In six weeks, college basketball will tip off with four of its best programs — Michigan State, Duke, Kentucky and Kansas — meeting in a doubleheader at Madison Square Garden. Later in November, the nation’s best will meet in a series of top non-conference tournaments. There will be premier games everywhere you look before December hits.
Compare that to college football’s first month. You can’t — because there is no comparison.
The first four weeks of college football have included four showcase non-conference games: Oregon-Auburn, Clemson-Texas A&M, Texas-LSU and Georgia-Notre Dame. That’s it. That’s the list.
Alabama’s non-conference schedule: Duke, New Mexico State, Southern Mississippi and Western Carolina.
Ohio State’s non-conference schedule: Florida Atlantic, Cincinnati and Miami (Ohio).
Wisconsin’s non-conference schedule: South Florida, Central Michigan and Kent State.
On Saturday, you had Clemson destroying Charlotte, 52-10, Alabama smoking Southern Mississippi, 49-7, and Ohio State crushing Miami (Ohio), 76-5.
These games can’t have any value, for the winners or losers. Backups are in by halftime. The crowds leave early.
That’s not to say the first month of the season hasn’t had drama. There have been big upsets and surprising results. But there have been too many predictable walkovers, the nation’s premier programs merely throwing their jerseys on the field to prevail.
I’m not advocating Clemson and Alabama start scheduling each other — they meet in January every year anyway — or even a major conference challenge against one another, but there needs to be a happy medium. This is no way to generate interest in the sport.
Andrew Elsass had an interesting suggestion at athleticdirectoru.com, suggesting a lottery system for non-conference schedules. You choose one of several different ranking systems for all 130 teams and break them into four tiers. A tier one team would face a tier four team one week, then a tier three team, a tier two team and a fellow tier one team. You can select the opponents randomly, even with a made-for-television show in the spring that would undoubtedly do fantastic ratings.
If the schools are unwilling to schedule tougher, take it out of their hands. This suggestion would work.
This is a problem the sport has to address, especially when it has become so top-heavy, so many of the same teams reaching the playoff every year.
If college basketball can create so many exciting early-season games, why can’t college football?
Not Har-bad
It’s easy to hammer Jim Harbaugh and Michigan. It’s easy to rip the Wolverines in the aftermath of another ugly loss to a highly ranked opponent, this time a 35-14 blowout to Wisconsin. It’s easy to say Harbaugh has been a failure.