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ThatDamnedPanda -> RE: NFL Sob (or Brag) Thread (3/10/2009 9:41:41 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: cjan
I prefer the college game because, imho, it is, generally, played with more passion , team work and a sense of FUN. I also agree with what Rain suggested by saying that often a smaller school, less regarded team, beats a national power house because they have more heart, want it more, and may even be better coached. Although it does happen in the pros occasionally, the "on any given Sunday" experiencet is , imo, much more rare.
I also agree that the BCS system is not fair, nor was the previous system which it replaced. Because of the nature of football, a tournament , of course, wouldn't work. And the play-off system used by the pros , including wild card teams, seems to be impractical since the season for student athletes would be prolonged. On second thought...fuck school...let them play !
I'm not that much of a football fan at all anymore, but speaking as someone who used to love the pre-BCS bowl games, the current system is a travesty. In order to squeeze a few more bucks out of the arrangement, they've ruined a lot of the game. I used to absolutely love watching bowl games all day on New year's, because any one of 2 or 3 or sometimes (if we were really lucky) even 4 games had the potential to be the national championship game - and you never knew which one it was going to be until the day was over and you tallied up who won, who lost, and how big. And more importantly, neither did the players, so they played their absolute hearts out on every play. Sure, sometimes you wound up with a split championship, but I never saw that as a bad thing, because it meant that there were two teams who'd played at a such a superlative level it was impossible to agree which one was more spectacular than the other that year.
I also liked the rivalries that stemmed from the automatic bids - for example, every year, it was going to be Michigan, Ohio State, or Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl against the Trojans or the Huskies (often with the national championship on the line), and no matter who was playing who, someone had a score to settle from the last time they met. Every year, it was Nebraska or Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl against Miami, Florida, or Florida State, always with a score to settle and often with a championship at stake. Every year, you knew you were going to see a game. Now, the BCS championship game rotates between the 4 major bowls, so the continuity of the rivalries is disrupted, and 3 years out of 4, the game is meaningless in terms of the championship.
Now, you've got a system where only two teams go into the bowl season with a chance to win the crown, and they don't even play until the week after New Year's Day - and even then, on a Monday night, so the networks can squeeze more advertising dollars out of it. For the casual fan like me, New Year's Day is just a bunch of games that don't mean anything to anyone without a personal connection to the schools. 30 years ago I never would have believed it was possible, but they've actually found a way to make college football boring.
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