By BJ Bennett
SouthernPigskin.com
With a constant national television audience and paychecks that keep adding zeroes come an expectation level that simply isn’t realistic to match.
Maybe being caught up in it all and being so emotionally-invested has hindered — hidden even — our objectivity, but the harsh, unsettling reality is that college football is quickly and dramatically spiraling out of control.
The last few years of swelling expectations, rising ticket prices, booming media contracts and vague, bureaucratic postseason direction have created a whirlwind of suffocating hype and insurmountable pressure. Today’s college football is rapidly becoming a landscape on which we, the average fan, can’t keep our balance.
The cycle is a simple, but a profound one. Millions upon millions of fans, a large majority of whom have a great psychological and financial investment in the proceedings, are deeply embedded in the games; over 30 million homes tuned into the BCS National Championship Game between Alabama and Texas last winter. With such a stage comes a considerable spotlight. Head coaches are paid quite well, four million dollars a year for Florida’s Urban Meyer and the Crimson Tide’s Nick Saban for point of reference, and the expectations follow suit.
They also follow the suit. Life as a big-time college football coach is a fiscally gratifying one sure, but an overwhelming one as well. Coaches are judged by disconnected millions week-by-week, providing armchair symmetry between a dropped pass, broken tackle or missed kick with their preparation, communication or lack there of.
With a big check comes a small margin for error, the natural ebb and flow of the game simply gets shoved aside. The paying customer, often times red-faced with a foam finger, wants results. Excuses are not part of the work description.
Meyer experienced the meltown first-hand. After winning two national championships and playing in three SEC Championship Games in his first five seasons with the Gators, his 2010 team slipped to 7-5. Tasked with the challenge of replacing arguably the greatest player in college football history in Tim Tebow and a total nine 2010 NFL Draft selections, a rebuilding year seemed like an acceptable, natural occurence. A loss to Florida State in the regular season finale, however, furthered grumblings. Worn down by the pressure, demands, lifestyle and perhaps tired of the culture, Meyer stunned college football by stepping down from his position, citing family and health concerns.
“I’m stepping down as the head football coach at the University of Florida to focus on family and my other interests away from the sidelines,’’ the 46-year-old Meyer said. “This is what I think is best for the University of Florida, for our players and honestly, for myself and my family.’’
In a division already settling in three new head coaches in 2010, many felt another new name could be set to step in for Mark Richt in Athens at times this past season.
Despite winning a record 91 games and two conference championships in his first nine seasons at Georgia, some fans were underwhelmed by the team’s slow start this year and felt new direction was needed. A portion of the alumni base no longer deemed Richt’s school-best career winning percentage good enough.
Playing a freshman quarterback, breaking in a new defensive scheme under first-year coordinator Todd Grantham and being without All-American A.J. Green, who was on suspension the first month of the season, were not suitable excuses. Prominent media members and high-powered boosters didn’t believe an off-year once-a-decade was acceptable in Athens.
No story better points to the nature of today’s game quite like Richt’s mentor, Bobby Bowden, who won two national championships, 12 conference titles and 304 games at Florida State, finishing in the fop four for 14 consecutive years from 1987-2000. He turned a former women’s college into one of the most dominant dynasties we have ever seen.
When his teams failed to live up to the expectations he himself created, Bowden was forced off of a field that bared his very signature, away from a stadium a bronzed replica of him adorns.
We’ve seen Tennessee fire national championship winning coach and alumnus Phillip Fulmer a year after making the SEC Championship Game (the Vols are 13-12 since), West Virginia forced Bill Stewart into an early retirement despite being the school’s second winningest coach to start his career in 100 years and Ole Miss, then Auburn fires Tommy Tuberville despite consistent success at both stops. The purse strings have loosened but so has the grip many have on reality.
Sources in the college coaching profession, frustrated with rash, unrealistic expectations, have told me that there may soon be a groundswell movement to possibly start getting no-fire clauses placed in contracts, legal wording which would force universities to honor the duration of the signed agreement. (On the other hand, schools could also start holding their coaches to their contracts without buyouts.)
The impractical, quixotic pressure today’s landscape is placing on coaches is unfair and downright unhealthy. Families and dozens of student-athletes get caught in between.
As salaries have increased, so have ticket prices. At the annual Alabama vs Auburn game at the end of November, face value for one ticket was $85.
Keep in mind that, in most cases, you have to donate thousands of dollars simply to be able to purchase tickets at face value from the school. Had that opportunity been afforded to you, a family of four could have gone and watched the Crimson Tide and Tigers play for $340. That’s before parking, which generally runs around $40, food, which could push $50 for a quartet of folks and gas.
Credit the schools for making money as they have hefty stadium bills and steep salaries to pay, but college football, all of the way around, is pricing out the average family. Had you wanted to watch many of these athletes perform the same feats roughly ten months prior, a ticket would only cost you a few bucks at a local high school venue. Kids, up through their senior year grow exponentially in high school—just not as much as the price it costs to watch them play.
With a constantly growing national television audience and paychecks that keep expanding zeroes come an expectation level that simply isn’t realistic to match. Winning, running a clean program and graduating players is not enough to keep up in today’s arms race known as college football. Just ask Miami’s Randy Shannon.
Seven, eight, nine win seasons are no longer efforts applauded — rather proverbial two-week notices slid alongside bowl invitations on the desks of athletic directors and doorsteps of fans.
The irony lies in the mutually exclusivity of it all. Take the SEC for example. Fans spend each off-season clamoring of how it’s the toughest conference in football and no game on the schedule is an automatic win. Many then call for administrative changes when championship goals aren’t met or when one sub-par season dares step into the rotation.
The reality is that while Georgia may have a 90,000-seat stadium, excellent facilities and a statewide foundation of support, so does Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, Florida, LSU, South Carolina and Tennessee. Every now and then, something has to give.
Football is a game of intangibles, variables that coaches can’t control and pundits can’t quantify. It’s an odd-shaped ball, one that bounces and falls without predictability. It’s a game where a weekend crew of seven determine right and wrong, kids who can’t yet buy a bottle of wine must perform with robotic-precision and coaches who stand helmet-less off the field of play are supposed to have an immediate and constant impact on what happens in front of them.
Can a game built on teamwork, perseverance and timing, built with student-athletes not yet full adults in the eyes of the law, continue to be fed more money, more pressure and more hype year-after-year? Everything, from salaries to expectations to prices to praise, has progressed, regressed rather, to an unsustainable level.
Complicating matters is a postseason system built on bias. Vague pre-season polls constructed by subjective media members determine the game’s bourgeoisie.
Fan demographics and media markets, not records or resumes, determine bowl game slotting. Opinion, sorry TCU, is our national semifinal, exclusion our game of choice. Conference affiliations have becoming nothing more than a means to an end, with title descriptions staying put simply because the diction can’t keep up. We have a landscape where the Big Ten will soon have 12 teams, the Big 12 will soon have ten teams, the Pac Ten will have 12 teams and the Big East, sorry TCU, will be the new home for a Horned Frog program based in Fort Worth, Texas.
No individual, group or entity is to blame and the motives in place aren’t necessarily substandard. As we continue to move forward, however, the comprehensive health of college football has to be gauged.
Lost in the shuffle of stacks of cash, handfuls of tickets and corporate handshakes, has been a game that may soon be getting too big for it’s britches, an evasive reality to which some fans and administrators turn a blind eye. Growth and financial opportunities should be taken advantage of, but it appears that college football may be in the process of a very real core erosion. As we continue to stand up and cheer, let’s hope the game can help us maintain our footing.