College Gameday is starting the 2023 season at a football game
between South Carolina and North Carolina. Seriously.
Last year, the college football season had a huge, signature
game with Notre Dame at Ohio State as the headliner. Now that’s where College
Gameday should be to start the season – on campus for a Top 10 game. That game
capped a solid slate of Saturday games that included Utah at Florida,
Cincinnati at Arkansas and Oregon vs Georgia. It wasn’t the greatest opening
weekend ever, but it was sufficiently exciting.
This year? Good luck trying to find a game worthy of
interest.
New Mexico at Texas A&M is the primetime ESPN game.
UMass at Auburn is the afternoon ESPN game. Yes, as in ESPN the main cable
network.
Colorado at TCU is the noon game on Fox, an impending
blowout hyped by Deion Sanders. That leads right into a thrilling Rice/Texas
game. Yes, Rice is playing Texas on broadcast television and, no, it’s not
1955.
CBS is airing Texas Tech at Wyoming in primetime. What?
NBC has the only other decent game with West Virginia
traveling to Penn State.
What in the name of the BCS is going on here?
When the four-team playoff debuted in 2014, we were fed a
pile of lies that non-conference schedules would improve because teams needed schedule
strength to make the playoff. Welp, that was not true.
Schedules have somehow gotten even worse from the BCS era.
In the BCS era, the best teams – think Miami or USC or Oklahoma – would play
tough non-conference games to ensure an undefeated season would end up with a
title game. Who could forget USC starting their 2003 title season by going to Jordan-Hare
and stuffing Auburn in a dumpster? Add to that the best non-BCS teams like
Boise State going anywhere and everywhere with top teams because they needed to
win big games in September.
This year? We have conferences re-arranging schedules in a
desperate attempt to provide some quality games, and we still end up with junk
like Ohio State at Indiana on week 1. Really, Big Ten? That was the best you
could do for Ohio State to kick off a billion dollar tv contract?
The trend mirrors the larger issues around college football,
which have been in full effect since the playoff started and only accelerated during the pandemic. Absolutely no one in charge cares about the fans, or the
players, or the sport. The only thing that matters is the money.
There’s a reason week 1 sucks so bad from a scheduling standpoint
and it’s because there’s too much easy money to be made for big schools playing
cupcakes to start the season. Could Auburn play a real team like USC to start
the season? Of course. But isn’t it easier to schedule UMass, get an easy win,
and still get showcased by ESPN?
Texas A&M is staring the season with a nothing game vs
New Mexico and it will be seen nationwide on ESPN. No, they couldn’t possibly
play Texas in the non-conference for the past decade, because their current
schedule is oh so difficult.
With the 12-team playoff looming and more conference
consolidation on the horizon, the inter-sectional games that defined the sport
of college football for its first century are about to be extinct. There’s no
room for Michigan vs Florida State in September like there was 30 years ago,
because Michigan needs those non-conference games against…. East Carolina,
UNLV, and Bowling Green.
It’s a joke. It’s only going to get worse. Will anything
change? As long as the tickets keep getting sold and tv keeps paying to air the
games, no, nothing will change.
And when ticket sales continue their inevitable decline, no
one in charge at Michigan or elsewhere will blame the schedules. No, it’s
smartphones, or Netflix, or whatever excuse helps them avoid the mirror.
Week 1 is a bummer this year.
Let’s hope the sport of college football is strong enough to overcome. It almost always is.
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