Seeping Matter

Football season is in full swing, which means that I am now very very busy on the weekend, so don’t bother me, unless you have tickets.

I love both NCAA and NFL football.  But if I had to choose (and often Amber, uh, encourages me to), I’d take college football over pro any day.  There’s a number of things that are better about college football than pro.  Here’s three big ones:

1. Instant Replay Technically, as I understand it, collegiate officials review every play for correctness in a replay booth upstairs.  I’m sure most of these reviews are a formality only, but it definitely helps officials to get the calls right nearly all of the time.  In pro, if a coach disagrees with a call, he has to consider not only whether he thinks the call was incorrect, but the likelihood of having indisputable video evidence in his favor, how many challenges he has left, how many timeouts he has left, the potential impact of a reversal on the game, etc.  College coaches still get some number of challenges throughout the game, but I think the general correctness of officiating in college football is higher because of this rule.
2. Overtime Let’s face it:  NFL overtime is a joke.  Alternating possessions from the 25 yard line, the way it is done in college football, is much more fair, much more exciting, and definitely superior to NFL overtime.
3. Stadiums I have a hard time figuring out why NFL franchises will build a brand new stadium and only have it house 70,000-80,000 fans.  The Denver Broncos build a new stadium in 2001, but made it basically the same capacity as the old stadium.  And even the brand-new Cowboys Stadium only officially seats 80,000 people, at least in its normal configuration.  Did you know that of the twenty largest football stadiums in the US, all of the top ten and nineteen of the top twenty are college football stadiums?

There are other differences both directions.  Differences are good; I don’t want college to be exactly like pro.  But those are three things about college that I think are superior to pro, which I’d love to see pro football adopt wholesale.

Of course, there are some things that are better about pro than college, but most of that I wouldn’t change either.  One biggie, though, is this:  In the NFL, they have playoffs at the end of the year to determine the champion.

This would unquestionably make for a better college football season and more interesting bowl games.  But would it make for a better experience?  That’s hard to say.  What would we all argue and complain about every year if the BCS went away?