They can't make college football suck

A mantra for a sport that keeps changing—but keeps making magic.

There’s a seeping sense among college football fans that the thing we love is being ruined. There is an unceasing barrage of changes, large and small, to college football, and most seem to benefit nobody but the bottom line. The sport is rudderless—or worse, intentionally guided by people who don’t seem to know or care why so many of us specifically love college football when we know we could watch the pro version of this sport on our TV every Sunday.

Teams are constantly changing conferences, ditching opponents they’ve played since before we were born, because organically formed conferences were not ideal for maximizing television revenue. The sport’s championship format has changed to include more teams, because more football means more opportunities to maximize television revenue. The rules about which players are eligible and how teams can build rosters have changed, because the old rules violated basic employment law. (I bet you thought it’d be television revenue again. Surprise!)

But watching college football this year, week after week—especially this past weekend, the grand regular season finale called rivalry week—one mantra has repeatedly crossed my mind:

They can’t make this suck.

There was a sudden outburst on Saturday of post-game brawls sparked by victorious players planting flags in the midfield logos of their rivals’ fields. (Technically, in Arizona State’s case, it was the Sun Devil mascot’s pitchfork, but spiritually, we’re counting it as a flag.) Although flag-planting has happened before, it happened repeatedly Saturday, in game after game, from coast to coast.

The flag plantings and the instabrawls they sparked were not copycats. They couldn’t have been. All the teams involved were playing football rather than sitting at home and watching the other flag-plantings on TV. They were driven not by imitation, but by the instinctual hate which lives deep inside all college football players. These were spawning salmon genetically programmed to swim up Asshole Creek as soon as they had a chance to make their biggest rival mad.

The most prominent flag planting was in Ohio State-Michigan:

Normally, either Ohio State or Michigan needs to win that game to stay in the national championship hunt, but that wasn’t the case Saturday. Michigan was already eliminated, and Ohio State entered with a 10-1 record, good enough to secure a playoff spot win or lose. They chose the “lose” option.

The fact that Ohio State lost as 23-point favorites to their biggest rival and still has a chance to win the national championship feels like the ultimate example of how a big picture change to college football had a huge negative impact on a thing we all care about. Games like Ohio State-Michigan should mean everything. A loss that bad should kill Ohio State’s season dead. But because of the new format, the Buckeyes will bounce off the Michigan speed bump and roll into the playoffs with bruised egos but a perfectly good shot at winning the national title.

But we learned Saturday that no matter what, you can’t strip the meaning from Michigan beating Ohio State. All players involved were clearly aware and terrified of stakes that the rankings would tell you didn’t exist, and spent 60 minutes playing nervy brainfart football. Then the game ended, the flag hit the artificial turf and everybody went feral.

Michigan’s team went home to Ann Arbor and got a standing ovation at a hockey game. The Victors Valiant! The Conquering Heroes! Nobody gave a crap that they were not, in fact, the Champions of the West. They made Ohio State sad, which is just as good.

Ohio State fans, whose team remains very much in line to win a national championship, were apoplectic with rage. (Sort of the resting Ohio State emotion, but trust me, they were more apoplectic than usual this time.) They’re googling things like “Ryan Day buyout” and “do you still have to pay a dead coach’s contract” and “hitman cost” and “hitman cost vs. Ryan Day buyout.”

It didn’t matter that this game didn’t matter as much as it should. They Can’t Make Ohio State-Michigan Suck.

They’ll try to make it worse. And they’ll succeed sometimes.

The biggest matchup of this weekend was Texas-Texas A&M, a bitter rivalry that was abandoned for 13 years over a mix of pride and greed. Long story short, Texas started its own TV network in hopes of making way more money than any other school, A&M left the Big 12 to prove they didn’t care and make some solid SEC money of their own. They could’ve kept playing each other anyway, but both schools insisted on a decade-long “no we don’t care about YOU” standoff which even 8-year olds would agree was unnecessarily stubborn and petty.

This all benefitted nobody in particular. We missed out on a decade of a great rivalry and it was all for nothing. They wound up in the same conference anyway. And Texas’ actions led to the de-regionalization of two leagues, the not-so-Southeastern SEC and the 3-time zone Big 12. A lot was lost here.

But Saturday, it was found again. The game in College Station was loud and it was brutal. 100,000 Aggies paid monthly rent prices for tickets, and left with empty wallets and souls. You built this hell for yourselves!

It’s still stupid these teams went so long without playing each other. The people who made that happen were so intent on chasing cash that they missed out on the easiest cash of all–having two ridiculously popular teams that hate each other play a big football game against each other.

They separated these two teams, then put them in a too-big conference where they don’t quite belong. Throw in a big new playoff format and a bunch of inexplicable tiebreakers… and somehow, it ends with Texas and A&M playing with their season on the line. They killed this game for a decade. But they can’t make it suck.

This season was filled with dumb things with silver linings.

A lot of changes supposedly made this season worse. Some made it better, probably by accident. Some pretty clearly made this season worse. But still: Look at what we got.

The Pac-12 died. It led to BYU and Utah joining the same league and playing a Holy War for the ages, another rivalry brought back to life.

Conferences accidentally eliminated divisions at the exact moment they became big enough that they clearly required divisions. The leagues themselves themselves were unsure who would be playing in their championship games, and teams wound up getting eliminated on weird tiebreakers. It all clearly would’ve been easier if leagues had divisions which played a round-robin, resulting in one obvious champion. But overall? A lot more games mattered than usual, and the end result will be a lot of championship games between good teams. Not bad!

I already complained that the playoff excuses too many big losses. I’m not sure I’ll ever get over the idea that a team can recover from a really bad loss like Notre Dame losing to Northern Illinois, or what Ohio State did Saturday. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t have a great time living in a world where programs like Indiana, Army, and Colorado had legitimate playoff hopes. I’m actually a pretty big 12-team playoff stan at this point.

At some point, college football agreed upon a ridiculous overtime format that randomly makes 44 football players repeatedly walk the length of the field every two plays. Nobody rational would invent this. AND IT CREATED AN INSTANT CLASSIC.

So I’m repeating my new mantra.

I am not telling you that you must be optimistic about the state of college football, or to blindly support for every new development in the sport. The people in charge have made it quite clear they don’t care about our preferences. They don’t need me and you as cheerleaders.

Trust me. I’m nervous about the future of this sport. If you’re not familiar with my whole thing here, I quit my job last year so I could go around the country going to college football games. It felt particularly urgent to go now, like a safari to see an endangered species. I wanted to see the thing I fell in love with before it disappeared.

My former coworkers Ryan Nanni and Steven Godfrey recently put together a podcast series called Who Killed College Football?, which leads with the general premise that even though college football is bigger, richer, and more popular than ever, it has been metaphorically murdered. Their short list of suspects is available on Substack here:

But after this spectacular season accidentally assembled by idiots, I believe in something. It’s not causeless hope that the sport is headed in the right direction, or that every school will be just fine.

I just know that They Can’t Make This Suck. We get to decide what matters.

They’re gonna try to strip college football and rebuild it to make as much money as possible. But when the demo crews get all the way down to the foundation, they’re going to find the load-bearing love and hate that college football was built on. It’s strong enough to ensure that rivalry games which don’t matter still matter, and strong enough to bring special matchups that died back to life.

I don’t know where this college football is headed. But I know they can’t make this suck.