After watching Ohio State thump Tennessee it occurred to me that one of the problems with Strength of Schedule is teams who have the hardest path to the end of the season are more likely to be at a reduced capability due to the loss of players, and more importantly the wear and tear on the starters. These are the teams which begin to see their score margins drop as the season goes on or which sustain a loss to an otherwise mediocre team that is at the top of its game.
This is more true today than ever before in college football because of NIL and the transfer portal. Schools like Alabama used to just reload from season to season because they had five star recruits backing up five star starters. With NIL (backups don’t get paid that much) and the transfer portal allowing immediate playing time, those five star backups or even four star backups, move on to another team that has need of a starting, name your position. Thus, a team with a significant strength of schedule is further reduced because the depth of talent is no longer there. A player who has the ability to start but has to sit behind someone else will simply move on, which means the coach has to replace an injured five star starter with a one, two or, with luck, an inexperienced three star. This is not a very good formula for winning.
The question becomes, do you play a number of significantly talented teams during the season and give the fans the close, thrilling victories (or not) they want, chancing that your talent is worn down or even lost; or do you play a bunch of former big name schools that have fallen on hard times in the football world, win by large margins, keep your talent unhurt and get into the CFP?
Of course, the very first casualty of NIL/TP was team loyalty. The very same thing happened in the Curt Flood Supreme Court case in baseball. The court’s ruling creating “Free Agency” and baseball has never been the same. Salaries skyrocketed and you never know from year to year who is going to be in the starting line-up for your favorite team. And with the advent of money ball the game has become less and less enjoyable. Professional baseball games, these days are more entertainment venues than they are a competition between two teams.
As for college football the ability to opt out of the post season for those five star starters changes team dynamics dramatically. Plus college football will have to have other divisions in the future. For example only 43 of the 128 FCS programs have NIL collectives for paying players. Will we have to split FCS into schools that pay and schools that don’t. If we don’t then we’ll have a major disparity in the FCS program.
There are those who want to throw out the concept of walk-on players at the FBS level and institute solely a scholarship/paid player category. If you do this you’re going to have problems finding scout team players. Guys getting paid aren’t going to want to practice for four years, be yelled at, beat up, and beat down all in hope of getting in one game. You know the whole Rudy thing. They’ve going to transfer to some school where they can start. After all being a scholarship player at Ohio State means you could probably start at (name most any other Big 10 school). It’s bad enough sitting in the stands when the team plays, but practicing and knowing the kid across from you is getting paid to knock your head in might just discourage more than a few but it hasn’t those walk-ons who dream of being on the field. The walk-on is part of football history but under the new rules it may become history.
I think I’ll stick with Div III where the kids play because they want to and not because they see themselves in a Kansas City Jersey being swooned over by a pop singer someday. Although that division is also being ruined by work/study programs (since no athletic scholarships are allowed) and schools like Mount Union or St John’s. If you look at the team picture for this year’s Mount Union team you’ll see 231 players on the team, that’s 21 eleven player sides. What other school could possibly have that sort of depth? And that’s one of the reasons Mount Union makes the Div III playoffs every year. St. John’s has 215 players with as many as four or five players having the same jersey number. They’re among the usual suspects in the Div III playoffs as well.
Mount Union has an astonishing ten percent of its undergraduate student body on the football team. That’s one in every ten students at Mount Union practices football every day. The other discrepancy that exists in Div III is St John’s has more than 15,000 undergraduates playing schools that average 2,000 undergraduates. The University of Wisconsin has an entire football conference of UW at here or there schools none of which has an enrollment smaller than 11,000 but all are Div III and one of which will almost always make the Div III playoffs.
So, college football is a messy thing these days with the paid playing the unpaid and the large playing the small. The stars opting out and the wannabe walk-ons threatened with extinction. The entire enterprise needs a Teddy Roosevelt to make a decree like he did in 1905 when college football had a reported 25 deaths with 168 hospitalizations for injury. The courts won’t allow true amateurism nor will the players at this point, but someone needs to have a vision of a game that once valued loyalty over lucre (well maybe never really but only for the exceptionally talented. Few linemen ever received payoffs.) Maybe just getting rid of ESPN might work. Who knows?
But talking about rules, how about some knee pads. Playing football in shorts looks ridiculous and I can’t think that if knee injuries are number one in the game that some governing body wouldn’t require they be protected. Nuff Said.