Close of College Football Season Has Us Looking to Next Fall

There’s Something Special About the College Football Experience Which the Pros Can’t Match

Although the NFL will march on for another three weeks or so, when the BCS champion is crowned tonight in Glendale, AZ, the football season will, in essence, end for many fans.  Include me in that group. 

Give the NFL credit for having created an extremely attractive product, but there is nothing as fun or as exciting as college football in the late summer and fall.  The differences between the two, pro and college, are simultaneously stark and subtle: 

• The pros get paid far too much cash to play what is essentially a backyard game while college players receive an education in exchange for their play.  There’s a purity in the thought that most of the college kids playing will soon be working Joes like the rest of us.
• Professional rules have diluted the game in many ways, i.e., closing in the hash marks, no touching receivers downfield, microphones in QB’s helmets, etc.  In college, the hash marks still give you a “wide side of the field,” DB’s can still play the position with some freedom, and creative sideline signals have become a fun part of the action. 
• In the pros, post-play and touchdown antics are part of the over blown entertainment package.  In college football, a team is penalized if a player chooses to embarrass himself with such childish and unsportsmanlike displays.  In other words, college kids are expected to be responsible adults.  Pro players aren’t. 
• College cheerleaders are students who may get a few hundred dollars for the whole semester which go toward their education.  Pro football cheerleaders are grown women who get free admission into the game for doing something just this side of a strip tease. 
• College fans are locked into their team’s fortunes once and for all.  The school and team are there forever.  You can count on them.  They won’t be sold or moved at someone’s whim.  You win some and lose some.  That’s life.  Fans of the pro game can never be completely comfortable that their team will not pack up and move in the middle of the night for a better deal.  Just ask diehard Baltimore Colts fans, or the abandoned fans of the former Los Angeles Rams.   

Although big time college football sadly is approaching its pro cousin in terms of commercialism and hype, as long as the NCAA decides not to pay players, the college game will continue to maintain its appeal over the professional version.  It’s amatuer football after all. 

Interestingly, only about 20% of all college football games are played at the penultimate level, NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision, or FBS.   That means, of course, that 80% of all college games are played in relatively small stadiums on fairly small campuses and in comparatively small towns where you can still buy a hamburger, soft drink and fries for about $5.00 at the same place you hung out at when you were a student there.  These are places where the parking attendants may be members of the baseball team, the people behind the concession stand could be the cross country runners, or the chain gang may be P.E. majors looking for extra credit in football theories class.  There are no pundits on television vigorously debating the team’s chances, no in-depth player interviews, and no former coach donning an oversized mascot head announcing which team he thinks will win the day’s matchup.  This is amatuer, college sports essentially the way it was when our parents and grandparents watched the games years ago.  There’s something comforting about that which gets completely obliterated in the hoopla which is major college and professional football.       

For most college football fans, tailgating is a family, affordable affair where people meet with old friends they may only see once or twice a year, but it’s a tradition and everyone plans around the dates.  Team colors are worn by men in starched, Oxford shirts, pressed slacks, loafers or docksiders and baseball caps all with the school’s logo tastefully embroidered on them.  The women wear the colors and do it in their own, perfect style.  

There are no drunken fools hanging onto one another, bouncing of their pick-up trucks and challenging or cursing at every person walking by wearing the opponent’s jersey.  No, the college game day tailgate atmosphere is still a civilized event, not the barbaric falderals into which most pro stadium parking lot, pre-game parties have digressed.  

Once inside college stadiums, students sit together near the field and cheer on their team while the adults and their kids sit by and smile at their antics and enthusiasm.  Seven male students walk by shirtless, but with their torsos painted in the school colors.  When they turn around to face the crowd, their rough printing spells out the school’s name.  You can look a few rows over and see your former math professor and his wife sitting in the same seats they’ve had for the past 25 years.  Former players walk in, wave at a few friends and sit alongside everyone else.  There’s no beer to be bought.  The few fans who sneak in a flask usually limit themselves to a drink a half, just to stay a bit warm inside. 

If you gain admission to a pro game, you rarely see anyone you know and you can hardly walk up or down the aisles without slipping in a quagmire of beer beneath your feet.  Certainly, college game days are not absent of colorful characters and over served fans, but they are not close to the mosh pits which some pro stadiums have devolved into.  A parent would be hard pressed to take a youngster to a professional game today where the behavior can be rough and the language rougher still.  At college games, fans express their pleasure and displeasure with oos, ahs and applause, but you will not find a grown man stand up and yell out toward the field as if his keys were stolen by the man in the striped shirt.         

College players are still kids to alumni, fans and viewers.  You’re reasonably confident that if they are standing on the sidelines, they have gone to their classes, studied, taken and passed tests.  They’ve been walking around campus with the other students, intermingling with people more interested in their term paper than the outcome of a football game.   These are kids who haven’t been tainted by the lure of endorsements, shoe contracts or gifts from grateful agents.  They are kids who play the game not because they think that someday they’ll be playing on Sunday afternoons, but because they love the game, want an education and enjoy being able to stand on the field and talk to their girlfriend, parents and roommates after the game.  Pro players are nearly unapproachable anytime, but especially in and around stadiums.  If they are on the field, about the only thing you can be sure of is that at the very least they are out on bail. 

For those reasons, and others, many of us will give cursory interest to what happens in the NFL after tonight’s game.  Yes, we’ll watch the playoff games and the Super Bowl, but in the back of our minds we know that the pros can never come close to providing us with the same rich experience and feeling of Saturday afternoons at a college football game.  We’ll see all the pretty confetti fall in Cowboy Stadium following Super Bowl XLV then we’ll turn off the TV, smile a little and then dream of Saturday afternoons next fall.