Three Reasons College Football is Simply the Best

I joined Twitter in March 2011, right as Major League Baseball was getting started, and largely because of this (at least this is my theory), I immediately became accustomed to tweeting a lot about baseball.  And thus a lot of my followers are primarily baseball fans.  And baseball is fine.  So is the NBA.  So is the NFL.  And so on.  But college football is, quite simply, the best.

A lot of people don't really give a shit about college football, but ever since I was eight years old, it has fascinated me.  The stereotypical (white) sports fan loses his mind over college basketball, which I like, but in the end, if given the choice between watching the national championship game or a NBA Finals Game 7, there's no dispute.  Even in the regular season, if my choice is watch Indiana/North Carolina or watch Lakers/Heat, I'm choosing the latter.  But college football is different--when Alabama plays at LSU next week, you could not in a million years pull me away from my television.  And here's a short list of the reasons why college football is the best.

1. Every game matters: In the NFL, you can lose six out of sixteen games and still have a reasonably good shot of winning the Super Bowl.  In baseball, the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals lost SEVENTY-EIGHT games and won the World Series--it is indisputable that one single regular season game isn't going to make or break you unless you've played with a mediocre streak for 150 some-odd games before that.  College football is different.  There has been one national champion, in the history of national champions, who had multiple losses.  Until last year's Alabama team, no team had lost its conference and won the national title.  Ever.  The individual game matters.  In 2005, Texas and Ohio State were both considered national title contenders and in the first half of September, they played a regular season game.  In college hoops, this happens all the time with tournaments, but unless a major conference team loses another twelve games, it won't dramatically hurt their overall success.  When Vince Young finished dissecting the TOSU defense, it was a dramatic blow to the Buckeyes.  In one game.  In September.  It's physically impossible to get that worked up about an NFL game.

2. Eclectic styles of play: In the end, basically every NFL team has the same style of play.  Some run marginally more or whatever, but have you ever seen an NFL team that effectively abandoned the run or the pass (in the last fifty years)?  There's an ideal strategy to offensive success in football (balanced run and pass, play-action to keep defense off-balance, etc), and since all the NFL teams essentially have equal access to build around that strategy, they do.  College football is different, though--it's like Moneyball.  Teams look for a differentiated factor, recruit guys who fit that mold, and they often achieve success.  Look, for instance, at Navy, a football program that doesn't recruit.  The offense they run is a throwback, a triple-option attack reminiscent of Nebraska's attack from the 80s and 90s.  Nebraska would recruit guys to run a style which didn't generally sell them to the NFL because the team would win, but then when the team began to falter, they opted for a more pro-style attack.  And on the opposite end of the spectrum, Texas Tech, Hawaii, and several other schools effectively abandoned the run and just throw it constantly.  But it allows things like Michael Crabtree going to Texas Tech happening--you play a certain style and then players at those key positions gravitate towards the school.  It's a never-ending process.  It's not a matter of watching a bunch of clones of each other.  The divide isn't what it once was--I envy people who grew up watching in the 70s who got to see USC airing it out, Oklahoma running the wishbone, and both teams achieving success by doing whatever they did well.  But it's still unlike any other sport.  It's like watching a team from the Dead Ball Era play against a modern swing-for-the-fences baseball team--it's about execution more than scheming.

3. Different Goals: In some ways, this is the benefit of the bowl system.  If you're an NFL team, whether you root for the Steelers or the Browns, you essentially have the same goal--win the Super Bowl.  If you're a Browns exec who sets his sights on an 8-8 record, you get run out of town.  Even in college basketball, the coach of Rider will always have some pressure to win it all, because he can.  But in college football, more than any other sport, realism prevails.  For instance, my good team of choice growing up was the Miami Hurricanes.  With Miami, especially back in the early 2000s, you expected to win a national title every year. Winning the Big East was a formality.  My earnest favorite team was Missouri--bowl eligibility was considered an amazing fear during the Kirk Farmer era.  And then, when Brad Smith and Chase Daniel happened, they upped the ante.  And in 2007, when the #1 ranked Missouri Tigers lost to Oklahoma in the Big 12 championship and were relegated out of the national championship picture, while many bandwagoners bemoaned it, all I could think was "Holy fucking shit, MIZZOU was the #1 team in the country."  It had to be the equivalent of being a German kid who saw the Beatles play in Hamburg and seeing them become the biggest musical act in the world.  And then in college, I went to Truman State, which quite frankly blows at football.  And Division II at that.  So when Truman got off to a hot start this year, it was exciting.  It was thrilling.  Getting excited about the first few games in most sports is unacceptable, but in college football, it's the name of the game.