If you’re reading this odds are you like college football more than the NFL. Perhaps you like college football a whole lot more than the NFL. As someone who is agnostic towards NFL team fandom but still watches plenty of professional football I’m definitely the type of person who cherishes college football so much more.
However, there’s something the NFL gets right that college football to this day struggles coping with each year: Appropriately judging and putting single games into perspective quickly.
College struggles with this because of the much wider talent disparity at the top of the game, plus a collection of teams more than 4 times the size of the NFL. In this way, the impact of one game makes sense especially when college plays fewer games in the first place.
I just don’t like it all that much.
We’re lucky that the playoffs has changed this thinking in a small way. I’ve long rallied against the romanticism associated with undefeated college teams and the belief that you’re done or spoiled after one loss. Nick Saban has put together the greatest modern coaching career and he’s lost one game per season in 5 out of his 6 National Title seasons. He’s only gone unbeaten once and never over the last 8 seasons!
Although we tend to see teams get overrated based off very small sample sizes or even one game the opposite happens far, far more. The opening weekend of college football is full of “that team sucks” or “I knew they weren’t any good” sometimes based off only a half of watching a single game. The NFL has its own yo-yo problem (“you’re good, you suck, you’re great, you’re terrible”) that fuels the increasingly headline-seeking news cycle. Still, we can see 2 really poor Aaron Rodgers games every season and in the big picture we know it will barely be a blip on the radar of his legacy both for that season or his career.
I don’t have a problem if one loss ends up really costing a team, if only the rest of the country shakes out in a way that this lone defeat really causes a team to miss the CFB playoff or some other major bowl game or conference title. That kind of misfortune is still a part of college football in a way that isn’t present in the NFL, and I’ve argued in the past it is heightened by the 4-team playoff race.
What I have a problem with is disproportionately weighing losses, a long common tactic in modern college football. For example, Notre Dame played seven ranked teams last year. The 1991 Notre Dame team with the same 10-3 record also played 7 ranked teams. Both the 2017 and 1991 teams went 4-3 against ranked teams.
Does that make the teams equal? Most likely not to most historians of the game–the Sugar Bowl win over eventual No. 7 Florida trumps the 2017 best win over No. 12 USC and is a big tie-breaker if it was close. But, that 1991 team headed into bowl season with the top wins over eventual No. 22 Stanford, No. 23 BYU, and No. 25 Air Force. These seasons are a lot closer than most people think, with of course, the surrounding 1988-90 and 1992-93 seasons also coloring 1991 in a positive light as well. By the way, the 2017 team did finish 2 spots higher in the AP rankings for what it’s worth.
My point is that today it’s more common for people to take losses and say, “Well these mean more because they’re losses and therefore those other games with wins over ranked teams mean less to me. The losses is where we saw the teams’ true colors.” This is certainly a prisoner-of-the-moment issue, to be fair. I have no doubt that in 20 years there will be more talk about how Notre Dame was so close to beating Georgia and that could’ve completely changed the season–which seems patently obvious.
Today, you often get more talk about how the Georgia game is rendered irrelevant because the loss at Miami was so bad. For the next 5 years or so I’m certain the Miami game will come to be the defining one for 2017, and yet, the 1991 team allowed one of the most horrendous comebacks in program history and were blown out the next week in Happy Valley…and these games are rarely if ever spoken of nowadays.
Isn’t that amazing!
I feel like the fact that in the NFL everyone is a professional a little more competitive is balanced out by the fact that college kids are so young and still not 100% focused on football at all times. There’s a case to be made that everything in college is much more crazy and wild, and yet we still expect perfection (or really, really close to it) from teams when so much of the sport keeps telling us that really doesn’t define greatness per se.
The 2016 USC team is a good example. They were absolutely destroyed in the opener against Alabama and right away some people never took them seriously again. They lost 3 out of 4 to start the season, largely due to the failed experiment of trying to start the mediocre Max Browne at quarterback. Then, they finished with 9 straight wins. In the NFL, I feel like that winning streak is such a bigger deal (primarily because they could still win the Super Bowl of course) and fans/commentators are more likely to forgive the early season swoon because Sam Darnold wasn’t at quarterback.
Instead, USC just slowly ended up winning the Rose Bowl and along the way there’s not as much talk about them actually being really good. Rather, all of that bottled up hindsight gets transferred to the following year when the pre-season hype takes over and we usually overrate a team based on the immediate past we didn’t evaluate correctly in real time. Even though it’s not always a clean 1:1 comparison is it wrong to want college football to be more like the NFL?
Also, the overtime rules.
That’s a hard no from me on that one. I adore the college overtime.
Do you like penalty kicks in soccer too?
PK’s to determine a game would be like exchanging gradually longer field goals for college football OT until someone missed.
I’m down with the current CFB OT format. Wouldn’t mind if they started them more towards midfield. But the concept of exchanging the same number of offensive possessions to determine a winner is cool with me.
Plus, not to open this can of worms again this week, but ties in football stink. For as taxing (and as important) as the games are, might as well have 1 team win and 1 team lose. I’m not anti-tie in general though, and they do serve a purpose and are already a part of soccer (especially for the big team vs small team where a tie is almost a win for an outmanned team). But NFL OT stinks.
Doesn’t feel like a good parallel to me.
NFL overtime is the absolute worst.
This is your natural pessimism coming out again, Eric, because the most remembered game from 2017 is going to be the epic beat down of USC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X-CJC48S2M
Losses are inherently more disproportionately weighed because the NFL has a 16 game season (where 16 teams in each conference are competing for 6 playoff spots). The college season is shorter with many more teams competing for fewer playoff spots. So CFB is setup more to over-react to losing a game, because losing one game can easily cost a team a spot on the conference championship and/or playoff.
Just my perspective anyways. No one remembers or cares that the Jaguars lost to the Jets in Week 4 because they had plenty of time and opportunity to easily recover and move on. If a CFB team loses to the equivalent of the Jets, their season is probably tanked. You can lose 37% of your games (a 10-6 record) and have a good shot of making the NFL playoffs. Lose 37% of your college games and you’re a 7.5-4.5 coach that’s an afterthought.
The expanded play-offs fix a lot in the NFL. Also, there are only 32 teams, which makes for a smaller package of games. With 117 or so 1-A teams, but if you get serious about NC matters, you probably do get to 30 or so legit contenders in a year. Still, most of those 30 will play no more than 4 games against other legit contenders. The NFL also does not rely on polls to place people into the playoffs. College does. That automatically means you have to discuss good/bad wins/losses much differently than in the NFL.
Lose to the Browns, Jets and Lions, you could still go 13-3 and win the Super Bowl. Depending on the year and the rest of your schedule, a loss to Vanderbilt or Tulsa could knock you out of the playoffs. Losing to Auburn or Michigan wouldn’t necessarily do that.
The other thing I don’t like is the focus on when the win/loss happens. Say we beat Michigan in week one, but lose to USC in week 12. If all three are 11-1, people will hold our USC loss against us far more than we will get credit for beating Michigan. I would agree that USC would deserve the playoffs over us in that scenario, but we would deserve it over Michigan. That is not what would happen though. You can substitute any schools in there in a similar scenario.
The 2010 Patriots went 14-2. Those 2 losses… Jets, Browns.
What the NFL really does better is make things objective. There is no trying to figure out which team deserves to make the playoffs.
I believe that the subjectivity of CFB leads people to over weight losses. There are fewer of them, so it’s easier to judge a team when you only have to look at 1 game, rather than 12. People are lazy. No one wants to look at the complete body of work in context (like 2011 OkSt), so they just tend to look at the number in the loss column.
True.
However, some might say that the subjectivity in determining the top teams in CFB makes it more interesting (and it can lead to great discussions over a few beers)
I do not want “interesting” anywhere near deciding a champion.
Is there a single other sport in the entire world (where the competitions themselves aren’t subjectively judged) that subjectively determines who gets to compete for a championship? NCAA basketball seems to be the closest, but they have 32 objectively selected teams. Even my adult kickball league objectively decides who plays for championships.
Adult kickball? Is that the new Lingerie Kickball League I keep seeing on NBC Sports?
In fairness, Alabama has earned enough credibility that when they lose, they rarely drop far enough in the rankings to be truly out of it. It also helps that their either ranked 1 or 2 when they lose so the worst they drop to is around 5. They also tend not to be totally pantsed when they do lose.
For everybody else that fights their way to the top of the rankings, a loss is usually perceived as them coming back to earth, whereas it’s only a slip up or an off-night for ‘bama.