It happens every August. The spreadsheet jockeys who have never put a hand in the dirt release their college football previews. This year, the eggheads have identified Florida and Michigan as wild card teams, warning readers that these prestigious programs possess terrifyingly high ceilings and catastrophically low floors.
The tone of these reports is one of grave concern. We are supposed to wring our hands because the Wolverines might win the Big Ten or they might lose to Central Michigan by three touchdowns. We are supposed to view the Gators’ potential to either upset Georgia or surrender fifty points to Toledo as a structural flaw. To which I say: when did we get so soft?
I will never apologize for preferring a football team that has absolutely no idea if it is any good. This league has a problem, and that problem is the relentless, suffocating demand for baseline competence. The modern fan wants to know that their team will show up, execute a game plan, and secure a predictable victory over an inferior opponent. It is disgusting. It is the death of romance.
Back in my day, a head coach didn’t look at a tablet to find out if his starting quarterback was going to have a panic attack in the third quarter. He used the eye test. He looked into a nineteen-year-old’s eyes during warmups and said, this kid is either going to throw for four hundred yards or punt the ball into his own offensive line, and then he lived with the consequences like a man.
Florida’s current roster is a masterpiece of structural instability. They have thirteen five-star recruits who have never spoken to one another, a defensive coordinator who communicates entirely through motivational riddles, and a quarterback room embroiled in a bitter dispute over a regional car dealership’s promotional money. The analytics department looks at this and sees a four-win season. I look at it and see intangibles.
You cannot quantify the sheer, unbridled terror of a defense that fundamentally misunderstands the concept of zone coverage but runs a blistering forty-yard dash. That is a unit capable of pitching a shutout against a top-five opponent purely by accident. When a Florida linebacker blitzes the wrong gap, trips over the umpire, and accidentally intercepts a screen pass with his facemask, you can’t chart that as expected points added. That is the divine right of a wild card team.
If I wanted to watch a group of young men execute a flawless, predictable routine with no risk of sudden, humiliating failure, I’d go to the ballet.
Michigan offers a similarly beautiful disaster. We are talking about a program that recently won a national title and is now, according to the metrics, just as likely to miss a bowl game entirely. The front office in Ann Arbor has allegedly tried to fix this by bringing in consultants to establish a reliable baseline of performance. Fortunately, the players have resisted this cowardly push for mediocrity by simply refusing to learn the snap count.
I had lunch with a prominent SEC athletic director last week, and he confessed that his biggest fear isn’t playing a consistent powerhouse like Ohio State. His biggest fear is playing a team like Michigan that has absolutely nothing to lose because they do not even know what they are trying to do. A consistent team can be scouted. A team that routinely forgets to field a punt returner is a tactical nightmare.
We have allowed the fantasy football mentality to ruin the collegiate game. Fans want guaranteed returns on their emotional investment. They want their highly paid collegiate free agents to deliver a reliable thirty points every Saturday. But they fail to realize that true character is only forged in the crucible of a completely inexplicable home loss to a directional Michigan school.
When you lose to a non-conference opponent by twenty-five points on a Tuesday night because your entire offensive line got food poisoning at a local seafood buffet, you learn something about yourself. You learn who is willing to get back up, dust themselves off, and boldly throw a pick-six the very next week. You do not get that from a flawless, undefeated season. An undefeated season teaches you nothing except hubris.
We are told that the modern collegiate athlete, flush with cash and brand deals, requires a stable environment to thrive. I recently listened to a twenty-minute diatribe on satellite radio from a so-called expert arguing that erratic quarterback play was damaging the players’ personal marketability. What a profound misunderstanding of the American consumer. Do you know what drives engagement? A highly paid junior throwing the ball directly into the chest of a stunned opposing nose tackle. That is viral content. That is the kind of unpredictable grit you cannot manufacture in a boardroom.
Look at the boosters who fund these programs. These are men of industry. They did not build their regional plumbing empires by demanding safe, incremental, five-percent annual growth. They built them by taking wild, uncalculated swings. If a booster writes a two-million-dollar check, he doesn’t want a polite, nine-win season that ends in a meaningless bowl game. He wants to beat his rival by fifty points, or he wants the head coach tarmac-fired by Halloween. There is no nobility in the middle ground.
We don’t recruit guys who are going to give you a solid B-plus every week. We recruit guys who are either going to the first round of the draft or going to quit football to become crypto day-traders, and we let God sort out the Saturdays.
I was at a postgame presser last November where a tearful head coach had to explain how his top-ranked squad gave up four unanswered touchdowns to a team consisting mostly of future insurance salesmen. That is the drama that built this sport. If we eliminate the floor, if we raise the baseline so that every power-conference team is guaranteed to play competent, mistake-free football, we rob ourselves of the majestic comedy of a fumbled kneel-down.
The media will continue to publish their little charts and graphs. They will continue to penalize Florida and Michigan in the preseason polls for their wide range of outcomes. They will praise the boring, soulless machines that march down the field in three-yard increments, never risking a sixty-yard bomb into triple coverage just to see what happens.
Let them have their consistency. Let them have their safe, predictable Saturdays. I will be sitting on my couch, a glass of bourbon in hand, watching a quarterback try to hurdle a defensive tackle on fourth-and-eighteen from his own end zone.
He might make it. He might fumble the ball out of bounds for a safety, tear his ACL, and lose his endorsement deal with a local air conditioning repair company. I have no idea which it will be, and neither does he. And that is why it is the greatest game on earth.