College Football

I have long preferred watching NFL football over college football, but over the past five years or so I have steadily gained interest in the college game as well.

College Football Rankings

There are two topics in college football I find particularly offensive: 1) the presumed ranking of some conferences over others, and 2) the post-season/BCS contest thing.

On the first of these, yes, I'm referring to the SEC. Many people state that the SEC is the best and a team from the SEC will beat teams from the other major conferences (Big 10, Big 12, Pac 10, etc.) without really considering the measurable strength of either team. I'll acknowledge that the SEC is the conference from which several of the best teams of recent history have sprung and that 3 of the current top-10 teams are from the SEC.

My point is that the SEC has not made these teams (Florida, Alabama, and LSU) as strong as they are. Those who proclaim the greatness of the SEC fail to acknowledge the utter horridness of its less noted members -- what about Tennessee, Vanderbilt, and Mississippi State? I'm not going to claim that the other major conferences don't have their bottomfeeders -- they most certainly do -- but that's exactly the point: each conference has its strong teams and its weak teams.

As for the postseason structure...I don't know how it got to be like this. Football is perhaps a more physically demanding sport than basketball. I can understand the argument against a large-scale tournament like NCAA basketball has as it would be very straining on the players if they were to play more often than once weekly and would take forever if they only played once per week.

I am in favor of a smaller tournament, maybe 16 teams -- I could even agree with 32, though this might force the season to run through late January. While I do not feel it's fair to rely on a subjective ranking system to decide which teams get into the tournament, it would at least allow some level of actual competition to let the underdogs get a chance. In my opinion, way too many teams are invited to bowl games -- isn't the postseason supposed to be special?