I like the bowl system. Actually, I liked the system in place before the BCS mandated a national championship game. I preferred the old traditional style where the winners of conferences met in traditional bowl games.

I also like that the college system is different from a straight playoff like in the pros. It gives me two different seasons to follow. It also makes the regular season games that much more compelling, because losing one or two greatly reduces your chances of playing in a meaningful bowl game. So overall, I like the NFL’s playoff system and I like the college football system, but I liked the pre-BCS bowl games better.

I agree that college football teams should schedule more games that are compelling instead of being of the OSU vs Division I-AA variety. I also agree that preseason polls are pretty asinine as well.

This certainly opens up a huge debate that should be had multiple times, from multiple perspectives and angles.

I agree the NFL is systemically superior no doubt. The one thing I might give the edge to college football in is simple entertainment of a single game. It just seems like there’s more incredibly entertaining games each week. I like the journey of the NFL season more, where a loss or two in a a couple of months of the season doesn’t cripple you, but individual games can be great at the college level, mostly because of the lack of defense I guess.

More from me soon on this.

One thing I do enjoy about college football is how they do their overtime. There are probably very legitimate complaints about it that everyone here can inform me of, but I find it much more enjoyable.

we have a fellow ‘Curtainer working on a ‘why college is better post’. I believe it will be more from a simple fan’s enoyment point of view, rather than an analysis of the two game’s systemic makeups, but i think it will be good.

I pretty much agree with everything you said. College football misses out on some real hype with some of these cupcake games. Sports fans want to see more interesting match ups. Like Florida play Notre Dame for example. Not USC playing Colgate.

A fine post with some very good points. However, I have to take issue with much of what has been said b/c it does not adequately address the different animal that is college football from the professional variety (college sports period, really) and it contradicts some of the intuitive conclusions that could be made from the very fine piece you did on scouting a little bit ago.

A big part of the problem with college football is a relative handful of teams and the conferences in which they belong have created a system where they hijacked all the money for themselves and have made it difficult for many teams to compete, and those that manage to do so are frozen out (the Boise States, Fresno States, Appalacian States, etc.) For example, Big Ben came from a MAC school, a conference which has produced a number of competitive teams and high quality pros such as Jack Lambert and Silverback (Kent State), Chad Pennington and Randy Moss (Marshall). Yet that entire conference is out of the running for the national championship before the season begins. Back in the day, Woody Hayes used to stockpile certain players not because he had any use for them, but because he wanted to make certain that the other teams in the Big Ten could not use them against him. Restrictions on maximum scholarships makes that tactic difficult, but there are still any number of practices that make it virtually impossible for the ‘cupcakes’ to compete on a level playing field. And if they are, in fact, cupcakes why not at least level the playing field? For example, if you want to schedule East Jablip Tech make it mandatory that it be a home and home series of two games, and require that the games be scheduled throughout the season, not just in the early weeks before many squads have jelled. One of the reasons that the rich remain rich and the poor remain poor is that quality players who might otherwise give serious consideration to a school may be swayed because the school has zero chance of making it to a major bowl game no matter how well it plays, will not get the tv exposure, etc. Imagine if the NFL were to skew the rules in such a fashion so that a handful of teams, say the Cowboys, Patriots, Packers and Steelers always were in the playoffs, and teams like Jacksonville, Seattle, San Diego and Carolina were never in the running (in other words like MLB). Would that be best for the sport? No, but it would be great for Pittsburgh, Green Bay, Dallas and Boston.

But perhaps most disturbing of all is that most of these athletes are being pimped by the colleges, the networks and the NFL, all of whom make millions off of their efforts. Often no legitimate effort is made to help these young men get the one thing that was promised to them in exchange for their labors, a degree. And everyone wants to organize a lynch party if one of them doesn’t sit in his dorm rooms and quietly starve like a good little boy. I guess that is really what disturbs me about the comparison. Are these ‘student athletes’ or athletic mercenaries? The definitions seem to change depending on the circumstances doesn’t it? If they are student athletes then every effort should be made for them to achieve an academic payoff, including graduate school if they desire. Given the amount of money and publicity they bring the schools that’s the least that shoud be done. If they are just mercenaries then they need to be paid and paid well, period. As someone who has participated a little in the process and has witnessed how the sausage has been made, so to speak, I find myself a bit conflicted about whether the entertainment aspects of the game are being maximized. Perhaps I’ll post something that will speak more extensively to the issue later.