Roll Tide

I have become less and less of a college football fan over the years. Part of this is because I’m a grownup now, and I don’t really have the luxury of spending all of Saturday AND Sunday plopped on the couch from 12pm-11pm. Part of it is that I didn’t go to 1 of those big state schools with a powerhouse football program. I know a lot of people that went to schools like Florida, Ohio St., or Penn St., and the traditions of college football like homecoming weekend and tailgating are as engrained in their lives as Christmas trees or Thanksgiving turkeys. I went to a school with no football program at all, so I don’t have nor will probably ever have that kind of connection to the sport. Similarly, I grew up in Maryland, an area that was Redskins territory and Redskins territory only at the time. No college football program in the area was really big enough to compete for the population’s attention. If I had grown up or had family from an area where college football is a birthright, it may have been a different story.

Enter into the conversation my gym buddy, Scott. Scott’s family is from Alabama, where you basically have to decide whether you are an Auburn or Alabama fan by the time you get baptized. That being said, Scott would tell you that he bleeds crimson. Every once in a while, I like to rile Scott up by talking about a very sore subject for him: Boise St. Most fans of SEC teams share the same superiority complex that Scott has. They have good reason to feel superior too. While I’m too lazy to look up the actual stats now, I know for a fact that the SEC has won more national titles than any other conference since the BCS’s inception, and throughout any given year the top 10 ranked teams in the country from week to week could be littered with 4 or 5 SEC teams. SEC teams pass the eye test too, as the quality of the athletes and the speed of the games doesn’t even compare to that of other conferences as a whole.

This is where fans of SEC teams like Alabama, Florida, and LSU (and other big time non-SEC football schools for that matter too like Ohio St., Oklahoma, and Texas) get in trouble in my opinion though. No one would argue that Boise St.’s conference (the Mountain West I believe) is as good as the SEC, the Big 12, or the Big 10. No one would argue that even though Boise has had a pretty good recent string of success that their history, pedigree, and resources can’t match up with a school like Alabama. Alabama is likely to have a top 5 recruiting class every year until the end of time…the kids that Boise recruits aren’t slouches, but they are not on Alabama’s level in that way.

Because of this, even seeing a team like Boise creep up into the top 5 of the rankings is enough to cause Scott’s blood to boil. They have no business being ranked that high. They wouldn’t even go through an SEC regular season above 0.500. These are the types of things Scott will say arguing against Boise. These kinds of things aren’t even really worth arguing…heck, most of the really good SEC schools don’t even make it through their respective seasons unscathed. You can use a 1-loss Florida team and a 2-loss LSU team that each won the national championship in different seasons a few years back.

If you bring up points in favor of Boise St., Scott will shoot down all of them. If you say that they can only play who they are scheduled to play, he would say that they need to try to schedule some better teams. If you say that they have tried to and point to playing at Georgia and what basically amounted to a road game against Virginia Tech the year before, he would say that’s not enough. If you say that they won both those games (the game against SEC opponent Georgia handily), he will say both those teams didn’t happen to be “that” good anyway at the time. If you say that they try to schedule those kinds of games all the time, but don’t get any takers because most big time schools don’t want to suffer the possible embarrassment of losing to Boise St., Scott would say they need to switch to a different conference. If you bring up the fact that a school of similar stature, Utah, smacked Alabama in a bowl game a few years ago, and Boise beat another traditional football powerhouse, Oklahoma, a few years ago in a bowl game as well, these points are scoffed at and poopoo-ed as flukes.

These arguments are all just in fun, as for all I know Scott is right, and Boise St. would lose by 4 touchdowns if they played Alabama or LSU. That’s all well and good, and besides I should know by now that trying to convince a fan of a team from a power football conference that Boise St. or TCU belongs in the same conversation as them is like trying to convince a fanatical religious nut that evolution really exists. Still, what really got me riled up is when Scott tried to argue that the general public would rather see a LSU-Alabama rematch in the BCS title game this year than have to watch the winner of that game face Boise St. (hypothetically assuming that things would workout so that would be the matchup). This is the typical elitist attitude that fans of teams like Bama and LSU have…the fact is that Alabama and LSU (just to pick out 2 teams) are not as important to the rest of the sports viewing world as they are to fans and alumni of those schools. And besides that, Boise St. vs. [insert powerhouse football team] would draw in much more attention than Bama-LSU, round 2. 1st, the loser of that game won’t even make it to their conference title game, and therefore should be eliminated from contention right there. 2nd, people get tired of seeing the same thing, especially after the 2 week lead-in to the 1st game between those 2 teams, and the constant blubbering about it being jammed down our throats by ESPN and every other sports news organization. 3rd (and most importantly), Boise-Bama or Boise-LSU would essentially be the plot of every great sports movie of the last 50 years playing out in real life. I’m sorry, but “Hoosiers” wasn’t about 1 great basketball team beating another…it was the classic underdog story. Guys like Scott and I are fans of the game. We are going to watch no matter who plays...but non-football fans aren’t going to watch LSU-Alabama, the sequel. Doesn’t anyone remember the Butler-Duke NCAA title game from a couple years ago? It only got the highest TV rating of any NCAA game since 1997. The “little team that could” vs. the “unstoppable juggernaut team”…now, there’s a story. By the way, did I mention the LSU-Alabama game was a disappointing 9-6 snoozefest? I’m all for great defense, but I don’t think it exactly lived up to the hype, and I don’t think the masses will be clamoring to see it again.

The problem with the whole “Boise doesn’t belong” attitude dismisses the whole premise of sports in general. It’s about competing, and champions aren’t determined on paper or in preseason rankings. Sure, if sports was a beauty pageant, the Alabama’s, Oklahoma’s, and LSU’s of the world would win every year…but sports doesn’t work that way. It has to be proven on the field or on the court. And I concede that guys who think like Scott could be right…if Alabama and Boise played 10 times, the Tide might win 9 of those games. In sports where champions are determined by playing a series of games, that would definitely hurt Boise’s chances. But that’s the thing about this situation…they only need to win once. And that might make elitist college football fans angry, but that is in fact what sports are all about.