CONFESSIONS OF AN EX-U.S. COLLEGE FOOTBALL JUNKIE

(Or, "How Reggie Bush and Vince Young ruined college football.")

Why the lack of posts here about NCAA football? Tongue-in-cheek answer: The Texas-USC epic last January made whatever would follow seem pale by comparison -- it was the Bestest Game Ever, don't you know.

Big-time college football a religion for many Americans, so there's no intent here to demean it. Besides, TV shots of, say, an Arkansas crowd all wearing red or a Michigan crowd all in blue are at once awesome and a little frightening.

It's just that, for this unrepentant sports-loving hick Canuck, U.S. college football is boring beyond belief.

It wasn't always the case. Time was, yours truly watched two, three games each Saturday, although that may have been compensation. (Namely, I had a work schedule that required working Sundays and Mondays and missing the weekly NFL smorgasbord, and there was much less TV coverage devoted to CIS football even a couple years ago.)

What's off-putting about U.S. college ball? Well, here's the Top 10. Heck, in the spirit of a sport that has 11 teams in the Big 10 conference, let's put it up to 11.

1. The same teams pretty much are in the hunt for its counterfeit national championship year after year. Ohio State is No. 1? Yawn. People knock the NFL for its parity, but it's better than the NCAA, which operates as a closed shop, with teams from outside the power conferences having no chance at winning. (No team from outside a big conference has been voted national champion since Brigham Young in 1984, and even then, the pollsters held their noses when they did it.)
   
   Every year, some media-manufactured contender -- like Iowa or West Virginia this fall -- gets thrown into the mix just to sustain the Big Lie.
2. The players don't get paid and they nuke the jocks who try to cash in on their fame. Just ask ex-Oklahoma quarterback Rhett Bomar. Yours truly is generally down on sports events that are Big Business precisely because they profit off free labour.
3. Every team seems to run the same dumbed-down version of the "spread" offence. It was fun to watch that six, seven years ago, when outsider schools like Purdue and Northwestern were using it to make established powerhouses such as Michigan look bad. Now you almost want to see someone bring back the old Oklahoma wishbone.
4. The best teams come from red states and universities whose admission policy amounts to, "If you can fog up a mirror, you're accepted."
5. The announcers unfailingly insult your intelligence. At a time when sports fans are getting more sophisticated, the guys on ABC (oops, ESPN on ABC) usually assume they're talking to a bunch of 10-year-olds.
6. Before the rule changes this year, every game lasted 3½ to 4 hours. The coaches had practically created a 5-quarter game.
7. There are no more Coaching Gods that you set your watch to. Even 15 years ago, there was Tom Osborne at Nebraska, Lou Holtz at Notre Dame or Steve Spurrier at Florida. The only icons left are Bobby Bowden and Joe Paterno, both of whom should have long ago retired.
8. For all the time, effort and money that goes into big-time NCAA football, it's not very well played. Is every game decided on a missed field goal or extra point, or does it just seem this way? Stephen Rodrick tackled this a few years back in a Slate article, "More than any other major sport, professional or amateur, college football games are decided by the physical incompetence and downright chokery of their players."
9. Let's see: You sometimes have a Rose Bowl without a team from the Big 10 or Pac-10, you have Boston College playing in the ACC, you have the counterfeit national championship being decided on Jan. 3 or 4 instead of New Year's Day. Yet we're supposed to believe the sport is all about tradition.
10. Yours truly doesn't have a favourite team anymore. As a kid, yours truly liked the Michigan Wolverines, since they offered winning basketball and football teams -- with the Fab Five and Desmond Howard, respectively. Now they embody the bloated arrogance of big-time teams that just putter along, going 9-3 or 10-2 each year by virtue of resources and recruiting. If Michigan coach Lloyd Carr was handed the fourth-best team in the Kingston high school league, by the end of the year they would be the fifth-best team.
11. Did I mention that they don't have a real national championship?

Ultimately, NCAA football is all about excess, at a time where people (well, at least this person) is moving toward a more minimalist outlook. Who needs a Big Game With National Championship Implications every week, a Game of the Century every year, or Brent Musburger, for that matter?

There is hope. The rule changes that are intended to speed up the game show that maybe U.S. college ball can reverse its slide toward this bloated morass. Maybe in another 15 or 20 years, there will be another player as captivating to watch as Reggie Bush was in the Southern Cal offence.

Perhaps yours truly will some day find a team to cheer for -- one from a mid-major conference, a real university, a Blue State, to cheer for. Rutgers looks awfully appealing.

Until then, give me the NFL on Sunday and Monday. Saturdays are for Canadian university football. The CIS game isn't perfect, it is a little amateurish and people sometimes laugh at me for following it so closely, but it still retains its charm, and a real system for determining a national champion.

Back with more later. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.