As I sat around watching football yesterday, I kept thinking to myself, “what the hell am I going to write about tomorrow?” It was a typical Week 2 where most of the teams were playing weak opponents and there were just a smattering of good games. I debated writing about the end of the Michigan-Notre Dame rivalry. It wasn’t a bad idea. Here was another great rivalry lost to the 21st Century College Football Money Grab. However, before my proverbial pen touched paper, I noticed a pattern emerging. What the hell was going on in the Big Ten? Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State all losing in the same day? Certainly this was foretold in the football bible as a sign of the apocalypse. Couple that with Wisconsin’s loss to LSU in Week 1 and it meant that the Big Ten might be finished for the year in terms of landing any team in the final four, (has anyone come up with a better name than simply stealing a coined basketball title?)
Michigan has virtually no hope of making a playoff scenario. First, no one in their right mind, including the most deluded fans in Ann Arbor will think that Michigan could run the table from this point and even if they managed to do so, a 31-0 loss will preclude them from any conversation about being in a playoff.
Ohio State’s loss to Virginia Tech is far more forgivable but again, they would have to run the tables and they would have to hope that Virginia Tech is a surprise team in the ACC. This is all possible but not probable. Even if all this happens, it’s going to be hard to forget that Ohio State lost by fourteen points and was never in the game. Not only would OSU need to run the tables but they would need to dominate from this point on and be able to make an argument that their early season loss to Virginia Tech was related to transitioning with a new quarterback.
Michigan State very likely lost to a playoff participant in Oregon but they lost by nineteen points and the team that last year boasted the best defense in college football allowed forty-six points in Week 2. The irony with Michigan State is that where the other Big Ten schools would be hoping that the teams they lost to do well, Michigan State would be hard pressed to make an argument to be in a playoff scenario that also included Oregon.
Out of the four power teams that lost, Wisconsin’s Week 1 loss gives them an easier road. Ideally, they would need to run the tables and they would also need to be the biggest LSU fans north of Baton Rouge. Not many would have problems with a rematch of LSU and Wisconsin. The game was close and it was one that many think Wisconsin simply let slip out of their hands.
Here is the problem, there doesn’t appear to be a dominant team in the Big Ten this year which means that most likely no one will run the table. At this point, the Big Ten’s greatest enemy in making the playoff will be themselves. More than likely the 2014 Big Ten champ will have two losses. We still have some “unknowns” in the Big Ten. Nebraska is undefeated but barely survived McNeese State. There is a higher probability that Pelini doesn’t finish the year versus Nebraska being a playoff participant. Penn State is also undefeated but Penn State is handcuffed to sanctions so they are out. Iowa hasn’t been at the top for quite a while. Maryland is unlikely to win it all. The long and short of it is that the Big Ten is most likely out of the playoff. The Big Ten not being in the playoffs isn’t shocking. The shocking part is that they have been virtually eliminated in Week 2.
The Week 2 massacre is another setback in a recent history of Big Ten setbacks. The conference that was once considered the premier conference in college football has been falling off the charts. The question is whether this week’s woes was simply an anomaly for a conference that is working their way back up to the top or if Week 2 represents another marker for charting the Big Ten’s low tide point. My guess is that it is a little of both. Braxton Miller getting hurt was a fluke, Michigan will get better when they finally find the right coach, Penn State will probably be back on top in a couple of years and Michigan State, despite its loss to Oregon, has greatly improved over the years. Neither will Nebraska always be a team in transition. However, any long term belief that the Big Ten will somehow dominate all other conferences would have to be tempered with the knowledge that college football has turned into a successful business venture and the Big Ten has made poor decisions over the last few years.
Conferences are essentially Fortune 500 companies with the commissioners being akin to CEOs. Where the SEC, ACC, and PAC-12 have dominated in their decisions, the Big Ten has made many questionable decisions. The Big Ten’s addition of Nebraska, Rutgers and Maryland weren’t exactly home run decisions. None look to add to the overall Big Ten product any time soon. Compare that to the SEC’s addition of Texas A&M and Missouri. A&M has been the hot team since joining the SEC and Missouri has already won the SEC East title. The Big Ten had a chance to add Missouri. It was actually Missouri’s possible defection to the Big Ten that created the domino effect of conference realignment a few years ago. The Big Ten chose Nebraska with the idea of keeping a solid product even though it meant losing a lot of potential viewers in a top television market of St. Louis. This would have made sense but for the decision to then add Maryland and Rutgers which weakened the overall Big Ten product at the expense of adding bigger television markets on the East Coast. Then, Notre Dame, with all of its history with the Big Ten chose to partner up with the ACC. Notre Dame’s decision speaks volumes.
The initial decision of starting the Big Ten Network looked good but compared to the SEC’s decision to partner with ESPN, it now comes across as short-sighted. It took an all SEC national championship game to make the Big Ten finally concede that a college football playoff was needed. These decisions affect the long term success of the conferences. If you are sitting in Ohio, you most likely have as much access to SEC matchups as someone sitting in Mississippi. Access to SEC games is now national for fifty states. When it comes to Big Ten games, outside of the Big Ten footprint, a viewer gets a few games each Saturday. All of this doesn’t add up to the end of the Big Ten. Again, much of what we have seen is more an anomaly. It’s possible next year that the Big Ten has two participants in the four team playoff but national access and money are flowing South, East, and West more than they are flowing to the North and the Midwest and if that continues, the long term outlook for the Big Ten means that there are more 2014 Week 2’s in their future.
As promised, starting this week I am providing my top four thus far. Again, this is not a prediction of the four playoff teams as it is my opinion of which teams would be in the playoff if the playoff started today. I expect this to be a very fluid list for most of the season. I won't consider a team that hasn't faced real competition.
The Top Four Teams Thus Far:
1. Florida State
2. Oregon
3. Texas A&M
4. Virginia Tech
Just outside, LSU, USC, and Notre Dame.
Half of the Evil Commish
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Rewriting the Script - Opening Weekend
We all know better than to base our preseason perceptions on what happened last year but inevitably we find there is no other choice when it comes to making a prediction of how the coming year will play out. It’s as soon as that first kick off starts that we can start rewriting the current year’s script. At this time last year, most believed Auburn would be lucky to make it to a bowl game, Baylor would be in trouble without RGIII, and that Texas and USC were dark horse contenders for the national title game. That Auburn would be in the championship game, that Baylor would be just as good without RGIII, that Texas and USC would lose their coaches weren’t foreseeable. Okay, maybe Texas and USC having new coaches wasn’t that far-fetched.
We entered this weekend with a different concept entirely. Now we are trying to figure out which four teams will make the playoffs. This weekend’s collection of games, (which is still going on as I write this), did nothing to clear up any picture as to what four teams would make the playoff. Florida State won a tough game against Oklahoma State and I am left with that I need more information about both. I could see one, both, or neither in the playoff based on that game. Alabama, which sits comfortably at #2, struggled all night with a West Virginia team that was simply horrible last year. All the issues that kept Alabama out of the championship game last year were still very much prevalent this year. The Tide entered the season with question marks at quarterback and how it would play under new offensive coordinator, Lane Kiffin. The early answer is that the Alabama offense will be just fine. The problem is and has been that Alabama is a team struggling on defense. The short answer, based on last night, is that if Alabama can’t fix its defense, it shouldn’t expect to make any final four scenario.
Defending SEC champ, Auburn struggled against Arkansas. Arkansas was winless in SEC play last year. Is Auburn not as good as last year or is Arkansas much improved? My guess is that Arkansas is a much improved team. Continuing in SEC play, Thursday night provided a bit of shocks. South Carolina faced off against Texas A&M. South Carolina was a preseason top ten team and the prevailing thought was that Texas A&M would have a year of adjustment without Johnny Football to carry them through the season. TAMU, like Baylor the year before, carried on without Manziel and proceeded to dump South Carolina to the tune of 52-28. This was Texas A&M’s announcement to the SEC West that they expect to be a part of the conversation. Thursday night also had a very strange result in SEC land with Vanderbilt’s loss to Temple. It’s hard to envision a worse start for freshman coach Derek Mason. Temple was the bottom dweller of the AAC last year. They managed only two wins all season. It’s doubtful that Temple has improved to such a level that it can drop a mid-tier SEC team 35-7. The only other possibility is that Vanderbilt is in for a long season and possibly one that ends winless. Mason could feasibly be out in one year. Vanderbilt can’t afford to be patient and that may wind up leading to Mason’s quick demise. If there were two teams in the SEC that might make it to the end, LSU and Georgia looked great. Put an asterisk next to LSU as they only looked great for the fourth quarter, but they beat Wisconsin in a comeback victory and most of their mistakes in the first three quarters appeared to be due to opening game sloppiness. Georgia faced off against Clemson. Clemson has been mentioned a lot in the preseason as a team that could sneak into the final four. The first half was an offensive shootout but in the second half, Georgia, whose defense had been suspect all last year, managed to get a handle on Clemson. Based on an opening weekend game, Georgia appears to have a clear path to getting to Atlanta and representing the East.
Two teams who managed victories in the opening weekend and who are breathing sighs of relief are Ohio State and Notre Dame. Ohio State was a top five team entering the season but with Braxton Miller’s season ending injury, many think Ohio State is going to have real problems down the line. OSU managed to top Navy 34-17 and this means that Urban Meyer has more time to get his offense to gel under redshirt freshman J.T. Barrett. The concern for OSU is not that Barrett isn’t up to the task but that he has been thrown into the role with so little time before the season starts. If Ohio State doesn’t have a great season, it will most likely not fall squarely on the injury of Miller as OSU allowed Navy to amass 370 yards on the ground. Notre Dame was heavily favored against Rice and managed to win big but the first half was a struggle for the Irish. The opener against Rice marked the return of Everett Golson who didn’t play last year because of disciplinary issues. Notre Dame sorely missed him last year. This was a year that Irish fans felt could be a return to the heights of 2012 but Notre Dame was without five players and is currently embroiled in an academic scandal. Brian Kelly has a monumental task in getting his team to stay focused this year as most think the academic scandal will be a continual distraction throughout the year.
Another team that has been a lot of people’s pick to be a surprise team this year is UCLA. UCLA opened up against Virginia beating them 28-20. UCLA managed to get the victory but there was nothing in their eight point victory over the Cavaliers that seemed impressive enough to signal that UCLA was ready to rise to the top of the PAC 12. Other PAC 12 powers, Oregon and Stanford opened up with easy games that really told us nothing.
Okay, starting next week and each week thereafter, I am going to name four teams that I think would be in the playoffs. This is going to be based on their performance throughout the year and will not take into account their rankings. For obvious reasons, these will be wildly inaccurate in the first part of the season. THESE ARE NOT PREDICTIONS FOR THE END OF THE YEAR. My four team selection will be based solely on what has happened so far and if the playoff were today. As an example, for this week, I would only include teams that faced off in premier games so Oklahoma, Oregon, Stanford, Ohio State, Notre Dame, etc would not be considered. I am not naming four teams this week because I am really hard-pressed to come up with four teams based on the games through Saturday night. Florida State would be in but from there I am stumped. The teams I would choose from to make up the other three would be Georgia, Texas A&M, LSU, Oklahoma State, and Wisconsin. Yes, there are a lot of SEC teams in there and yes, I have two teams that lost their openers but like the committee, I am going to look at the body of work. I was impressed with both Oklahoma State and Wisconsin in their losses and based on what I saw, I expect both to challenge for their respective conference titles. As for the three SEC teams, they each faced stiff competition in Week one and won their games.
We entered this weekend with a different concept entirely. Now we are trying to figure out which four teams will make the playoffs. This weekend’s collection of games, (which is still going on as I write this), did nothing to clear up any picture as to what four teams would make the playoff. Florida State won a tough game against Oklahoma State and I am left with that I need more information about both. I could see one, both, or neither in the playoff based on that game. Alabama, which sits comfortably at #2, struggled all night with a West Virginia team that was simply horrible last year. All the issues that kept Alabama out of the championship game last year were still very much prevalent this year. The Tide entered the season with question marks at quarterback and how it would play under new offensive coordinator, Lane Kiffin. The early answer is that the Alabama offense will be just fine. The problem is and has been that Alabama is a team struggling on defense. The short answer, based on last night, is that if Alabama can’t fix its defense, it shouldn’t expect to make any final four scenario.
Defending SEC champ, Auburn struggled against Arkansas. Arkansas was winless in SEC play last year. Is Auburn not as good as last year or is Arkansas much improved? My guess is that Arkansas is a much improved team. Continuing in SEC play, Thursday night provided a bit of shocks. South Carolina faced off against Texas A&M. South Carolina was a preseason top ten team and the prevailing thought was that Texas A&M would have a year of adjustment without Johnny Football to carry them through the season. TAMU, like Baylor the year before, carried on without Manziel and proceeded to dump South Carolina to the tune of 52-28. This was Texas A&M’s announcement to the SEC West that they expect to be a part of the conversation. Thursday night also had a very strange result in SEC land with Vanderbilt’s loss to Temple. It’s hard to envision a worse start for freshman coach Derek Mason. Temple was the bottom dweller of the AAC last year. They managed only two wins all season. It’s doubtful that Temple has improved to such a level that it can drop a mid-tier SEC team 35-7. The only other possibility is that Vanderbilt is in for a long season and possibly one that ends winless. Mason could feasibly be out in one year. Vanderbilt can’t afford to be patient and that may wind up leading to Mason’s quick demise. If there were two teams in the SEC that might make it to the end, LSU and Georgia looked great. Put an asterisk next to LSU as they only looked great for the fourth quarter, but they beat Wisconsin in a comeback victory and most of their mistakes in the first three quarters appeared to be due to opening game sloppiness. Georgia faced off against Clemson. Clemson has been mentioned a lot in the preseason as a team that could sneak into the final four. The first half was an offensive shootout but in the second half, Georgia, whose defense had been suspect all last year, managed to get a handle on Clemson. Based on an opening weekend game, Georgia appears to have a clear path to getting to Atlanta and representing the East.
Two teams who managed victories in the opening weekend and who are breathing sighs of relief are Ohio State and Notre Dame. Ohio State was a top five team entering the season but with Braxton Miller’s season ending injury, many think Ohio State is going to have real problems down the line. OSU managed to top Navy 34-17 and this means that Urban Meyer has more time to get his offense to gel under redshirt freshman J.T. Barrett. The concern for OSU is not that Barrett isn’t up to the task but that he has been thrown into the role with so little time before the season starts. If Ohio State doesn’t have a great season, it will most likely not fall squarely on the injury of Miller as OSU allowed Navy to amass 370 yards on the ground. Notre Dame was heavily favored against Rice and managed to win big but the first half was a struggle for the Irish. The opener against Rice marked the return of Everett Golson who didn’t play last year because of disciplinary issues. Notre Dame sorely missed him last year. This was a year that Irish fans felt could be a return to the heights of 2012 but Notre Dame was without five players and is currently embroiled in an academic scandal. Brian Kelly has a monumental task in getting his team to stay focused this year as most think the academic scandal will be a continual distraction throughout the year.
Another team that has been a lot of people’s pick to be a surprise team this year is UCLA. UCLA opened up against Virginia beating them 28-20. UCLA managed to get the victory but there was nothing in their eight point victory over the Cavaliers that seemed impressive enough to signal that UCLA was ready to rise to the top of the PAC 12. Other PAC 12 powers, Oregon and Stanford opened up with easy games that really told us nothing.
Okay, starting next week and each week thereafter, I am going to name four teams that I think would be in the playoffs. This is going to be based on their performance throughout the year and will not take into account their rankings. For obvious reasons, these will be wildly inaccurate in the first part of the season. THESE ARE NOT PREDICTIONS FOR THE END OF THE YEAR. My four team selection will be based solely on what has happened so far and if the playoff were today. As an example, for this week, I would only include teams that faced off in premier games so Oklahoma, Oregon, Stanford, Ohio State, Notre Dame, etc would not be considered. I am not naming four teams this week because I am really hard-pressed to come up with four teams based on the games through Saturday night. Florida State would be in but from there I am stumped. The teams I would choose from to make up the other three would be Georgia, Texas A&M, LSU, Oklahoma State, and Wisconsin. Yes, there are a lot of SEC teams in there and yes, I have two teams that lost their openers but like the committee, I am going to look at the body of work. I was impressed with both Oklahoma State and Wisconsin in their losses and based on what I saw, I expect both to challenge for their respective conference titles. As for the three SEC teams, they each faced stiff competition in Week one and won their games.
Notre Dame and the Conference Dilemma
Notre Dame is in the midst of a scandal right now. Academic scandals aren’t anything new in college football. Scandals and Notre Dame however, are quite new. How this will all play out in the near and not so near future is unknown. One thing that I have learned is that you cannot predict how the NCAA will treat school infractions. Some schools look like they are staring down the barrel of a gun and wind up getting slaps on the wrists while others receive major punishments for what appear to be nominal infractions. NCAA sanctions and uniformity do not go hand in hand. Notre Dame is a school that instills passions in college football fans. Simply put, you either love them or hate them.
Overall, this is good for a college football team; the worst thing any team can invoke is apathy. How passionate are most fans about Wyoming? Regardless of the negative feelings, Notre Dame is the team that represents college football more than any other. If, some day in the future, there is no more college football and all that is known of it is just a few sentences in a history book, you can be guaranteed that one of those sentences will mention Notre Dame. I don’t write this as a Notre Dame homer. I went to Alabama. Most Alabama fans get particularly annoyed with the Notre Dame accolades.
We can make argument after argument why Alabama is historically the better team yet Notre Dame gets Rudy and the best Alabama can muster is a small, fictional blurb in Forest Gump. C'est la vie. One of the reasons Notre Dame is Notre Dame is that the school has always held itself out as being above the football factory mentality. These aren’t just words either, Notre Dame has foregone extra money and extra playing time for its players by rejecting bowl bids when it felt its team wasn’t worthy of a bowl game. Notre Dame fires coaches before they even coach a game because of lies on a résumé. However, Notre Dame doesn’t live in a bubble. Many of their decisions regarding their football team are based generating money for the team and the school . . . including their unwillingness to join a conference.
However, those profits are proving to be shortsighted in terms of getting Notre Dame back to a point of football relevancy. It is not a coincidence that Notre Dame has fallen off of the map of college football power players some twenty to twenty five years ago and has yet to really return. Notre Dame saw a glimmer of hope in 2012 but the Irish’s loss to Alabama was a very good measuring stick for just how far removed Notre Dame was from modern college football elite. Notre Dame sits at a crossroad. Giving up autonomy and money to join a conference would almost guarantee that Notre Dame will eventually get back on top of the mountain but more than the loss of revenue, Notre Dame threatens to give up its identity. As we are learning though, Notre Dame’s identity is changing even if they keep on the same path. Notre Dame of 2014 isn’t the same Notre Dame of 1989. The Notre Dame of 2039 could be the Notre Dame that instills no real passion or hatred. If Notre Dame thinks that isn’t possible, they only need to look across to their ancient arch-rival Army. Army was Notre Dame before Notre Dame was Notre Dame. College football is littered with once great giants who have all but disappeared from the ranks of the relevant.
The major difference between college football when Notre Dame was relevant and college football today is television. Look at conference realignment 1990s versus 21st Century realignment. In the early 1990s, the SEC expanded from ten teams to twelve teams. The SEC originally pursued Florida State and Miami but after being rejected by both schools, the SEC added Arkansas and South Carolina. These were easy additions that made sense based on geography and fan base. Conference realignment in the 21st Century is based on television markets. When the SEC expanded again, Florida State, Clemson, and one time SEC member, Georgia Tech were off the table. All three teams being a part of the SEC made sense as they all have their arch-rivals in the SEC. What made sense on a fan level, doomed them on a financial level. Not one of three aforementioned teams could provide much in the way of expanding the television market.
Commissioner Mike Slive understood that in order to negotiate a better contract with ESPN he had to one, obtain a product that was not already a part of the existing contract, thereby forcing ESPN to renegotiate, and two, improve the product so that ESPN would be willing to write a much bigger check. Texas and Missouri have a whole lot of new television sets. The SEC is not alone in this process. The Pac 10/12 tried to go after those same Texas television sets via an attempt to add Texas. The BigTen just added Maryland and Rutgers. All of this is for expanding television markets, which creates higher revenue, which translates into more success, which then translates into higher revenue, etc. etc. The long and short of this is that the college football middle class is shrinking and is quickly becoming a world of have and have nots. Who is to blame for all of this money above all attitude in college football? The answer is Notre Dame. In the early 1990s, as Notre Dame was near the pinnacle of its success, Notre Dame negotiated out a legendary contract with NBC in which NBC would televise every game with Notre Dame. This should have solidified Notre Dame as a powerhouse for decades.
Imagine being a coach of Notre Dame, walking into a recruit’s house and saying, you will be on National TV every single time you play. It didn’t actually work out that way. Notre Dame was slipping into mediocrity and it was on display nationally. Notre Dame had inadvertently filmed its own demise. The biggest problem Notre Dame has that other schools can avoid, is that Notre Dame has to go it alone. Instead of comparing Notre Dame to another school, it’s more accurate to compare it to another conference. Because Notre Dame is an independent, it is essentially a conference unto itself. This is great when Notre Dame is great but when Notre Dame is bad, it is the equivalent of the entire conference collapsing. Compare Notre Dame with the SEC for the last couple of decades and it becomes easily seen. In the early 1990s, when Notre Dame was on top, the top teams of the SEC were Florida and to a lesser extent Alabama. Alabama begins its descent in the mid to late 1990s and is replaced by Tennessee. When Florida has some bumpy years, LSU emerges. Tennessee disappears, Florida reappears, Alabama reappears, Florida disappears, and lately, Auburn appears. This doesn’t even factor the plethora of SEC teams with lesser successes. Tennessee, Kentucky, Vandy, Mississippi State, all make far more money now than they did twenty years ago and even three years ago. Vanderbilt in particular was a team that hadn’t played in bowl games in decades, hadn’t even been ranked in decades but managed to take the money that it was given, couple it would very good coaching hires, and return to relevance for the first time since the 1940s.
In case you are wondering, Vanderbilt’s academic requirements for enrollment of student athletes is more stringent than Notre Dame’s. During this same time, college football’s most elite program has managed to continue to lose ground. On some level, Notre Dame doesn’t want a conference to swallow its brand. The truth is that Notre Dame entering a conference would be protecting its brand. More than likely those in South Bend who could make that decision realize that entering a conference doesn’t mean losing Notre Dame. If you are looking for the real reason Notre Dame fails to join a conference, all you have to do is follow the money. Notre Dame is still a very attractive brand and Notre Dame makes a lot of money on that brand. If Notre Dame were to enter a conference and place its revenue share in the conference pot, the short term would result in Notre Dame having less money. Conferences have learned from the Texas/Big 12 debacle that allowing a team to keep a separate revenue share is essentially allowing a cancer within the conference.
Right now, the ACC and Notre Dame have worked out a deal in which Notre Dame has agreed to play ACC teams. This isn’t joining a conference so much as it is a joint venture of the ACC and Notre Dame with both hoping to fill their respective coffers. This was a much more attractive deal to the ACC before the impending Notre Dame scandal. The outcome of this scandal could certainly sour any future joint ventures for the Irish. As mentioned before, scandals are nothing new. Alabama was devastated by a scandal in the early 2000s. Penn State, a one time independent team, is trying to make its way through the forest of NCAA sanctions. USC is hoping that they are past their darkest point of the scandal that negated their national championship. I could argue that all three of these teams could stand alone as independents. USC and Alabama were Rose Bowl rivals before Rockne stepped foot on Notre Dame’s campus. All three of these teams have managed to make it through because when they were down, the conference checks kept coming in. Alabama is at the top again thanks to the successes, of Tennessee, LSU, and Florida.
I would hate to think that politics would play into any decisions by an infractions committee but if Notre Dame fans want to look for conspiracy theories, a harsh decision from the committee on infractions could almost force Notre Dame to join a conference. Even if Notre Dame only gets a slap on the wrist, they are only one major scandal away from devastation. Notre Dame, joining a conference could very quickly put the Irish on the road to relevancy. A conference adds division championships, conference championships, a larger recruiting base, television contracts based on the success of the conference and not the success of the team, in short, immediate dividends that Notre Dame could reap before the next president takes the oath of office. If it keeps going the other way, Notre Dame will drift even further down the road to apathy and will do so in the name of short term profits.
An entire generation of kids has been born and graduated college since the last time Notre Dame was actually relevant. Notre Dame’s greatest success in the 21st Century comes from an obsessed media that covers Notre Dame based on their own and their audience’s nostalgia but nostalgia is a finite fuel and needs present successes to keep producing. Notre Dame joining a conference is good for Notre Dame but it is also good for all of college football, for those that love Notre Dame and those that despise Notre Dame. It’s an investment that virtually guarantees that Notre Dame will be relevant beyond our lifetimes and not just relegated to a blurb in a history book.
Overall, this is good for a college football team; the worst thing any team can invoke is apathy. How passionate are most fans about Wyoming? Regardless of the negative feelings, Notre Dame is the team that represents college football more than any other. If, some day in the future, there is no more college football and all that is known of it is just a few sentences in a history book, you can be guaranteed that one of those sentences will mention Notre Dame. I don’t write this as a Notre Dame homer. I went to Alabama. Most Alabama fans get particularly annoyed with the Notre Dame accolades.
We can make argument after argument why Alabama is historically the better team yet Notre Dame gets Rudy and the best Alabama can muster is a small, fictional blurb in Forest Gump. C'est la vie. One of the reasons Notre Dame is Notre Dame is that the school has always held itself out as being above the football factory mentality. These aren’t just words either, Notre Dame has foregone extra money and extra playing time for its players by rejecting bowl bids when it felt its team wasn’t worthy of a bowl game. Notre Dame fires coaches before they even coach a game because of lies on a résumé. However, Notre Dame doesn’t live in a bubble. Many of their decisions regarding their football team are based generating money for the team and the school . . . including their unwillingness to join a conference.
However, those profits are proving to be shortsighted in terms of getting Notre Dame back to a point of football relevancy. It is not a coincidence that Notre Dame has fallen off of the map of college football power players some twenty to twenty five years ago and has yet to really return. Notre Dame saw a glimmer of hope in 2012 but the Irish’s loss to Alabama was a very good measuring stick for just how far removed Notre Dame was from modern college football elite. Notre Dame sits at a crossroad. Giving up autonomy and money to join a conference would almost guarantee that Notre Dame will eventually get back on top of the mountain but more than the loss of revenue, Notre Dame threatens to give up its identity. As we are learning though, Notre Dame’s identity is changing even if they keep on the same path. Notre Dame of 2014 isn’t the same Notre Dame of 1989. The Notre Dame of 2039 could be the Notre Dame that instills no real passion or hatred. If Notre Dame thinks that isn’t possible, they only need to look across to their ancient arch-rival Army. Army was Notre Dame before Notre Dame was Notre Dame. College football is littered with once great giants who have all but disappeared from the ranks of the relevant.
The major difference between college football when Notre Dame was relevant and college football today is television. Look at conference realignment 1990s versus 21st Century realignment. In the early 1990s, the SEC expanded from ten teams to twelve teams. The SEC originally pursued Florida State and Miami but after being rejected by both schools, the SEC added Arkansas and South Carolina. These were easy additions that made sense based on geography and fan base. Conference realignment in the 21st Century is based on television markets. When the SEC expanded again, Florida State, Clemson, and one time SEC member, Georgia Tech were off the table. All three teams being a part of the SEC made sense as they all have their arch-rivals in the SEC. What made sense on a fan level, doomed them on a financial level. Not one of three aforementioned teams could provide much in the way of expanding the television market.
Commissioner Mike Slive understood that in order to negotiate a better contract with ESPN he had to one, obtain a product that was not already a part of the existing contract, thereby forcing ESPN to renegotiate, and two, improve the product so that ESPN would be willing to write a much bigger check. Texas and Missouri have a whole lot of new television sets. The SEC is not alone in this process. The Pac 10/12 tried to go after those same Texas television sets via an attempt to add Texas. The BigTen just added Maryland and Rutgers. All of this is for expanding television markets, which creates higher revenue, which translates into more success, which then translates into higher revenue, etc. etc. The long and short of this is that the college football middle class is shrinking and is quickly becoming a world of have and have nots. Who is to blame for all of this money above all attitude in college football? The answer is Notre Dame. In the early 1990s, as Notre Dame was near the pinnacle of its success, Notre Dame negotiated out a legendary contract with NBC in which NBC would televise every game with Notre Dame. This should have solidified Notre Dame as a powerhouse for decades.
Imagine being a coach of Notre Dame, walking into a recruit’s house and saying, you will be on National TV every single time you play. It didn’t actually work out that way. Notre Dame was slipping into mediocrity and it was on display nationally. Notre Dame had inadvertently filmed its own demise. The biggest problem Notre Dame has that other schools can avoid, is that Notre Dame has to go it alone. Instead of comparing Notre Dame to another school, it’s more accurate to compare it to another conference. Because Notre Dame is an independent, it is essentially a conference unto itself. This is great when Notre Dame is great but when Notre Dame is bad, it is the equivalent of the entire conference collapsing. Compare Notre Dame with the SEC for the last couple of decades and it becomes easily seen. In the early 1990s, when Notre Dame was on top, the top teams of the SEC were Florida and to a lesser extent Alabama. Alabama begins its descent in the mid to late 1990s and is replaced by Tennessee. When Florida has some bumpy years, LSU emerges. Tennessee disappears, Florida reappears, Alabama reappears, Florida disappears, and lately, Auburn appears. This doesn’t even factor the plethora of SEC teams with lesser successes. Tennessee, Kentucky, Vandy, Mississippi State, all make far more money now than they did twenty years ago and even three years ago. Vanderbilt in particular was a team that hadn’t played in bowl games in decades, hadn’t even been ranked in decades but managed to take the money that it was given, couple it would very good coaching hires, and return to relevance for the first time since the 1940s.
In case you are wondering, Vanderbilt’s academic requirements for enrollment of student athletes is more stringent than Notre Dame’s. During this same time, college football’s most elite program has managed to continue to lose ground. On some level, Notre Dame doesn’t want a conference to swallow its brand. The truth is that Notre Dame entering a conference would be protecting its brand. More than likely those in South Bend who could make that decision realize that entering a conference doesn’t mean losing Notre Dame. If you are looking for the real reason Notre Dame fails to join a conference, all you have to do is follow the money. Notre Dame is still a very attractive brand and Notre Dame makes a lot of money on that brand. If Notre Dame were to enter a conference and place its revenue share in the conference pot, the short term would result in Notre Dame having less money. Conferences have learned from the Texas/Big 12 debacle that allowing a team to keep a separate revenue share is essentially allowing a cancer within the conference.
Right now, the ACC and Notre Dame have worked out a deal in which Notre Dame has agreed to play ACC teams. This isn’t joining a conference so much as it is a joint venture of the ACC and Notre Dame with both hoping to fill their respective coffers. This was a much more attractive deal to the ACC before the impending Notre Dame scandal. The outcome of this scandal could certainly sour any future joint ventures for the Irish. As mentioned before, scandals are nothing new. Alabama was devastated by a scandal in the early 2000s. Penn State, a one time independent team, is trying to make its way through the forest of NCAA sanctions. USC is hoping that they are past their darkest point of the scandal that negated their national championship. I could argue that all three of these teams could stand alone as independents. USC and Alabama were Rose Bowl rivals before Rockne stepped foot on Notre Dame’s campus. All three of these teams have managed to make it through because when they were down, the conference checks kept coming in. Alabama is at the top again thanks to the successes, of Tennessee, LSU, and Florida.
I would hate to think that politics would play into any decisions by an infractions committee but if Notre Dame fans want to look for conspiracy theories, a harsh decision from the committee on infractions could almost force Notre Dame to join a conference. Even if Notre Dame only gets a slap on the wrist, they are only one major scandal away from devastation. Notre Dame, joining a conference could very quickly put the Irish on the road to relevancy. A conference adds division championships, conference championships, a larger recruiting base, television contracts based on the success of the conference and not the success of the team, in short, immediate dividends that Notre Dame could reap before the next president takes the oath of office. If it keeps going the other way, Notre Dame will drift even further down the road to apathy and will do so in the name of short term profits.
An entire generation of kids has been born and graduated college since the last time Notre Dame was actually relevant. Notre Dame’s greatest success in the 21st Century comes from an obsessed media that covers Notre Dame based on their own and their audience’s nostalgia but nostalgia is a finite fuel and needs present successes to keep producing. Notre Dame joining a conference is good for Notre Dame but it is also good for all of college football, for those that love Notre Dame and those that despise Notre Dame. It’s an investment that virtually guarantees that Notre Dame will be relevant beyond our lifetimes and not just relegated to a blurb in a history book.
Looking ahead to the 2034 Season
It’s hard to imagine that anything could top the crazy ending of 2033. No one could have imagined that 10th place Clemson would win it all. The FBS1 title was taken by Clemson in dramatic fashion. Kudos to UCF for their FBS2 victory as well. Their FBS2 Championship should really help them build their trust funds for their players and we all know that is the number one factor in recruiting. If they keep it up, they could garner a spot in the FBS1. I know we’re all thinking Rutgers is on their way out. We all see how the rich get richer in this game. I doubt most of you are aware but the AP Poll came out earlier this week. I’m probably showing my age a little bit but I remember when the polls came out and well it was a pretty big deal. Not so much anymore. To quote coach Luck, “polls are an old man’s folly.”
Obviously, most would agree that college football is as good as it has ever been. Tonight, let’s take a look back at the perfect storm that finally led to what many believe is the perfection of the greatest game. I think I would be remiss to say that the playoff was the starting point. For years it was a much sought after goal and for a long time it seemed unattainable but here we are celebrating the twenty year anniversary of the playoffs. Who back in 2014 could have imagined how much the decision to have a playoff could have changed the game and how it could have grown into the spectacle that it is today.
I think 2014 was a perfect storm in a lot of ways. The Power Five conferences received autonomy. At first it was almost ceremonial but today, the Power Five autonomy is wholly separate from the NCAA. I guess it would be remiss to mention that back then the Power Five was somewhat chaotic. Some conferences had fourteen teams others had ten, some had championship games where others didn’t. From this chaos, a committee was forced to choose four teams. In 2014, this was thought to be an easy task but there was surprisingly more controversy than was expected. Finally in 2021, the Power Five agreed to realign their conferences and restructure the playoffs to what they are now. The conferences all expanded to 16 teams, now known as the Super 5. The five champions of the Super Five automatically advanced. Each conference is then eligible to place their second ranked teams as decided by their conference committees. The ninth and tenth ranked teams play the seventh and eighth ranked teams to play in to the eight team playoff. The ACC’s selection of Clemson last year was questionable as Virginia had played a tougher schedule and had won their division but the blowout loss to ACC Champ Penn State was simply too much for the ACC five person AD committee to overcome. Clemson becomes the lowest ranked team to win it all and the first team with five losses to win the Championship. Prior to last year, no team ranked lower than fourth had ever won it all.
Of course probably the biggest factor that changed college football was the O’Bannon case decided in the summer of ’14. At first this case seemed to have a lot of bark and no bite but once the Power Five realized that instead of fighting the decision in OBannon, they could use it as a recruiting tool to entice the best players to their schools, all gloves were off. This became the deciding factor in the split of the FBS. With the top teams of the FBS schools able to set up lucrative trust funds for their football and basketball students, the gap between those with money and those without was simply too much for mid tier schools to overcome. This, of course, led to the Power Five Mad Grab as it has been called. Oklahoma’s defection to the SEC forced Texas to finally give up its monetary autonomy. Showing my age again I know but man I miss the Red River Rivalry. The ACC thought they had the in road with Notre Dame but SEC Commissioner Sankey’s pitch to Notre Dame that they would receive a 1/12th share of revenue for five years in return for a ten year surrender of their television rights was simply too much for Notre Dame to refuse. Who doesn’t love SEC money? With Notre Dame playing near the top again, the other thirteen SEC schools’ willingness to give up some of their money to nab Notre Dame has paid dividends. The ACC did pretty well with grabbing Penn State from the BigTen. Penn State isn’t Notre Dame but Coach Geno Smith has given them a lot of stability. It says a lot to be at a school for ten years when the average stay is 2.75. Of course lately his seat is getting pretty hot. His national championship and four playoff appearances are starting to look very small in the rear view mirror.
Well what should we expect in 2034? I’m not going out on a limb when I say that five of last year’s teams will be in the playoff again. There isn’t a lot of turnover from year to year. What’s that saying? A playoff spot means higher revenue, higher revenue equals higher player trust funds and a championship is like getting five playoff spots. Now folks next year things are going to change drastically. All of the BigTen’s television contracts are up for renewal along with the Big16s. I’m wagering that at least three teams from each conference will swap places. I know we’ve all heard the rumors that the Big16 is trying to put together a package deal that would bring Michigan and Ohio State to the Big16. Can you imagine a conference that will have Michigan, Ohio State, Texas and two time Big16 champ USC in the same conference? It seems too good to be true. Of course no one could have imagined Florida and Georgia’s defections to the ACC two years ago either. Fox said they were going to outspend ESPN and outspend they did. It’s hard to believe there are still some people out there that preferred the old ways of polls, bowl games, and conflicted national champions. College football is definitely at the pinnacle of success as we enter 2034.
Obviously, most would agree that college football is as good as it has ever been. Tonight, let’s take a look back at the perfect storm that finally led to what many believe is the perfection of the greatest game. I think I would be remiss to say that the playoff was the starting point. For years it was a much sought after goal and for a long time it seemed unattainable but here we are celebrating the twenty year anniversary of the playoffs. Who back in 2014 could have imagined how much the decision to have a playoff could have changed the game and how it could have grown into the spectacle that it is today.
I think 2014 was a perfect storm in a lot of ways. The Power Five conferences received autonomy. At first it was almost ceremonial but today, the Power Five autonomy is wholly separate from the NCAA. I guess it would be remiss to mention that back then the Power Five was somewhat chaotic. Some conferences had fourteen teams others had ten, some had championship games where others didn’t. From this chaos, a committee was forced to choose four teams. In 2014, this was thought to be an easy task but there was surprisingly more controversy than was expected. Finally in 2021, the Power Five agreed to realign their conferences and restructure the playoffs to what they are now. The conferences all expanded to 16 teams, now known as the Super 5. The five champions of the Super Five automatically advanced. Each conference is then eligible to place their second ranked teams as decided by their conference committees. The ninth and tenth ranked teams play the seventh and eighth ranked teams to play in to the eight team playoff. The ACC’s selection of Clemson last year was questionable as Virginia had played a tougher schedule and had won their division but the blowout loss to ACC Champ Penn State was simply too much for the ACC five person AD committee to overcome. Clemson becomes the lowest ranked team to win it all and the first team with five losses to win the Championship. Prior to last year, no team ranked lower than fourth had ever won it all.
Of course probably the biggest factor that changed college football was the O’Bannon case decided in the summer of ’14. At first this case seemed to have a lot of bark and no bite but once the Power Five realized that instead of fighting the decision in OBannon, they could use it as a recruiting tool to entice the best players to their schools, all gloves were off. This became the deciding factor in the split of the FBS. With the top teams of the FBS schools able to set up lucrative trust funds for their football and basketball students, the gap between those with money and those without was simply too much for mid tier schools to overcome. This, of course, led to the Power Five Mad Grab as it has been called. Oklahoma’s defection to the SEC forced Texas to finally give up its monetary autonomy. Showing my age again I know but man I miss the Red River Rivalry. The ACC thought they had the in road with Notre Dame but SEC Commissioner Sankey’s pitch to Notre Dame that they would receive a 1/12th share of revenue for five years in return for a ten year surrender of their television rights was simply too much for Notre Dame to refuse. Who doesn’t love SEC money? With Notre Dame playing near the top again, the other thirteen SEC schools’ willingness to give up some of their money to nab Notre Dame has paid dividends. The ACC did pretty well with grabbing Penn State from the BigTen. Penn State isn’t Notre Dame but Coach Geno Smith has given them a lot of stability. It says a lot to be at a school for ten years when the average stay is 2.75. Of course lately his seat is getting pretty hot. His national championship and four playoff appearances are starting to look very small in the rear view mirror.
Well what should we expect in 2034? I’m not going out on a limb when I say that five of last year’s teams will be in the playoff again. There isn’t a lot of turnover from year to year. What’s that saying? A playoff spot means higher revenue, higher revenue equals higher player trust funds and a championship is like getting five playoff spots. Now folks next year things are going to change drastically. All of the BigTen’s television contracts are up for renewal along with the Big16s. I’m wagering that at least three teams from each conference will swap places. I know we’ve all heard the rumors that the Big16 is trying to put together a package deal that would bring Michigan and Ohio State to the Big16. Can you imagine a conference that will have Michigan, Ohio State, Texas and two time Big16 champ USC in the same conference? It seems too good to be true. Of course no one could have imagined Florida and Georgia’s defections to the ACC two years ago either. Fox said they were going to outspend ESPN and outspend they did. It’s hard to believe there are still some people out there that preferred the old ways of polls, bowl games, and conflicted national champions. College football is definitely at the pinnacle of success as we enter 2034.
Alabama and Nick Saban's Climb Back Up The Mountain
Well so far in this pre-season, I have reminisced about the past and warned of the future but it’s finally time to remain in the present and take a look around. This season I will be one of CFB’s beat writers for the 2014 Alabama Crimson Tide. Hey, it’s not a bad gig. I grew up watching Alabama, eventually went to Alabama and now I get to write about my favorite subject . . . Alabama. Truthfully, I have been writing about Alabama and the SEC for quite a few years. Now I just have to do it for a larger audience. The bad news is that now I have to check my facts and not rely on my ever growing foggy memory.
This will be a pivotal year for the Tide. Alabama has finally been knocked off of its perch and history shows that getting back up, once your down, is nearly impossible. In my last article, I wrote about Paul W. “Bear” Bryant. One of Bryant’s most impressive achievements was Bryant getting Alabama back to the top once the program had started to decline under his stewardship. Accomplishing that, while remaining at the same school, is almost unheard of. Even legendary coach Marty Schottenheimer once quipped that ten years was as much as any head coach should stay at a program.
Nick Saban came to Alabama in the 2007 season and enters his eighth year as the head man at Alabama. During that time, he has won two SEC championships and three national championships. Most would agree those are pretty good results for seven years. One of the reasons it is so hard for a great coach to have success at the same program past the ten year mark is because that coach’s success changes the game. Saban coming into the SEC was a direct response to Steve Spurrier’s success in the 1990s. Spurrier came in as someone who could get Florida past the strong defenses that were left over from the Bryant era. Now Saban has created an atmosphere in the SEC where athletic directors are searching for offensive gurus that can break through and those athletic directors are having success.
In any conference, the successes of offenses and defenses are cyclical. As one rises, the other falls and vice versa. The SEC that has been dominated by defense is finding it hard to keep up with the new offensive coaching regimes. Gus Malzahn of Auburn and Kevin Sumlin of Texas A&M are leading the way in providing offenses that are exposing SEC defenses. If Alabama has any hope of remaining on top, it’s going to require that Alabama adjusts. This isn’t just a matter of players feeling “entitled.” This is a problem that goes to coaching.
Nick Saban has already made major adjustments coming into the 2014 season. The biggest adjustment is bringing in Lane Kiffin as his new Offensive Coordinator. The jury is out on Lane Kiffin and it has been out. He hasn’t been around any place long enough to get a good gauge on his coaching abilities. He had a great load of success during his years at USC as an assistant but that is counter-balanced to his years of underachieving at USC while he was a head coach. Kiffin is surrounded with top tier talent. No team in the country has recruited better than Alabama. Alabama is making a change at the quarterback position and it is a significant change. Alabama is replacing its most successful quarterback in its storied history.
Even with the current crop of talent, Kiffin will have some additional talent at his reach. Alabama has brought on Florida State transfer Jake Coker. Coker was a highly touted recruit at Florida State. Still, Coker doesn’t have the job cemented. Returning backup Blake Sims is still in competition for the starting position.
Whoever gets the nod at quarterback will have a plethora of great receivers as targets. Amari Cooper and Christion Jones are veteran receivers that both excel under pressure and are prone to amazing feats of athleticism when needed. This will be balanced out with Alabama using Saban’s method of rotating two to three running backs. A lot of excitement surrounds Alabama running back Derrick Henry. Henry quickly draws comparisons to Trent Richardson, Alabama’s pounding running back from a few years ago. In short, this is an offense than can, should, and will score. If there are question marks about the 2014 Tide, it comes from Saban’s specialty, the defense.
Even though Alabama’s offense didn’t always excel last year, there was one clear reason why Alabama didn’t return for a third try for a national title. The defense, which remained strong for most of the season, was prone to collapses and mostly those collapses came at the hands of very strong, attacking offenses. Alabama’s secondary was shredded by Texas A&M last year. Alabama’s normal ability to stop the run proved anemic against Auburn in last year’s Iron Bowl and Oklahoma scored in a variety of ways against the Tide in the Sugar Bowl.
Nick Saban loves a challenge. His love of a challenge is so great that it was rumored that he almost left Tuscaloosa for Austin last year to become the head man of the Texas Longhorns. The truth is there is more than enough of a challenge for Nick Saban in Tuscaloosa. If Alabama were to make the four team playoff and win this year’s championship, from the outside, it wouldn’t look like much of a surprise but the reality would be that Saban would have staved off the young guns that are on his heels. To do that is something that even the greatest coaches of all time almost always fail to do. Even Bryant, who was able to finally adjust to the game of the late 1960s, took a few years to get Alabama back to the top. This will be one of the most pivotal years in Saban’s coaching career and indicative as to whether Alabama is still at the top or if the high water mark for Alabama happened in January 2013.
This will be a pivotal year for the Tide. Alabama has finally been knocked off of its perch and history shows that getting back up, once your down, is nearly impossible. In my last article, I wrote about Paul W. “Bear” Bryant. One of Bryant’s most impressive achievements was Bryant getting Alabama back to the top once the program had started to decline under his stewardship. Accomplishing that, while remaining at the same school, is almost unheard of. Even legendary coach Marty Schottenheimer once quipped that ten years was as much as any head coach should stay at a program.
Nick Saban came to Alabama in the 2007 season and enters his eighth year as the head man at Alabama. During that time, he has won two SEC championships and three national championships. Most would agree those are pretty good results for seven years. One of the reasons it is so hard for a great coach to have success at the same program past the ten year mark is because that coach’s success changes the game. Saban coming into the SEC was a direct response to Steve Spurrier’s success in the 1990s. Spurrier came in as someone who could get Florida past the strong defenses that were left over from the Bryant era. Now Saban has created an atmosphere in the SEC where athletic directors are searching for offensive gurus that can break through and those athletic directors are having success.
In any conference, the successes of offenses and defenses are cyclical. As one rises, the other falls and vice versa. The SEC that has been dominated by defense is finding it hard to keep up with the new offensive coaching regimes. Gus Malzahn of Auburn and Kevin Sumlin of Texas A&M are leading the way in providing offenses that are exposing SEC defenses. If Alabama has any hope of remaining on top, it’s going to require that Alabama adjusts. This isn’t just a matter of players feeling “entitled.” This is a problem that goes to coaching.
Nick Saban has already made major adjustments coming into the 2014 season. The biggest adjustment is bringing in Lane Kiffin as his new Offensive Coordinator. The jury is out on Lane Kiffin and it has been out. He hasn’t been around any place long enough to get a good gauge on his coaching abilities. He had a great load of success during his years at USC as an assistant but that is counter-balanced to his years of underachieving at USC while he was a head coach. Kiffin is surrounded with top tier talent. No team in the country has recruited better than Alabama. Alabama is making a change at the quarterback position and it is a significant change. Alabama is replacing its most successful quarterback in its storied history.
Even with the current crop of talent, Kiffin will have some additional talent at his reach. Alabama has brought on Florida State transfer Jake Coker. Coker was a highly touted recruit at Florida State. Still, Coker doesn’t have the job cemented. Returning backup Blake Sims is still in competition for the starting position.
Whoever gets the nod at quarterback will have a plethora of great receivers as targets. Amari Cooper and Christion Jones are veteran receivers that both excel under pressure and are prone to amazing feats of athleticism when needed. This will be balanced out with Alabama using Saban’s method of rotating two to three running backs. A lot of excitement surrounds Alabama running back Derrick Henry. Henry quickly draws comparisons to Trent Richardson, Alabama’s pounding running back from a few years ago. In short, this is an offense than can, should, and will score. If there are question marks about the 2014 Tide, it comes from Saban’s specialty, the defense.
Even though Alabama’s offense didn’t always excel last year, there was one clear reason why Alabama didn’t return for a third try for a national title. The defense, which remained strong for most of the season, was prone to collapses and mostly those collapses came at the hands of very strong, attacking offenses. Alabama’s secondary was shredded by Texas A&M last year. Alabama’s normal ability to stop the run proved anemic against Auburn in last year’s Iron Bowl and Oklahoma scored in a variety of ways against the Tide in the Sugar Bowl.
Nick Saban loves a challenge. His love of a challenge is so great that it was rumored that he almost left Tuscaloosa for Austin last year to become the head man of the Texas Longhorns. The truth is there is more than enough of a challenge for Nick Saban in Tuscaloosa. If Alabama were to make the four team playoff and win this year’s championship, from the outside, it wouldn’t look like much of a surprise but the reality would be that Saban would have staved off the young guns that are on his heels. To do that is something that even the greatest coaches of all time almost always fail to do. Even Bryant, who was able to finally adjust to the game of the late 1960s, took a few years to get Alabama back to the top. This will be one of the most pivotal years in Saban’s coaching career and indicative as to whether Alabama is still at the top or if the high water mark for Alabama happened in January 2013.
Revisiting The Bear
As we enter the 2014 season, The Alabama Crimson Tide is in the midst of a new Golden Age of college football. Nick Saban has brought Alabama back to the glory days. Back is the key word in that last sentence. Back. Saban, statistically, is on par with another coach that Alabama fans hold in high esteem. The coach was Paul William Bryant but most know him more by his nickname, The Bear.
A lot of schools have legendary coaches in their past. There was Knute Rockne of Notre Dame, Joe Paterno of Penn State, Bobby Bowden of Florida State, Bo Schembechler of Michigan, and Woody Hayes of Ohio State just to name a few. Some of these men can match Bryant in terms of success, in some categories, they can surpass Bryant and yet Bryant carries a mystique that even the most successful coaches fail to achieve. To understand Paul Bryant’s affect on college football, you have to understand the man.
The key to understanding Bryant is to not look at him as simply a football coach. He was a man that became so ingrained in the psyche of state of Alabama that he is sometimes joked as being a deity. Even Auburn fans typically give deference to Bryant. Without tracing his entire life, know that he was born in a tiny town of Arkansas and he was poor. He was a bottom rung child. Many attribute Bryant’s nickname to his gravely voice earned through many years of being a hard drinker and a smoker but he actually got the nickname when he was a child. At the age of thirteen, as he was walking back from town, a circus promoter was promoting a traveling circus. He challenged the townspeople to a wrestling match with the circus bear. The promoter would pay anyone willing to do it, one dollar for every minute they stayed in the ring with the bear. The only one willing to take up the challenge was thirteen year old Paul Bryant. Bryant wrestled the bear, was bitten on the ear, and as he always later joked, didn’t even get the money.
In today’s southern football atmosphere, the southern schools are bitter rivals. If you ever wonder though why they seem to stick together with chants of S-E-C, a lot of that has to do with how southern football was originally judged. Superior college football, (back then simply football), was found in the Northeast, Midwest, and, West coast. In the 1920s, southerners were not so far removed from The Civil War. People in the south experienced a backlash of anger from the rest of the country and it was during those times that the stereotypes of inferiority and being backwards were born. In 1925, Alabama received a reluctant invitation to play in the 1926 Rose Bowl. Alabama wasn’t even a first or second choice to play in The Rose Bowl and no one outside the state of Alabama expected Alabama to win. Some predictions, legitimate predictions, had Alabama losing 100-0. Considering that only a decade prior Cumberland Tennessee lost to Georgia Tech 222-0, a 100-0 score wasn’t unfathomable. Even Will Rogers got in on the act by calling Alabama the Tuscaloosers.
Alabama didn’t lose. They won the 1926 Rose Bowl by beating Washington 20-19. On that day, Alabama stepped out of the role of a regional team and developed a following throughout the South. It was listening to a public radio broadcast of Alabama’s victory that Bryant became a fan of Alabama.
Legend is that Bryant showed up in Tuscaloosa when he was still a kid but was told to come back when he was of age. Whatever the truth, Bryant did show back up in Tuscaloosa. He was a great football player but while playing for The Capstone, Bryant was given another nickname, “The Other End.” He was called that because the guy playing on the other side was Don Hutson, a man that many consider to be one of the greatest to ever play the game. Bryant had his moments. In 1935, he was playing against Tennessee. During the game he broke a leg bone. He kept playing. To verify the story, Ralph McGill who was a sports writer for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, asked to see the x-ray. McGill confirmed the veracity, printed the story in the AJC and when Alabama went to play Georgia, Bryant was greeted with an ovation. All of this and he had yet to coach a game.
A few years after Bryant’s college career came to an end, the U.S. found itself embroiled in a World War. Bryant enlisted in the Navy. When the boat he was on was charged by an enemy vessel, the orders were given to abandon ship. Bryant disobeyed those orders. Such was the nature of Bryant. In later years, Bryant was known for his toughness on his players but Bryant never asked one of his players to do anything that he wouldn’t have done himself. When he looked for players, he looked for one quality among all others, he looked for winners. He knew if a kid had a drive to succeed that he could get them to achieve greatness.
Of course Bryant entered coaching and yes, he won at Alabama but before he won at Alabama, he won at Maryland, he won at Kentucky, he won at Texas A&M and then Mama called. That’s what he told his players at Texas A&M. Alabama had fallen on hard times. After decades of success under two great coaches Wallace Wade and Frank Thomas, Alabama was losing and losing a lot. Bryant had developed a reputation as a young, very tough coach. Alabama’s hire of its first alumnus J.B. “Ears” Whitworth, had proven disastrous but its second alumnus hire of Paul “Bear” Bryant would become legendary.
Bryant showed up on campus in 1958 and he called a team meeting. As soon as it was time for the meeting to begin, Bryant instructed his assistant coach, Jerry Claiborne to lock the door. When the stragglers tried to come in late, he told Claiborne in front of the team, “tell whoever it is, we don’t need them.”
Bryant was the coach of Alabama for a little more than two decades and in that time, he accomplished a lot. From 1958-1982, he won six national championships. From 1963 to 1982, he won every game that was played in Tuscaloosa. That’s nineteen years without a loss. Steve Spurrier suffered his first college defeat at the hands of Bryant. Joe Namath, Kenny Stabler, Ozzy Newsome, and George Blanda all played for Bryant. Bryant didn’t come to a school that hadn’t known success, Bryant followed two coaches that had already placed Alabama on the map. Before Bryant coached his first game, Alabama had already claimed five national championships, had played in six Rose Bowls and amassed a 4-1-1 record in those games. Alabama was the last participant in the last open Rose Bowl and to this date has more Rose Bowl appearances than any team not from the Big Ten or Pac10/12. Even with all of Alabama’s previous success, Bryant dwarfed it and redefined what success meant at The Capstone.
It would be remiss to fail to talk about Bryant, Alabama and segregation. If Bryant was the most popular figure in Alabama during the 1960s and 70s, the second most popular figure was Governor George Wallace. Wallace was a segregationist governor who is most famous for standing in front of Foster Auditorium on the Alabama campus and making his “Segregation Forever” speech. There was no love loss between Paul W. Bryant and George Wallace. Wallace was less a racist and more an opportunist. When Wallace started his political career, he lost running as a moderate. He lost to a man that used race and segregation as his platform. Wallace realized that if he was going to have a political career in Alabama that he would have to adopt a Segregationist platform. He took to it full force. By the time Wallace’s career was in full swing, he had become one of the faces of Segregation and Southern racism. Bryant had privately expressed his hope that he could integrate the Alabama football team but Wallace had made the task nearly impossible. Wallace used Bryant’s success with an all white team to promote his segregationist policies. At one point Wallace was asked whether he feared Bryant running for Governor, Wallace quipped back, “Why would Bryant want the second best job in the state?”
It can be argued that Bryant’s greatest football game as a coach might be a loss. Bryant was famous for trying to schedule an opponent that he felt he could beat. Joe Paterno told of a time that Bryant called him to schedule a game because of his belief that he could beat Penn State. Bryant was a very good friend of John McKay. McKay, was the head coach of the USC Trojans. Bryant wanted to play USC and he wanted them to come play them Birmingham. McKay and Bryant were very secretive in their talks about the game. Bryant had scheduled a team that seemed to be a much better team. The players that played for Alabama spoke of the preparation before the game and that Bryant lacked his normal intensity. USC fielded a backfield of African-American players. There were legitimate fears from the USC players that they were in real physical danger.
There were no incidents that night other than Alabama getting drummed. Alabama lost the game 42-21. After the game, Bryant approached McKay and thanked him. It was an odd gesture for a man who despised losing. The Alabama loss to USC in 1970 was one of the worst defeats, in terms of score, that Bryant ever suffered. The MVP of the game was Sam “Bam” Cunningham, an African-American USC running back that ran for 135 yards and scored two touchdowns that night. After the game, Jerry Claiborne said, “Sam Cunningham did more for integration in sixty minutes than Martin Luther King, Jr. did in twenty years.” It was said semi-jokingly, but there was a truth to it all the same.
Whether Bryant deliberately scheduled a game that he planned to lose is debatable however, when one considers that Bryant scheduling a game against a fully integrated school and winning would have set back his own established agenda of trying to integrate the Alabama football team, it’s easy to believe that Bryant was okay with the loss. However, Alabama was one of the last schools to fully integrate and Bryant himself admitted years later that he was slow to integrate Alabama. His reasoning was that he felt that it wasn’t the right time. Normally, a statement like that could be seen as a flimsy excuse but one has to remember the role Alabama played. Alabama and its success was in the forefront of the racial scene. In the sixties, Bryant had told his coaches that Alabama wouldn’t be the first to integrate but they also wouldn’t be the third. Bryant wanted Alabama to be one of the first SEC schools to integrate but Wallace’s stance had made it almost impossible. If Bryant brought in the player at the wrong time, Wallace could have used that player’s failures to further his agenda that African-Americans weren’t on par with whites. Bryant was playing a chess match against Wallace with Wallace having the better pieces on the board.
The 1970 USC Alabama game did much to create acceptance of an integrated Crimson Tide. The 1971 rematch was legendary for entirely different reasons. It is mostly a given that a coach is only successful at one school for about ten years. After that, it seems like coaches start a downward arc. Bryant’s time at Alabama followed that arc. After claiming three national championships in the 1960s, Alabama was a team that was starting to decline. One reason was that Alabama hadn’t fully integrated but another was simply that the game had caught up the man that was called Bear.
Bryant wasn’t quite done yet. After a disappointing season in 1970, Bryant visited Darryl Royal of Texas. Texas ran the wishbone offense and Bryant ran a more traditional offense akin to a pro set. It had been a successful offense through the years. The first three SuperBowl MVPs were claimed by two Alabama quarterbacks. However, Bryant saw advantages to running the wishbone and he thought he could make it work.
Under secrecy, Alabama made the switch to the wishbone in the off-season. The 1971 season began with Alabama making a trip to Los Angeles for another date with long time Rose Bowl rival USC. USC was favored but the racial drama of a year before was gone. For the first time in its history, Alabama fielded an integrated team. Alabama upset USC that night and went on to win the rest of their regular season games. Their only loss that season was an Orange Bowl loss to Nebraska.
The wishbone would define Bryant’s teams of the 1970s. Bryant would win three more National Championships. From 1971 through 1979, Alabama would win the SEC championship in every single year but for 1976. Bryant’s streak of five straight SEC championships still stands today. Steve Spurrier came close to tying it when he won four straight SEC championships from 1993-1996 but Tennessee’s upset of Florida in 1997 denied Spurrier his chance to tie that record.
Paul W. Bryant ended his career in 1982. 1982 was a rough year for him. Alabama went 8-4 with losses to Tennessee, Auburn, LSU, and Southern Miss. The year before, Bryant’s 1981 team had captured a share of the SEC crown. However, Bryant felt that 8-4 was simply not good enough for Alabama and he didn’t feel he had the energy to climb up the hill one more time. Bryant retired in 1982 as the coach with the most wins in college football history. A couple of years later Eddie Robinson of Grambling would break that record. Years later Bobby Bowden and Joe Paterno would battle it out to break Bryant’s record in Division I/FBS. Unlike Bryant, they didn’t step down after having one bad season. They constantly felt that there was still one more opportunity to turn it around.
On December 29th, 1982, Bryant coached his last game. It was a 21-15 Liberty Bowl victory over Illinois. Less than one month later on January 26th, 1983, Bryant would be dead. The death came as a shock to people across the state. The man that had so entrenched himself into the history and folklore of the state of Alabama was gone. With Bryant’s passing went some of the magic that had been so much a part of Alabama’s history. His good friend John McKay was told that Bryant had died and McKay simply stated he wasn’t a coach he was The Coach.
Bryant’s legacy has been felt in so many different ways. Jerry Claiborne went on to become a legendary coach at Kentucky. Former assistant Bobby Bowden eventually surpassed Bryant’s win total record. Former assistant, and Georgia alum, Pat Dye, would later become one of the most successful coaches at arch-rival Auburn. Gene Stallings, a former player from Bryant’s days at Texas A&M and one of the famous “Junction Boys” would later take over the head coaching position at Alabama and would lead Alabama to its first post-Bryant national championship. Other players told stories about how Bryant had affected their lives. One player attributed his ability to beat cancer to Bryant’s ability to push players past their perceived limits to achieve results that they didn’t believe possible.
To this day, Bryant is the only successful alumnus coach of Alabama. It could be argued that Alabama’s demand for success eventually created the atmosphere that landed Nick Saban but the truth is that it was the years where Alabama was humbled that led to a fan base having to be re-taught lessons in patience. As mentioned above, Nick Saban, at the same point in his career at Alabama, has matched Bryant stride for stride. Whether Saban’s legacy will match that of Bryant’s is a question for a future generation to answer.
Paul W. “Bear” Bryant was one of those men that would have been successful no matter what he put his mind to. Bryant chose football as much as it chose him. Football, however, only partially defines the man that most consider to be the greatest football coach of all time. Football changed Bryant’s life and he spent the rest of his life using football to change the lives of those that played for him. When I hear the phrase, “larger than life” I always picture the man they called “The Bear.”
A lot of schools have legendary coaches in their past. There was Knute Rockne of Notre Dame, Joe Paterno of Penn State, Bobby Bowden of Florida State, Bo Schembechler of Michigan, and Woody Hayes of Ohio State just to name a few. Some of these men can match Bryant in terms of success, in some categories, they can surpass Bryant and yet Bryant carries a mystique that even the most successful coaches fail to achieve. To understand Paul Bryant’s affect on college football, you have to understand the man.
The key to understanding Bryant is to not look at him as simply a football coach. He was a man that became so ingrained in the psyche of state of Alabama that he is sometimes joked as being a deity. Even Auburn fans typically give deference to Bryant. Without tracing his entire life, know that he was born in a tiny town of Arkansas and he was poor. He was a bottom rung child. Many attribute Bryant’s nickname to his gravely voice earned through many years of being a hard drinker and a smoker but he actually got the nickname when he was a child. At the age of thirteen, as he was walking back from town, a circus promoter was promoting a traveling circus. He challenged the townspeople to a wrestling match with the circus bear. The promoter would pay anyone willing to do it, one dollar for every minute they stayed in the ring with the bear. The only one willing to take up the challenge was thirteen year old Paul Bryant. Bryant wrestled the bear, was bitten on the ear, and as he always later joked, didn’t even get the money.
In today’s southern football atmosphere, the southern schools are bitter rivals. If you ever wonder though why they seem to stick together with chants of S-E-C, a lot of that has to do with how southern football was originally judged. Superior college football, (back then simply football), was found in the Northeast, Midwest, and, West coast. In the 1920s, southerners were not so far removed from The Civil War. People in the south experienced a backlash of anger from the rest of the country and it was during those times that the stereotypes of inferiority and being backwards were born. In 1925, Alabama received a reluctant invitation to play in the 1926 Rose Bowl. Alabama wasn’t even a first or second choice to play in The Rose Bowl and no one outside the state of Alabama expected Alabama to win. Some predictions, legitimate predictions, had Alabama losing 100-0. Considering that only a decade prior Cumberland Tennessee lost to Georgia Tech 222-0, a 100-0 score wasn’t unfathomable. Even Will Rogers got in on the act by calling Alabama the Tuscaloosers.
Alabama didn’t lose. They won the 1926 Rose Bowl by beating Washington 20-19. On that day, Alabama stepped out of the role of a regional team and developed a following throughout the South. It was listening to a public radio broadcast of Alabama’s victory that Bryant became a fan of Alabama.
Legend is that Bryant showed up in Tuscaloosa when he was still a kid but was told to come back when he was of age. Whatever the truth, Bryant did show back up in Tuscaloosa. He was a great football player but while playing for The Capstone, Bryant was given another nickname, “The Other End.” He was called that because the guy playing on the other side was Don Hutson, a man that many consider to be one of the greatest to ever play the game. Bryant had his moments. In 1935, he was playing against Tennessee. During the game he broke a leg bone. He kept playing. To verify the story, Ralph McGill who was a sports writer for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, asked to see the x-ray. McGill confirmed the veracity, printed the story in the AJC and when Alabama went to play Georgia, Bryant was greeted with an ovation. All of this and he had yet to coach a game.
A few years after Bryant’s college career came to an end, the U.S. found itself embroiled in a World War. Bryant enlisted in the Navy. When the boat he was on was charged by an enemy vessel, the orders were given to abandon ship. Bryant disobeyed those orders. Such was the nature of Bryant. In later years, Bryant was known for his toughness on his players but Bryant never asked one of his players to do anything that he wouldn’t have done himself. When he looked for players, he looked for one quality among all others, he looked for winners. He knew if a kid had a drive to succeed that he could get them to achieve greatness.
Of course Bryant entered coaching and yes, he won at Alabama but before he won at Alabama, he won at Maryland, he won at Kentucky, he won at Texas A&M and then Mama called. That’s what he told his players at Texas A&M. Alabama had fallen on hard times. After decades of success under two great coaches Wallace Wade and Frank Thomas, Alabama was losing and losing a lot. Bryant had developed a reputation as a young, very tough coach. Alabama’s hire of its first alumnus J.B. “Ears” Whitworth, had proven disastrous but its second alumnus hire of Paul “Bear” Bryant would become legendary.
Bryant showed up on campus in 1958 and he called a team meeting. As soon as it was time for the meeting to begin, Bryant instructed his assistant coach, Jerry Claiborne to lock the door. When the stragglers tried to come in late, he told Claiborne in front of the team, “tell whoever it is, we don’t need them.”
Bryant was the coach of Alabama for a little more than two decades and in that time, he accomplished a lot. From 1958-1982, he won six national championships. From 1963 to 1982, he won every game that was played in Tuscaloosa. That’s nineteen years without a loss. Steve Spurrier suffered his first college defeat at the hands of Bryant. Joe Namath, Kenny Stabler, Ozzy Newsome, and George Blanda all played for Bryant. Bryant didn’t come to a school that hadn’t known success, Bryant followed two coaches that had already placed Alabama on the map. Before Bryant coached his first game, Alabama had already claimed five national championships, had played in six Rose Bowls and amassed a 4-1-1 record in those games. Alabama was the last participant in the last open Rose Bowl and to this date has more Rose Bowl appearances than any team not from the Big Ten or Pac10/12. Even with all of Alabama’s previous success, Bryant dwarfed it and redefined what success meant at The Capstone.
It would be remiss to fail to talk about Bryant, Alabama and segregation. If Bryant was the most popular figure in Alabama during the 1960s and 70s, the second most popular figure was Governor George Wallace. Wallace was a segregationist governor who is most famous for standing in front of Foster Auditorium on the Alabama campus and making his “Segregation Forever” speech. There was no love loss between Paul W. Bryant and George Wallace. Wallace was less a racist and more an opportunist. When Wallace started his political career, he lost running as a moderate. He lost to a man that used race and segregation as his platform. Wallace realized that if he was going to have a political career in Alabama that he would have to adopt a Segregationist platform. He took to it full force. By the time Wallace’s career was in full swing, he had become one of the faces of Segregation and Southern racism. Bryant had privately expressed his hope that he could integrate the Alabama football team but Wallace had made the task nearly impossible. Wallace used Bryant’s success with an all white team to promote his segregationist policies. At one point Wallace was asked whether he feared Bryant running for Governor, Wallace quipped back, “Why would Bryant want the second best job in the state?”
It can be argued that Bryant’s greatest football game as a coach might be a loss. Bryant was famous for trying to schedule an opponent that he felt he could beat. Joe Paterno told of a time that Bryant called him to schedule a game because of his belief that he could beat Penn State. Bryant was a very good friend of John McKay. McKay, was the head coach of the USC Trojans. Bryant wanted to play USC and he wanted them to come play them Birmingham. McKay and Bryant were very secretive in their talks about the game. Bryant had scheduled a team that seemed to be a much better team. The players that played for Alabama spoke of the preparation before the game and that Bryant lacked his normal intensity. USC fielded a backfield of African-American players. There were legitimate fears from the USC players that they were in real physical danger.
There were no incidents that night other than Alabama getting drummed. Alabama lost the game 42-21. After the game, Bryant approached McKay and thanked him. It was an odd gesture for a man who despised losing. The Alabama loss to USC in 1970 was one of the worst defeats, in terms of score, that Bryant ever suffered. The MVP of the game was Sam “Bam” Cunningham, an African-American USC running back that ran for 135 yards and scored two touchdowns that night. After the game, Jerry Claiborne said, “Sam Cunningham did more for integration in sixty minutes than Martin Luther King, Jr. did in twenty years.” It was said semi-jokingly, but there was a truth to it all the same.
Whether Bryant deliberately scheduled a game that he planned to lose is debatable however, when one considers that Bryant scheduling a game against a fully integrated school and winning would have set back his own established agenda of trying to integrate the Alabama football team, it’s easy to believe that Bryant was okay with the loss. However, Alabama was one of the last schools to fully integrate and Bryant himself admitted years later that he was slow to integrate Alabama. His reasoning was that he felt that it wasn’t the right time. Normally, a statement like that could be seen as a flimsy excuse but one has to remember the role Alabama played. Alabama and its success was in the forefront of the racial scene. In the sixties, Bryant had told his coaches that Alabama wouldn’t be the first to integrate but they also wouldn’t be the third. Bryant wanted Alabama to be one of the first SEC schools to integrate but Wallace’s stance had made it almost impossible. If Bryant brought in the player at the wrong time, Wallace could have used that player’s failures to further his agenda that African-Americans weren’t on par with whites. Bryant was playing a chess match against Wallace with Wallace having the better pieces on the board.
The 1970 USC Alabama game did much to create acceptance of an integrated Crimson Tide. The 1971 rematch was legendary for entirely different reasons. It is mostly a given that a coach is only successful at one school for about ten years. After that, it seems like coaches start a downward arc. Bryant’s time at Alabama followed that arc. After claiming three national championships in the 1960s, Alabama was a team that was starting to decline. One reason was that Alabama hadn’t fully integrated but another was simply that the game had caught up the man that was called Bear.
Bryant wasn’t quite done yet. After a disappointing season in 1970, Bryant visited Darryl Royal of Texas. Texas ran the wishbone offense and Bryant ran a more traditional offense akin to a pro set. It had been a successful offense through the years. The first three SuperBowl MVPs were claimed by two Alabama quarterbacks. However, Bryant saw advantages to running the wishbone and he thought he could make it work.
Under secrecy, Alabama made the switch to the wishbone in the off-season. The 1971 season began with Alabama making a trip to Los Angeles for another date with long time Rose Bowl rival USC. USC was favored but the racial drama of a year before was gone. For the first time in its history, Alabama fielded an integrated team. Alabama upset USC that night and went on to win the rest of their regular season games. Their only loss that season was an Orange Bowl loss to Nebraska.
The wishbone would define Bryant’s teams of the 1970s. Bryant would win three more National Championships. From 1971 through 1979, Alabama would win the SEC championship in every single year but for 1976. Bryant’s streak of five straight SEC championships still stands today. Steve Spurrier came close to tying it when he won four straight SEC championships from 1993-1996 but Tennessee’s upset of Florida in 1997 denied Spurrier his chance to tie that record.
Paul W. Bryant ended his career in 1982. 1982 was a rough year for him. Alabama went 8-4 with losses to Tennessee, Auburn, LSU, and Southern Miss. The year before, Bryant’s 1981 team had captured a share of the SEC crown. However, Bryant felt that 8-4 was simply not good enough for Alabama and he didn’t feel he had the energy to climb up the hill one more time. Bryant retired in 1982 as the coach with the most wins in college football history. A couple of years later Eddie Robinson of Grambling would break that record. Years later Bobby Bowden and Joe Paterno would battle it out to break Bryant’s record in Division I/FBS. Unlike Bryant, they didn’t step down after having one bad season. They constantly felt that there was still one more opportunity to turn it around.
On December 29th, 1982, Bryant coached his last game. It was a 21-15 Liberty Bowl victory over Illinois. Less than one month later on January 26th, 1983, Bryant would be dead. The death came as a shock to people across the state. The man that had so entrenched himself into the history and folklore of the state of Alabama was gone. With Bryant’s passing went some of the magic that had been so much a part of Alabama’s history. His good friend John McKay was told that Bryant had died and McKay simply stated he wasn’t a coach he was The Coach.
Bryant’s legacy has been felt in so many different ways. Jerry Claiborne went on to become a legendary coach at Kentucky. Former assistant Bobby Bowden eventually surpassed Bryant’s win total record. Former assistant, and Georgia alum, Pat Dye, would later become one of the most successful coaches at arch-rival Auburn. Gene Stallings, a former player from Bryant’s days at Texas A&M and one of the famous “Junction Boys” would later take over the head coaching position at Alabama and would lead Alabama to its first post-Bryant national championship. Other players told stories about how Bryant had affected their lives. One player attributed his ability to beat cancer to Bryant’s ability to push players past their perceived limits to achieve results that they didn’t believe possible.
To this day, Bryant is the only successful alumnus coach of Alabama. It could be argued that Alabama’s demand for success eventually created the atmosphere that landed Nick Saban but the truth is that it was the years where Alabama was humbled that led to a fan base having to be re-taught lessons in patience. As mentioned above, Nick Saban, at the same point in his career at Alabama, has matched Bryant stride for stride. Whether Saban’s legacy will match that of Bryant’s is a question for a future generation to answer.
Paul W. “Bear” Bryant was one of those men that would have been successful no matter what he put his mind to. Bryant chose football as much as it chose him. Football, however, only partially defines the man that most consider to be the greatest football coach of all time. Football changed Bryant’s life and he spent the rest of his life using football to change the lives of those that played for him. When I hear the phrase, “larger than life” I always picture the man they called “The Bear.”
The College Football Playoff – Expect Controversy
I’ve heard this story before. We have a system in place that is going to right the college football wrongs, give us a system that everyone can support, and finally end the decades of controversy that has plagued college football fans since the days before the advent of the forward pass.
The last time I heard about a fix to end all fixes was with the introduction of the Bowl Championship Series. Before that it was the Bowl Alliance and before that, it was the Bowl Coalition. This isn’t a knock on the playoffs. If you want to read about that, you can read it here.
http://cfbroundtable.com/2014/college-football-playoff-lost/ Each one of the above mentioned systems was an improvement on the last. I believe that the majority of fans will feel that the latest installment to fix college football will be an improvement over the BCS. I am not so sure they will believe that in the early years.
The BCS takes a lot of knocks and most of them are deserved knocks, however, by the time the BCS came to an end, it was the best system produced in terms of providing national championship matchups. When the BCS provided controversy in the later years, that controversy was unavoidable. In 2011, any combination of LSU, Alabama, Oklahoma State, or Stanford would have been controversial.
The BCS ran about as smooth as it could possibly run in those later years but in the beginning, it was the equivalent of a backfiring 1974 Pinto, (as Joel McHale would say, look it up kids). Initially, the BCS relied heavily on computers to produce the championship matchup. I once proposed an alternative to the BCS computer system. Simply simulate the entire season via the Playstation 2 and a current copy of EA Sports' edition of NCAA's College Football.
The BCS clunked along. In 2001, a second ranked Oregon team was left out in favor of Nebraska. Nebraska got the nod to play against Miami and was blown out. Margin of victory, which had been a major component in tabulating BCS points, was minimized to and fix the issues in 2001. In 2003, the BCS engine nearly seized up. Controversy was so strong in 2003 that the BCS barely survived. In 2003, margin of victory, though minimized, was still a factor. This meant that all of your nice, respectable coaches were forced to run up scores for fear of being left out of the national championship game and top tier bowls. Prior to the Big 12 Championship Game, (they used to have those), Oklahoma had amassed such a large lead in BCS points that Oklahoma could afford to lose the Big 12 Championship Game . . . and the Sooners did lose . . . and they lost big. Oklahoma stunk it up in Dallas losing to Kansas State 35-7. It didn’t matter. OU's NC ticket had been punched prior to kick off. Thanks IBM. Oklahoma was matched against the LSU Tigers and USC was sent to the Rose Bowl. LSU won, USC won and for the only time in the BCS era, we had a split national championship.
The fallout of the 2003 season was that the AP writers successfully demanded that their poll not be used as a BCS factor. The margin of victory was done away with, and the computers were minimized and given deference to the polls. In short, the folly of thinking that a computer could somehow do a better job than former coaches and sports writers in picking the top two teams was done. And they all lived happily ever after . . . .
Well not quite. 2004 created more controversy. However, it was the modern BCS controversy that we have grown to know and detest. An undefeated Auburn was left out of the national championship picture. The BCS did the best it could in 2004, this was simply a problem, much like 2011 or 2012, that the BCS wasn’t designed to fix. Too many teams, too little slots.
The new College Football Playoff is designed to fix the last major issue that the BCS never could have fixed. Instead of two slots, now we have four slots. Also, the new playoff system has given a better avenue to teams outside of the Power Five conferences. If it all stopped there, we probably would have a decent system but once again, the power brokers have attempted to remove the sports writers from the equation. Why the major conferences try to fix college football inequities by cutting out the polls is a bit of a mystery. For the most part, the polls and those that contribute to them, haven't really been the problem. In their place is a committee akin to the committees we are used to seeing in college basketball. There are factors that the committee will use but how one committee member gives weight to a factor may not be the same as how another committee member weighs the same factor. The committee is made up of individuals from various backgrounds. Some have been immersed in college football their whole lives and others have no tangible relationship to it at all.
Ideally, we picture a playoff system where both major polls have the same top four teams ranked and the playoff pits #1 vs. #4 and and #2 vs. #3 with the respective winners facing off for the championship. However, we are already being prepared that the committee’s top four teams may disagree with the polls’ top four teams. It works in college basketball because the committee is placing 64 teams. Any teams typically left out are at or near .500. The college basketball committee works because of quantity. Imagine if the NCAA basketball playoffs only could place four teams or even eight for that matter. Every year would be rocked in controversy. It is perplexing why the college football power brokers want to put more weight on an unknown committee and no weight on pollsters. At best this seems odd and at worst seems like an invitation to post season disaster.
It doesn't take the Long Island Medium to figure out that the early years of the college football playoff will be bumpy. It wouldn’t be surprising to see a future where the committee is nixed or limited and the polls are again a major factor. I also won’t be surprised if we have a split national championship in the near future. USC’s 2003 AP Championship was in part an acknowledgement of what USC had done and also part protest of what the BCS had done. It worked. It forced the BCS to completely overhaul itself in the off-season.
If it seems as if I am preaching doom and gloom, I’m not. I think the Playoff will work the way it was intended and that years from now, a version of what we will see in 2014, will be run like a fine tuned engine. It may even work that way in 2014, 2015, and a year or two beyond. However, somewhere in the near future is another 2003. The flaws are in place and it’s only going to take the right scenario to bring those flaws to the surface. Here’s hoping that when it happens, it’s not my team or yours getting the short end of the stick.
The last time I heard about a fix to end all fixes was with the introduction of the Bowl Championship Series. Before that it was the Bowl Alliance and before that, it was the Bowl Coalition. This isn’t a knock on the playoffs. If you want to read about that, you can read it here.
http://cfbroundtable.com/2014/college-football-playoff-lost/ Each one of the above mentioned systems was an improvement on the last. I believe that the majority of fans will feel that the latest installment to fix college football will be an improvement over the BCS. I am not so sure they will believe that in the early years.
The BCS takes a lot of knocks and most of them are deserved knocks, however, by the time the BCS came to an end, it was the best system produced in terms of providing national championship matchups. When the BCS provided controversy in the later years, that controversy was unavoidable. In 2011, any combination of LSU, Alabama, Oklahoma State, or Stanford would have been controversial.
The BCS ran about as smooth as it could possibly run in those later years but in the beginning, it was the equivalent of a backfiring 1974 Pinto, (as Joel McHale would say, look it up kids). Initially, the BCS relied heavily on computers to produce the championship matchup. I once proposed an alternative to the BCS computer system. Simply simulate the entire season via the Playstation 2 and a current copy of EA Sports' edition of NCAA's College Football.
The BCS clunked along. In 2001, a second ranked Oregon team was left out in favor of Nebraska. Nebraska got the nod to play against Miami and was blown out. Margin of victory, which had been a major component in tabulating BCS points, was minimized to and fix the issues in 2001. In 2003, the BCS engine nearly seized up. Controversy was so strong in 2003 that the BCS barely survived. In 2003, margin of victory, though minimized, was still a factor. This meant that all of your nice, respectable coaches were forced to run up scores for fear of being left out of the national championship game and top tier bowls. Prior to the Big 12 Championship Game, (they used to have those), Oklahoma had amassed such a large lead in BCS points that Oklahoma could afford to lose the Big 12 Championship Game . . . and the Sooners did lose . . . and they lost big. Oklahoma stunk it up in Dallas losing to Kansas State 35-7. It didn’t matter. OU's NC ticket had been punched prior to kick off. Thanks IBM. Oklahoma was matched against the LSU Tigers and USC was sent to the Rose Bowl. LSU won, USC won and for the only time in the BCS era, we had a split national championship.
The fallout of the 2003 season was that the AP writers successfully demanded that their poll not be used as a BCS factor. The margin of victory was done away with, and the computers were minimized and given deference to the polls. In short, the folly of thinking that a computer could somehow do a better job than former coaches and sports writers in picking the top two teams was done. And they all lived happily ever after . . . .
Well not quite. 2004 created more controversy. However, it was the modern BCS controversy that we have grown to know and detest. An undefeated Auburn was left out of the national championship picture. The BCS did the best it could in 2004, this was simply a problem, much like 2011 or 2012, that the BCS wasn’t designed to fix. Too many teams, too little slots.
The new College Football Playoff is designed to fix the last major issue that the BCS never could have fixed. Instead of two slots, now we have four slots. Also, the new playoff system has given a better avenue to teams outside of the Power Five conferences. If it all stopped there, we probably would have a decent system but once again, the power brokers have attempted to remove the sports writers from the equation. Why the major conferences try to fix college football inequities by cutting out the polls is a bit of a mystery. For the most part, the polls and those that contribute to them, haven't really been the problem. In their place is a committee akin to the committees we are used to seeing in college basketball. There are factors that the committee will use but how one committee member gives weight to a factor may not be the same as how another committee member weighs the same factor. The committee is made up of individuals from various backgrounds. Some have been immersed in college football their whole lives and others have no tangible relationship to it at all.
Ideally, we picture a playoff system where both major polls have the same top four teams ranked and the playoff pits #1 vs. #4 and and #2 vs. #3 with the respective winners facing off for the championship. However, we are already being prepared that the committee’s top four teams may disagree with the polls’ top four teams. It works in college basketball because the committee is placing 64 teams. Any teams typically left out are at or near .500. The college basketball committee works because of quantity. Imagine if the NCAA basketball playoffs only could place four teams or even eight for that matter. Every year would be rocked in controversy. It is perplexing why the college football power brokers want to put more weight on an unknown committee and no weight on pollsters. At best this seems odd and at worst seems like an invitation to post season disaster.
It doesn't take the Long Island Medium to figure out that the early years of the college football playoff will be bumpy. It wouldn’t be surprising to see a future where the committee is nixed or limited and the polls are again a major factor. I also won’t be surprised if we have a split national championship in the near future. USC’s 2003 AP Championship was in part an acknowledgement of what USC had done and also part protest of what the BCS had done. It worked. It forced the BCS to completely overhaul itself in the off-season.
If it seems as if I am preaching doom and gloom, I’m not. I think the Playoff will work the way it was intended and that years from now, a version of what we will see in 2014, will be run like a fine tuned engine. It may even work that way in 2014, 2015, and a year or two beyond. However, somewhere in the near future is another 2003. The flaws are in place and it’s only going to take the right scenario to bring those flaws to the surface. Here’s hoping that when it happens, it’s not my team or yours getting the short end of the stick.
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