The absolute idiocy of playing the two semi-final games on New Year's Eve continues to baffle me.
Living on the East Coast, I am finishing and then hustling home from work when the first game begins, getting ready to go out for a New Year's Eve dinner during the end of the first game and the beginning of the second game, and having to sneak peaks at a television set at a party later in the night. Essentially, I don't get to watch a good portion of either game. And neither do millions of other people who have jobs, wives, girlfriends, and real lives.
Things could easily be remedied if they played the games the next day on New Year's Day. (Like they do once every three years when the Rose Bowl hosts one of the games.) They would have a huge captive audience since nobody really leaves the house on that day, with most people being exhausted, hung over, or just lazy and on the couch relaxing.
Yeah, I know the bullshit about how we can't interfere with the Rose Bowl, and the other stupid bowl games played in Florida (like the Outbackwards Bowl), but why not play the semi-final games before and after the grand-daddy of them all, and play the Florida bowl games and/or the Sugar Bowl on New Year's Eve when fans are just sporadically checking the scores anyway.
And another thing......talk about compromising the quality of the game.. What other sport ends their regular season, and then has to wait up to four weeks to play their first play-off game? It made sense back in the day when an invitation to a bowl game was about rewarding a team who had a great year by bringing them and their fans to a warm weather site to have a week of fun and play a little football.
In case the NCAA hasn't taken notice, times have changed and the concept of matching up a national semi-final game with a bowl game is ludicrous. The quality of play is never very sharp (especially in the first half). Why would it be? Teams are not in any kind of football shape because they haven't played for almost a month. Can you spell R-U-S-T?
On another note, something else that bothers me is watching an Alabama football game. The whole thing reminds me of what the antebellum South must have looked like. On the field, you have mostly black players (the slaves) with the white over-seer (Nick Saban) barking out orders. In the stands (or up in the Big House), you have an occasional black face (the house blacks), but mostly white faces who are cheering wildly for people they wouldn't give the time of day to in normal life if they weren't football players, and whose grand-daddies would have disavowed them if they could come back and see them rooting for blacks playing football wearing Alabama jerseys.
And oh yeah, in the luxury boxes are the plantation owners who supply the money to make it all possible.
It reminds me of a trip I took years ago to see a Ole Miss football game. I had heard what an impressive setting the Grove was for pre-game partying, and I wanted to see it first-hand. It was everything it was advertised to be......beautiful setting, pretty girls wearing spring dresses, great food and drink, and a place where anyone who is anybody in the state of Mississippi had gathered on a football Saturday morning for a great cultural event.
There was only one problem. When the crowd formed a human tunnel so the players could walk from the athletic building down to the stadium, that same antebellum vibe took place. All white people cheering mostly blacks as they headed down to the field to do the day's work. And I was absolutely shocked by how many times I heard the n-word used in that gathering of people.....especially by young guys dressed in coats and ties snickering to each other. I heard that word more in one day than I had heard it in the previous year. (And I've been known to hang with some rough people.)
Now I know that most fan bases are primarily white, and that 75% of college football players are black, but there is still something about Alabama and Mississippi that strikes me as weird. Maybe it's their somewhat less than stellar history......but it's not really even a Confederate thing as you don't see that attitude as much in Georgia or Louisiana.
Finally, a word about THE Ohio State University. Toughen up that defense next year (like it used to be in the old days), and get ready to celebrate a national championship in January, 2023.
Living on the East Coast, I am finishing and then hustling home from work when the first game begins, getting ready to go out for a New Year's Eve dinner during the end of the first game and the beginning of the second game, and having to sneak peaks at a television set at a party later in the night. Essentially, I don't get to watch a good portion of either game. And neither do millions of other people who have jobs, wives, girlfriends, and real lives.
Things could easily be remedied if they played the games the next day on New Year's Day. (Like they do once every three years when the Rose Bowl hosts one of the games.) They would have a huge captive audience since nobody really leaves the house on that day, with most people being exhausted, hung over, or just lazy and on the couch relaxing.
Yeah, I know the bullshit about how we can't interfere with the Rose Bowl, and the other stupid bowl games played in Florida (like the Outbackwards Bowl), but why not play the semi-final games before and after the grand-daddy of them all, and play the Florida bowl games and/or the Sugar Bowl on New Year's Eve when fans are just sporadically checking the scores anyway.
And another thing......talk about compromising the quality of the game.. What other sport ends their regular season, and then has to wait up to four weeks to play their first play-off game? It made sense back in the day when an invitation to a bowl game was about rewarding a team who had a great year by bringing them and their fans to a warm weather site to have a week of fun and play a little football.
In case the NCAA hasn't taken notice, times have changed and the concept of matching up a national semi-final game with a bowl game is ludicrous. The quality of play is never very sharp (especially in the first half). Why would it be? Teams are not in any kind of football shape because they haven't played for almost a month. Can you spell R-U-S-T?
On another note, something else that bothers me is watching an Alabama football game. The whole thing reminds me of what the antebellum South must have looked like. On the field, you have mostly black players (the slaves) with the white over-seer (Nick Saban) barking out orders. In the stands (or up in the Big House), you have an occasional black face (the house blacks), but mostly white faces who are cheering wildly for people they wouldn't give the time of day to in normal life if they weren't football players, and whose grand-daddies would have disavowed them if they could come back and see them rooting for blacks playing football wearing Alabama jerseys.
And oh yeah, in the luxury boxes are the plantation owners who supply the money to make it all possible.
It reminds me of a trip I took years ago to see a Ole Miss football game. I had heard what an impressive setting the Grove was for pre-game partying, and I wanted to see it first-hand. It was everything it was advertised to be......beautiful setting, pretty girls wearing spring dresses, great food and drink, and a place where anyone who is anybody in the state of Mississippi had gathered on a football Saturday morning for a great cultural event.
There was only one problem. When the crowd formed a human tunnel so the players could walk from the athletic building down to the stadium, that same antebellum vibe took place. All white people cheering mostly blacks as they headed down to the field to do the day's work. And I was absolutely shocked by how many times I heard the n-word used in that gathering of people.....especially by young guys dressed in coats and ties snickering to each other. I heard that word more in one day than I had heard it in the previous year. (And I've been known to hang with some rough people.)
Now I know that most fan bases are primarily white, and that 75% of college football players are black, but there is still something about Alabama and Mississippi that strikes me as weird. Maybe it's their somewhat less than stellar history......but it's not really even a Confederate thing as you don't see that attitude as much in Georgia or Louisiana.
Finally, a word about THE Ohio State University. Toughen up that defense next year (like it used to be in the old days), and get ready to celebrate a national championship in January, 2023.
