I love college football. What am I saying, I love all high school and pro football, too. I will even watch an arena football game every now and then. But would someone answer me this - do we really need college football on TV every single night of the week?
OK, so maybe it’s not on every single night of the week - yet. As far as I can tell, Monday night is still reserved to the NFL. But every other night of the week is fair game for college football. What happened?
There was a time when football went like this:
- Friday night: High Schol games
- Saturday: College games
- Sunday and Monday night: NFL
That was a pretty strict rule that things went by for a long time. It was a good idea. You started out with high school games and worked your way up through the talent level with a logical conclusion on Sunday’s and Monday’s with the NFL. Each level would not play on the other level’s day. Once college football was over, the NFL would play a few games on Saturday so there would be something on. But the NFL would never play a game on a Saturday if college games were going on.
So what the hell happened? There is a college football game on TV every night of the week except Monday. There’s one on right now opposite the Sunday night game. College football games on television are approaching college basketball on televsion numbers.
An away game for a football team is way more logistically intensive than an away game for a college basketball team.College basketball games on multiple nights a week are not really that big a deal for the players. A college basketball team has about 10-15 people on it and I’m guessing on the high end a support staff of about 20 people. That might mean chartering a plane, flying in to someplace and flying out in a couple of hours.
A college football team travel squad has something like 60 guys on it. I would guess the support staff for a football team would probably be close to that, too. And then there is all of the equipment that travels with a football team.
It’s not that I don’t like the games on in the first place. I really don’t care. TV shows suck horribly this season and there are plenty of channels to fill up. But why did the NCAA let college football pull the trigger and say “f-it, we’re going 24 -7 with this?”
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I couldn’t care any less about sports. They are interesting ways of perfecting arbitrary talents. If I’m chilling with someone who wants to watch a game (or sporting event of any kind) I’ll likely watch it too unless there is something else to do. Honestly, none of it matters, at all. Nobody remembers that winning touchdown but the few athletes involved, maybe their families, and some sports fans. Let me pose a question to you: If you swapped the popularity levels of athletes with the popularity levels of scientists, how do you imagine that would affect society? Nearly all the people that humanity SHOULD be honoring and remembering (scientists who improve every possible facet of a regular-joe’s life) are totally overshadowed by the overly hyped atheletes who have perfected the skill of throwing a particular ball, or running quickly, or dare I say driving a car quickly. ‘Sport’ is a word synonomous with ‘game’ at the basic level.
Explore a new hobby if television is too boring. I think that in the time it took you to type the text of your complaint about there being too much college football to watch, you could have read some pretty interesting posts on fark.com or digg.com or even just learned some random facts on wikipedia.org. Competition is awesome, but sports are for people whose social life peaked when they were students.
Meat on November 25th, 2008 at 1:30 am | Link