Traditionalists, we have won a great victory. The sanctity of the college football regular season is preserved. We remain with the long term comfort of knowing that if we are lucky, then on January 1st we will wake up, pull on our colors, and watch our team beat the living hell out of some other crappy team that doesn’t belong on the same field as us. Well the date doesn’t matter…Dec 28th, January 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 8th…whichever date applies.
It may appear at first glance that we are sailing through a maelstrom that’s changing the college football world permanently and irrevocably, but I assure you that blue skies and clear sailing are ahead and that college football tradition will stand victorious.
Yes, there have been some miniscule sacrifices. Texas will no longer play Texas A&M. Missouri will no longer play Kansas. Conference USA, the Mountain West, and the remains of the Big East will form some weird 30 team hybrid conference to achieve…well actually I don’t even know what they are trying to achieve, but we must never forget that it was all worth it.
Colorado in the Pac 12. Nebraska in the Big Ten. Syracuse and Pittsburgh in the ACC. West Virginia in the Big 12. Missouri and Texas A&M in the SEC. Despite these setbacks, I think I speak for college football purists everywhere w
hen I say, “Mission accomplished!” We have defied the looming playoff monster and achieved a stunning victory in the name of preserving college football tradition as it is and as it should be for all time.
Conferences? Rivalries? We mourn their loss, but remember that their sacrifice has allowed our hallowed traditions, such as the Tostitos Bowl, to continue uninterrupted. This is the inevitable march of progress and the necessary steps to thwart the ultimate evil. In fact, this allows us to see how successful our preservation of the regular season and the bowls has been. Just watch our schools dance and struggle. Why do they struggle? They struggle for regular season TV contract money. They struggle for BCS automatic berths. It’s the ultimate triumph of the regular season and bowl games over the playoff hacks that threatened to bring our beloved sport to its knees.
Just imagine where we would be if the enemies had gotten their way. The regular season would be destroyed; a team could lose a game and still win the national championship! Surely no traditional conference matchup is worth the possibility that such a thing could happen. In addition, the evil playoff system would likely throw billions more dollars into the system, corrupting our pristine sport. Playoff money and automatic bids to all conferences would likely have staved off the superconference era, depriving us of two-plus years of fun realignment talk. The coaches and computer stat geeks would be deprived of their God-given and decades (sort of) old right to hold up that crystal football and say “Yes, we think you are the best team in the land this year. We dub thee national champions, and give thee bragging rights over the three other teams that finished with the same record as you, but that you did not play against. Rise as champion.”
But the fight is not over. We must all remain vigilant lest the dark clouds of NCAA playoffs return to threaten college football. There is already talk among the fiends that would bring us down that superconferences are the beginnings of moving toward a playoff system. We should be ever watchful for these savages who scrape at the very foundations of college football and root them out before the sport we love is destroyed forever.
Stay strong my fellows. Tradition will triumph.
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