first visible sign I can remember of the dirty politics in college football was in 2004 involving Texas head coach Mack Brown who pleaded on national television that his one-loss Longhorns deserve to go to the Rose Bowl over a one-loss Cal team that had smacked around opponents all season long. The pollsters listened and Texas played in the Rose Bowl, while Cal was subjected to the Holiday Bowl.
The politics and posturing of college coaches in football makes it so unbearable to watch, unlike the NFL.
Let’s further this debate with simple numbers, because as we know, numbers don’t lie. In his much highly anticipated return to Lambeau Field last Sunday, Brett Favre led the Minnesota Vikings to a thrilling win over his former team, the Green Bay Packers. Days later, television ratings reported that Vikings-Packers game was the most-watched show since the Academy Awards with 29.8 million viewers. Compare that to last Saturday’s key USC-Oregon match-up for Pac-10 supremacy. Television ratings reported 3.5 million viewers. This was a game with huge national title implications with two highly ranked teams (both in the top-10 at the start of the game), and it drew 26 million fewer viewers.
The NFL matters more because it has more identifiable players, there are no politics involved when it comes to determine who the best team is on Sunday’s. There is no need for a computer to determine who plays in the Super Bowl. Playoffs determine that. Take for example the Arizona Cardinals last season. Limping into the playoffs with a 9-7 record, no one gave them a chance to win one playoff game. Yet the Cardinals shocked the world and made it to the Super Bowl and even held a lead late with 2 minutes left giving the country a thrilling finish. Seven losses, yet they still reached the Super Bowl because they were better on that particular day in the playoffs.
Computers and politics need not apply.
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