We’re coming up on the last Saturday of November, which, for me, always has been the best time of the college football season.
As exhilarating as the opening round of the NCAA Tournament. As blissful as MLB’s Opening Day. As can’t-miss as the Sundays of all the golf majors combined.
In college football, Rivalry Week — all those storied, magical matchups in the enchanted afterglow of Thanksgiving — is everything.
Sorry, make that ‘‘was’’ everything.
The all-consuming College Football Playoff has rendered Rivalry Week impotent, at least compared with what it used to be.
In my football ‘‘bucket list’’ book that was published in 2017, there was a chapter on all the greatest college rivalries, most of whose annual games were reserved for the last Saturday of November. By the way, I really should pause here to thank the 14 of you who bought and read the thing. But the book — and that chapter, in particular — was written, as it turns out, by a total rube.
Consider this passage on rivalries, which might as well have been written 25 or 50 years earlier: ‘‘They go together not like oil and water, but rather like leaking gas and an open flame. Football’s best rivalries explode with emotion and physical play on the field and with opposing loyalties off it. Yet they also fit together like pieces of a beautiful puzzle, neither side truly whole without the other.’’
It’s as though this was written in a different lifetime, which, come to think of it, it was. The book was cobbled together during the summer and fall of 2016 as the Cubs were working toward winning a World Series for the first time since, well, you remember. But the playoff already existed, albeit in the four-team model that lasted through last season. And I thought even then that the four-team playoff sucked too much oxygen from the proverbial room, minimizing rivalry games, all non-playoff bowl games and various other traditions. Still, Rivalry Week held its singular allure as the apex of the season, at least from my point of view.
Now, though, with the playoff having been expanded to 12 teams? You’re either in it or you’re irrelevant. Your next game either has an impact on the list of 12 or why even bother? And even a so-called rivalry game that indeed will affect whom the playoff committee selects and whom it doesn’t really matters only in terms of the playoff itself; the rivalry part has been reduced to, at best, a bonus feature.
College football has bailed on so much of what made it unique, first and foremost that the regular season was more important than the postseason. While other sports and leagues focused on determining one champion, college football had its own day of the week and its own sense of regular-season pomp and pageantry. That’s in the past, underscored by the recent six-year, $7.8 billion agreement between the CFP and ESPN, whose exclusive rights to televise playoff games completely informs its coverage from August to January.
On Friday, Minnesota and Wisconsin will renew the most-played rivalry in the top division of college football, the FBS. This will be game No. 134, with Wisconsin holding the slightest series edge of 63-62-8. The winning team will run from goalpost to goalpost with Paul Bunyan’s Axe and mimic chopping them down. It’ll be quaint. The sports world won’t give a damn.
Also that day, Mississippi State and Ole Miss — historically a hateful rivalry — will square off in the annual Egg Bowl and Georgia Tech and Georgia will play the game actually nicknamed ‘‘Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate.’’ Ole Miss fell out of playoff contention last week, reducing interest in its game to locals and gamblers (who’d bet on a competition between a fire hydrant and a tuna casserole) only.
Saturday should be college football’s day of the year. The Iron Bowl (Alabama and Auburn), the Palmetto Bowl (Clemson and South Carolina), the Territorial Cup (Arizona and Arizona State). Of course, the blessed battle for the Jeweled Shillelagh (Notre Dame and USC). By God, the best rivalry of ’em all, as I see it — The Game (Michigan and Ohio State).
Yeah, yeah, the ‘‘Hat’’ game, too. We’ll let Illinois and Northwestern play along, too.
But Saturdays anymore are for playoff implications only. That’s every Saturday of the season, including this one.
Maybe that’s how you like it? The expansion of the playoff was a pretty dang popular thing, broadly speaking. It could be I’m not only a rube but a dinosaur.
