The end of the American calendar sports year features a festival of college football bowl games that fill television airwaves — if not attendant stadiums — and since 2014 a four-team playoff to determine which of the blessed chosen gets to shout from a mountaintop that is, arguably, mythical.
This year, however, the most memorable season’s punctuation really should be the likely conclusion of the college career of the brilliant Alabama quarterback Tua Tagovailoa. In mid-November, he played one series — or one game, if extreme pragmatism is your choice of perspectives — too long.
In sending Tagovailoa onto the field against Mississippi State one week after clear evidence that he was not fully recovered from the surgical aftermath of a high ankle sprain, Coach Nick Saban played for high-risk stakes with the arbiters of the sport and — much worse, for Tagovailoa’s sake — with the purveyors of fate.
Against any sub-.500 team in America, which is what Mississippi State was at the time, the star-laden Crimson Tide would be a heavy favorite, with or without its starting quarterback. With a four-touchdown lead late in the first half, Saban opted to have Tagovailoa work on the two-minute drill before taking him out.
The coach wound up watching gloomily as a player widely projected to be a next-level star was carted off the field with a serious hip injury, clouding Tagovailoa’s foreseeable future, months before the N.F.L. draft.
And for what? In part, at least, to impress upon the all-powerful playoff selection committee that Alabama, despite losing to its rival powerhouse L.S.U. the previous week, might still be considered for the appointed final four. If not for the quality of its victories, then for the steamrolling of those vanquished.
“Tua wanted to play in the game, so I don’t really make a lot of decisions based on worrying about guys getting hurt,” Saban said afterward.
Callous as that sounded, the rationale merely meant that football is inherently dangerous for all players on any play of every game. And since it could not be proved that the ankle injury factored into the hip injury, criticism of Saban’s decision not to sit Tagovailoa for the entire game, while not totally illegitimate, is not my main point.
The problem is more with a process that is at best contrived and at worst tortured. The playoff is more arbitrary invitational than actual tournament, creating the season-long need to tantalize 13 judges by humiliating opponents and the inevitable related lapses in logic.
Let me disclose that I have come to the conclusion that the College Football Playoff is little more than an overhyped, made-for-television event by way of impassioned partisanship.
My son was a Penn State upperclassman during the 2011 Jerry Sandusky pedophilia horror. The quicker-than-anticipated re-emergence of the program occurred as I was concluding my decades-long career as a sports journalist. The graduate and I bonded in conjunction with the reboot.
As a child of New York, I grew up rabidly supporting the Yankees and Knicks, but the rooting interests of youth are typically the casualties of a professional life covering sports. There is nothing like story line and deadline pressure to inflict full compliance with the ethics of neutrality.
But when Penn State, led by the ascendant running back Saquon Barkley, recovered from two early defeats to win the Big 10 championship in the fall of 2016, I had just retired from The New York Times as a full-time writer.
Looking to re-engage as a fan of something, I was captivated one October Saturday night when the Nittany Lions shocked the juggernaut Ohio State. In the misguided view of the committee, the Buckeyes, with only one regular-season loss, were later deemed the better team and therefore more deserving of the playoff.
No small consolation, Penn State instead went to the venerable Rose Bowl, but the committee had prioritized consensus opinion over concrete achievement. Its very existence exposed the sport’s intentions.
Rather than automatically reward conference winners and leave no argument in the wake of those who qualified, its preference was self-empowerment for marketing means, co-opting multiple network partners and a compliant news media to relentlessly debate its weekly rankings, topped off by the grand announcement and staged anointment.
When it came to cumulative airtime, impeachment had nothing this fall on the College Football Playoff.
Something else occurred to me after the 2016 season — the first of what I now consider my guilty pleasure, given the participatory health risks and endemic exploitation of those playing for the revenue-rich Division I football factories, Penn State included. That Rose Bowl game, lost narrowly to U.S.C., was wildly entertaining but felt like little more than a glorified exhibition, an embellishment compared to what had been a gripping regular season.
To begin with, the major bowl games and the playoff occur a month after the conference title games, and with N.F.L.-bound stars increasingly sitting them out rather than risk injury in games that have historically existed as warm-weather junkets for well-heeled friends of the program. The 2016 Big 10 championship, which Penn State claimed weeks earlier, 38-31, in a breathtaking rally against Wisconsin, provided a far greater sense of seasonal culmination.
Long before I had any rooting interest in college football, I never quite got the obsession with crowning the king of all 50 states via various rankings methodologies. Beyond exploding television revenues, what has it really accomplished besides the creation of a never-ending arms race to spend that money on palatial facilities and outrageous coaches’ salaries — from the pockets of strapped taxpayers at the major state universities.
Worse has been the trickle-down effect of this holy quest for national pre-eminence, especially on youth sports culture. What began years ago with national ratings of high school football teams and a champion presumably chosen by people throwing darts at a map, has devolved into rankings for children not yet five feet tall.
Websites currently chart the top prospects in a variety of sports for the college freshman class of 2028 — in other words, an exercise in the inflation of 10-year-old egos, inspiring too many wishful parents eager to spend huge sums on a statistically improbable outcome of college or professional stardom.
Remember the ad campaign by Nike — You don’t win silver, you lose gold — for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta? Reasonable people denounced it as competitive heresy, but the superpower compulsion that America is or must be No. 1 in everything — even when cold, hard facts would indicate otherwise — took root in its sporting culture.
Winning a town league or even a state title these days is almost considered quaint, just not proportionally conclusive enough.
On the final weekend of the 2019 regular season, Saban’s gamble loomed large as Alabama lost a second game, this one to Auburn, and failed to make the playoff for the first time since its inception. Meanwhile, the selection committee prattled on about choosing the best teams for its premier events while sending Virginia, ranked 24th, to the Orange Bowl — thanks to contradictory deals the major conferences cling to in order to ensure their piece of the postseason pie.
As for my Nittany Lions, they finished a laudable 10-2, with an invitation to the Cotton Bowl to play Memphis, champion of the unsung American Conference — a game in which the best they can do in the eyes of the critics, I suppose, is not embarrass themselves.
I’ll watch, of course. I’m an addict now — even my son looks at me suspiciously when I inform him of the latest five-star recruit landed or lost. But our season really climaxed in late November with a third excruciating loss in three years to Ohio State.
It wasn’t falling off the playoff committee’s radar that hurt most — it was the loss, once again, of good, old-fashioned neighborhood bragging rights, the Big 10 East Division title. That mountaintop, thankfully, merely requires winning the game — not styling for the sake of a television spectacle.
Harvey Araton has reported on sports in New York City for 40 years, the last 25 of them at The New York Times. He wrote the Sports of the Times column for 15 years and reported on 10 Olympics, and is best known for his work on basketball and tennis.
Source: Football - nytimes.com
