[Also published in Sardonic Views]

Inevitably it seems that I read something along the veins of this article every year.

This, I submit, is a very good thing for college football. The sport needs USC to be good. Needs Notre Dame to be strong. Needs Oklahoma and Alabama and Michigan to be competitive.
…
And the sport is stronger when those schools with the most powerful histories and traditions are strong, and not struggling. It’s fun to see an outsider charge into the big room and challenge for a championship, like Virginia Tech did in 1999, but college football’s touchstones are in places such as Austin and Norman and Columbus.

Every year it sets my teeth to grinding.

Part of it is the sheer arrogance in believing that college football and tradition only belong in certain places that are still producing winning teams. I don’t read any stories about the grand old days of when Fordham, Columbia and the Ivy Leagues ruled. What about poor old Rutgers, one of the true founding schools of college football? Haven’t heard much about missing the great old Southern Methodist University teams.

Part of it is the elitism in denying that college football doesn’t or shouldn’t become that big in other places — that they are less worthy for some reason. Sure schools like Virginia Tech and Florida State have built top-tier programs, and they have created rabid and fanatical fans, but that doesn’t mean they have any right to be treated like Nebraska, Penn St., Oklahoma, Michigan, Ohio St., Texas, or Notre Dame. Why, the nerve!

Mainly, though, it annoys me because what it is really just a chance for sportswriters to get lazy and pretentious. Who cares about really analyzing and writing about a present team, when you can just bask in the comparisons to teams of yore. Or to write about the great old traditions. They write their flowery prose with dreams of dime-a-dozen sportswriting awards, and fantasies of a Pulitzer dancing before them. Never noticing that they are writing the same generic piece that has been written dozens of times before in dozens of cities before.

And when things go south, the same writers quickly turn on the “storied programs” by bleating about how overbearing and unrealistic and arrogant the fans, alumni and boosters are in daring to compare today’s situation to the days when Bryant, Schembeckler (sp?), Hayes, Rockne, Osbourne and so on strode the sidelines. As if.

Spare me.