Every year, college football makes us very angry.
“Us” refers to everyone who participates in the rollercoaster of emotions that is a college football season — the fans who get upset at pundits, the writers who can’t stand how the playoff system works (or fails to work), the coaches who can’t stand referees, and the players who can’t stand losing.
This sport is — certainly in its lived reality, if not in its inherent nature — chaotic. One season’s collective scenario might bring about certain reforms, only for the next season to offer a completely different scenario which cuts against those reforms or exposes new loopholes or limitations. College football is a troll god unto itself. Baseball has the capacity to leave its fans and observers dumbfounded. College football’s signature characteristic is its ability to infuriate everyone in the room.
What follows, then, is not an attempt to guarantee success. More precisely, what is said below is not articulated with any real expectation that fans across the country are going to respond (properly) to it. Expecting a nation of college football fans to suddenly become cerebral, mindful of the big picture (in other words, aware of considerations beyond the ones which affect their favorite team or conference), and levelheaded is the ultimate fool’s errand. Be assured that I carry no expectations at all into this list of the five foremost reminders college football fans need at the start of every season:
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5 – SEPTEMBER HEISMAN CANDIDACIES: DON’T TOUT THEM!
Remember when the likes of Taylor Martinez and Denard Robinson were put forth as leading Heisman contenders, as a result of blowing through weak non-conference lineups and putting up ridiculous stats before their conference seasons had even begun? Such instances represent the Heisman silly season at its worst. Much like the race for the College Football Playoff, the Heisman doesn’t deserve particularly serious consideration until the first weekend of November at the earliest. Only when a couple of months have been played can we gain a real feel for the strength of various teams. Accordingly, it’s not until the calendar turns to November that we can gauge the quality of a Heisman candidate’s opponents… and his own teammates.
September Heisman comparisons? Keep them in your mind. Public declarations? They’re never a good look.
4 – BEING A BOWL TEAM AND BEING A GOOD TEAM AREN’T AUTOMATICALLY THE SAME
The reality of college football is that if you play in a Power 5 conference and don’t challenge yourself in the non-conference portion of your schedule, you can gobble up three or four easy wins; go 3-5 in your league; and make a bowl. What does that prove, if anything, about how good you are?
A total of 12 teams made bowls last year despite having a losing record in conference games. Several other teams made a bowl after going 4-4 in their conference during the season. This leads to an attached reminder: Touting the number of bowl teams in a conference is rarely if ever an effective argument to make in terms of conference strength. Depth? Maybe. Strength? No.
3 – WINNING NINE GAMES DOESN’T MEAN WHAT IT USED TO
The above reality in item No. 4 — being able to win four games out of conference against meager opposition — makes the path to nine wins very attainable. Just go 5-3 in an eight-game conference scheudule or 6-3 in a nine-gamer, and you’re there. Now that there are 12 games in a regular season instead of 11, and now that conference championship games represent 13th contests before the bowls, nine wins become ever more hollow for a lot of programs. Nebraska going 9-4 under Bo Pelini was and is the perfect example of how the nine-win plateau just doesn’t carry the status or weight it used to in this sport. Even 10-2 Michigan State needed to beat Baylor in the Cotton Bowl in order to stamp its season as a success. The Spartans’ 2014 regular season schedule (aside from Oregon and Ohio State) wasn’t particularly intimidating.
2 – THE WEEK ONE OVERREACTION: GUARD AGAINST IT
This is something in which I am as guilty as anyone else, if not more so. I wrote this piece after Texas A&M’s dismantling of South Carolina in the 2014 season opener. I jumped to a far-reaching conclusion instead of allowing the season to play out. I allowed one night, when nerves are fragile and many teams aren’t settled into the rhythms of a season, to affect my long-term assessment of a situation. I succumbed to the Kenny Trill effect.
Don’t do what I did last year. Allow week one to sit there and develop into week two and week three before pronouncing certain teams as being great or awful.
Which reminds me:
1 – COLLEGE FOOTBALL TEAMS GO THROUGH IN-SEASON CYCLES, AND WHAT HAPPENS IN SEPTEMBER OFTEN DOESN’T LAST
The Ohio State Buckeyes didn’t look very good in their first few games of the 2014 season. They got whipped by Virginia Tech at home.
Things turned out more than okay for the Buckeyes. In marked contrast, things didn’t turn out very well at all for the Hokies.
September is its own creature; national champions don’t thrive in this month so much as they survive it. Don’t look for style points, and don’t lose touch with the reality that teams either develop or regress over the course of the season. A classic example of regression last year? Notre Dame, which was strong for two months but then lost the plot in November.
Allow seasons to run their course… at least until certain teams lose twice in September, which truly does knock them to the canvas in terms of College Football Playoff ability. Then you can pounce on them and make a far-reaching assessment of how nasty the rest of the season is going to be (and even then, you might run into a 2011 Georgia, which starts 0-2 and then wins 10 straight to make the SEC Championship Game).
These are your reminders at the beginning of another college football season. Ignore them at your peril.