I get it. Basically, once every four years I do a commentary right after an election, and depending on the gravity of the moment, it might feel a bit vapid to drone on about who just won a football game or drafted a point guard. I understand that sports can often feel gratuitous at moments of national importance or perspective, as if we don’t get the assignment. That said, as I often do, I did turn on sports talk radio this morning, and there were plenty of people clearly far more concerned about the Jets trading Sauce Gardner than anything that may have happened in an election booth. So it should be noted that regardless of the calendar, every day is another sports day.
In that spirit, I will note that election results weren’t the only ranked choice list that came out yesterday. It was also the release of the first college football playoff ranking, the list of 12 schools that will get to play for the one coveted national championship. For this initial salvo, Ohio State took the overall top spot, followed by Indiana. The next two teams are Alabama and Texas A&M – those top four all getting byes in the first round. Overall, there are currently four teams in the mighty SEC, three in the Big 10, two Big 12, one ACC, independent Notre Dame, and Memphis representing the best of the non-power four conferences. Of course, there’s still a lot of football to be played, meaning the exact teams and rankings are going to change. But I’d be quite confident in the fact that the basic ratio of teams and conferences are going to remain fairly constant. Meaning we can expect over half the clubs, and probably all that get first round byes, to come from the two super leagues – the SEC and Big 10, where an absolutely insane amount of money is spent each year on football and where pretty much every recent football champion has come from in the increasingly lengthy past, minus a small run of success from Clemson – a team that looked like an SEC squad put in the wrong classroom.
This constitution is fairly unavoidable. It’s kind of like kids choosing to eat a Halloween snickers bar before they pay any attention to the one house that threw pretzels into the plastic pumpkin. It’s just human inertia. Schools in these two conferences spent more on coaches they’ve already fired than most universities spend on their entire athletics program. And probably their humanities department as well. In a game of spending more money that you can legally use to build collectives to pay players and build better facilities and hire better coaches, it’s almost unfathomable that teams outside the big two would break through the pay wall. And if they do, it’s probably a one-off, like a Clemson or almost Florida State or Notre Dame, who despite being independent spends as much as pretty much everyone. But there’s not a lot of hope that a Kansas or Wake Forest somehow sneaks into the title game. And forget about, I don’t, Marshall or Bowling Green. That’s crazy talk.
Now some of this is structural. For example, last year, four teams that won their conferences were given byes in the first round. Which meant that a top ACC and Big 12 team would find themselves one step closer to the title. But that changed this year, when it’s just the highest four rated. So even when maybe Virgina wins the ACC, which actually might happen, they’re starting all the way at the bottom. It’s a structure set up to yield largely the same results every year – some version of Ohio State and Alabama and Georgia or some other interchangeable program in the final game. Whether or not it’s what we want, it’s what we’re going to get.
I don’t know what this says about the future of college football, and whether a model that always brings us back to the same spot at even higher costs is something American sports fans want to see. I suppose it hasn’t hurt baseball, although it’s a lot harder when well over 100 teams start the season knowing it’s already over.
Then again, last night was election night, an American tradition that, like college football, typically leads us through the same, expensive process towards nearly the same exact place. I suppose you could make an argument last night was maybe a little different. Regardless, maybe sports and politics are more similar than we’d tend to believe. And why today is a great day to talk about sports.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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