Reason No. 39,848 why college football is the absolute best.
#ThorLoveAndThunder writer admits destroying an Oklahoma town (in the comics) to get revenge for the Sooners' 2014 Sugar Bowl win over Alabama: https://t.co/WBLawvetww pic.twitter.com/hf2h3JpBdB
— RedditCFB (@RedditCFB) July 6, 2022
Word of the Day: Abashed.
CFP CHAMPIONS LEAGUE? With the Big Ten suddenly pushing the "CHAOS" button last week and actually pulling off a move that everyone has pondered but nobody ever thought would actually happen, every weird hypothetical we've liked to talk about online has suddenly become... well, less weird and hypothetical.
That includes the whole hypothetical "kill the the NCAA model" conversation that Gene Smith started a few months ago. With such a sudden seismic shift in the college football landscape, maybe it actually is time to head in that direction.
Either way, it's fun to think about. And noted football knower Bill Connelly took a stab at prognosticating how it could work.
We love a good soccer analogy -- Lord knows I do -- but we still don't know whether college football is headed toward a Super League or Champions League situation. Let me explain the difference.
Super League: a folded tent of sorts with 32 to 64 teams in the sport's top division, perhaps all belonging to either the Big Ten or SEC. We spent part of last summer yelling "SEC SUPER LEAGUE" after Oklahoma and Texas announced they were joining, and now we're doing the same with the Big Ten. If this comes to pass, it would be the biggest structural change the sport has ever experienced. It's clearly a possibility, and it became more likely when USC and UCLA made their move. But it's not a given.
Champions League: Smith's vision above, in which FBS membership remains mostly the same -- perhaps some extra qualifiers are added for membership, and it shrinks from 133 (where it will be in 2023) to something more in the 90-110 range, but anyone who can and will offer 85 scholarships has a spot in the subdivision.
I give it this name because the Champions League in Europe currently offers 32 spots in the field (it will soon expand to 36), and virtually any champion of any top-division league can qualify ... but most of the spots go to the sport's powerhouses. The top four leagues in Europe get 16 of the 32 spots to themselves, the remainder fight for scraps and, in the end, someone from a power league wins the title. (The past 18 champs, and 26 of the past 27, have come from England, Spain, Germany or Italy. England and Spain alone have occupied 14 of the past 18 spots in the finals.)
Honestly, I say go for it. Between the absurd conference realignment, NIL, and the transfer portal, college football as we know it is falling apart, for better or for worse. At this point, you may as well just blow the whole thing up and put it back together in a way that makes sense.
Maybe not everyone will agree, but as long as the Buckeyes are on television at the end of all of this, I can guarantee you that I will tune in.
NOBODY GETS PAST. Paris Johnson Jr. is pretty consistently projected as a first-round pick in the 2023 NFL Draft, which is kinda wild considering he's never played the position he'll be playing this season at the college level.
But it sure helps your case on that front when you can say things like this:
Paris Johnson has only allowed 1 sack in his career @OhioStateFB pic.twitter.com/QdsGUBstdN
— PFF College (@PFF_College) July 7, 2022
Personally, I'm trying to straddle that line between "it's absolutely insane to project someone as a top-15 pick without ever actually seeing them play the position you're projecting them to play at the NFL level" and "I've thought he was a future Hall of Famer since he was in high school."
I think both can be true!
GOING PRO IN SOMETHING ELSE. Everyday it gets more and more hilarious that at one point not all that long ago, Joe Burrow was sitting on the bench at Ohio State making backup plans for his life in case it turned out that football wasn't his thing.
Apparently, "investment banker" was going to be his career of choice.
Burrow had to overcome plenty of adversity early in his college career at Ohio State since he wasn't playing. He even considered walking away from football all together.
"Of course there was self doubt in that moment," Burrow told Chris Simms of NBC Sports. "When you don't play for three years and you're putting in the work and you feel like you're practicing really well and you feel like you can go out there and make plays and do what you always done, but you're not getting the opportunity to show what you can do—it's frustrating.
"There were times when I started updating that resume, thinking about being an investment banker."
My biggest takeaway here is that either way, Joe was going to be rich as hell.
HOW'S THIS GOING TO WORK? Once I got over the initial shock of the Big Ten adding USC and UCLA, all my brain wanted to do was try to figure out how the hell this is going to work logistically.
To be clear, as long as it works financially (which it very much does, by all accounts), they'll figure it out the logistics. But the fact remains that even if the deal does give you Scrooge McDuck money, you're still going to have to put together a college football conference that includes two schools which are an average of 2,000 miles away from all the rest.
There are plenty of options for how they could pull this off.
Divisions and schedules
Administrators appeared keen to ditch the current geographical divisional structure and those thoughts are cemented now that UCLA and USC have joined the Big Ten. It’s ludicrous to suggest USC would play in a West Division and then meet power players Ohio State, Penn State and Michigan once every four years apiece. The Big Ten’s media partners rightly would frown upon that, too.
There are questions that linger, however. Would the Big Ten go to a division-less structure in 2023 with its new rights deal or wait until 2024 to completely rebrand itself when USC and UCLA begin football competition? If the Big Ten remains a 16-team league, would it enact a 3-6-6 schedule with three protected annual opponents and then rotate the other 12 twice over a four-year period? Perhaps at the end of every four-year block, the league could adjust some of those protected series to cycle USC and UCLA through more opponents with regularity. The possibilities are endless.
No matter how they do it, UCLA and USC traveling 2,000 miles every time they need to compete in any sport is going to get insane really quick, even if they do have the extra bonus money to foot the bill.
That's why I don't see a realm of reality where the Big Ten doesn't add at least a couple more west coast teams in the nearish future. But even if that happens, there's a solid chance they wouldn't be joining as soon as 2024 with USC and UCLA. That means for at least one season, things could be pretty wild.
SONG OF THE DAY. "Master of Puppets" by Metallica.
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