WHY IS THE NFL PICKING A FIGHT? COLLEGE FOOTBALL IS DELIVERING BETTER GAMES
Rather than intrude on Black Friday and plot ways to dilute an expanded College Football Playoff, the NFL should focus on a lackluster product and do what little brother does best: classic thrillers
It’s almost comical, the idea that the almighty National Football League must squash its partner in pigskin. Are Roger Goodell and the owners really that greedy? Are they so cutthroat that they can’t share cocktails with the leaders of their feeder system — the power elite of college football — and figure out how to make December and January compatible for both?
In truth, the NFL could pit laughing hyenas against dancing bears and 20 million people would watch. The cultural colossus that proudly displays its shield during every telecast, accompanied by gladiator music, should work with the college game as it expands to a 12-team playoff as soon as 2024. Let the kids have their time slots. Hell, I know diehard fans and gamblers who’d snap out of an Ambien-induced deep sleep to watch a Lions-Texans game at 3 a.m. Of the 100 most-watched TV broadcasts last year, 75 related to the NFL, and so did the four top-rated series in a country that once lived for sitcoms and dramas.
But earlier this month, while we apparently were busy watching the NFL, the league made an announcement akin to a sledgehammer attack on Nick Saban, Lincoln Riley, NIL collectives, transfer portals, marching bands, cheerleaders and Kirk Herbstreit. Next year, for the first time, pro football will encroach the traditional territory of college football on Black Friday. It’s not enough to control Thanksgiving Day. Now the NFL wants to hijack your indigestion and hangover a day later, disrupting a college-driven schedule dating back decades (and, for that matter, high school title games in states such as Illinois). The NBA is dealing with a similar intrusion, having to share its Christmas feast with one NFL game, then two games, now three. But basketball is a rival sport. Now Goodell is bullying his little brother?
Consider it the first strike in a one-sided territorial war. The NFL will schedule games when it wants and won’t accommodate the bigger College Football Playoff, which must fit eight additional games into the new format. There will be head-to-head collisions, which logically shouldn’t bother the behemoth. The NFL is an impenetrable national obsession, while college football is a regional affair, tilted Southward, catering more to true-to-your-school devotees. So, why pick an unfair fight?
Hubris is part of it. But there also is concern, though Goodell never will admit it, that the college game carries high national appeal when played at its freewheeling, frenetic best. The most memorable football game of 2022, so far, was Tennessee’s breakthrough victory against Alabama, followed by a Rocky Top swarm of humanity on the Neyland Stadium field. Next on the list came later that evening, when Utah knocked off USC and its transfer-portal posse with a dizzying rally and the same crowd surge. Not only has the NFL failed to match the thrill quotient of either game, the league is struggling through a choppy, sometimes unwatchable regular season in which scoring is down and starpower is waning. The defining story is Tom Brady, finally looking 45 if not 50 in what hopefully is his final season, calling out the league for lackluster performances.
“I think there’s a lot of bad football from what I watch,” said Brady, days before he and wife announced their divorce, amid the first 3-5 start of his 23-year NFL career. “I watch a lot of bad football. Poor quality of football. That’s what I see.” He didn’t mention that he’s contributing to the blight.
Brady and Aaron Rodgers look done. Geno Smith and a post-concussive Tua Tagovailoa are in vogue. Sure, we’re riveted by Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Hurts and Lamar Jackson. Sunday, we saw why Christian McCaffrey — who rushed for a touchdown, passed for a touchdown and caught a touchdown pass — might be the best midseason pickup in NFL history if the 49ers reach the Super Bowl. Yet beyond Buffalo, Philadelphia and Kansas City, where are the elite teams? And what happened to the great games? It seemed we had one Sunday, when Carolina quarterback PJ Walker heaved a Hail Mary pass 67 yards in the air over a lax Atlanta secondary to receiver DJ Moore, who scored what appeared to be the game-winning touchdown. But Moore foolishly removed his helmet, incurring an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty that pushed back the extra-point attempt 15 yards. With the score tied at 34, Eddy Pineiro missed the 47-yard kick.
Atlanta won in overtime. “It was a natural reaction,” Moore said of his game-changing blunder, “but you still have to know you can’t do that.” It was a metaphor for a wayward NFL season, a special moment needlessly gone wrong.
Such trends tend to be cyclical, of course, and no one is suggesting even one college playoff game would outrate a conflicting NFL postseason game. But a game that might be better than those two previous beauties — No. 1 Georgia hosting Tennessee, tied with Ohio State at No. 2 in the Associated Press poll — will command as much national buzz this week as an NFL showdown between the 7-0 Eagles and 6-2 Cowboys. This in a college season where an Ohio State-Michigan epic, followed by more theatrics in the SEC title game, promise more fun than anything down the NFL stretch.
If more classics eventually are delivered in an expanded CFP posited to begin in December’s third weekend, sure, the tournament would steal attention and smaller bites of the ratings pie from a league accustomed to a winter monopoly. The NFL is pocketing $113 billion in media money, keep in mind. Goodell has a supreme responsibility to maximize ratings and revenue for his broadcast partners. They want the arrow pointing upward, for every earnings call, and college football can’t slow the speed train even a bit.
So, he takes over Black Friday and eyes the CFP. What’s next in the NFL’s quest for world domination? With London established in Europe, Munich is next. As it is, Major League Baseball has rolled over and surrendered to the colossus. Did you notice a World Series game wasn’t played on Sunday night? The decision was strategic, with MLB intentionally avoiding the NFL and going dark on the holy day for the first time since 1947. Though a matchup once highly anticipated morphed into another prime-time snooze — Rodgers continued to look old and cranky as the 3-5 Packers fell to the Bills, who can launch Allen’s MVP campaign — MLB and Fox ran from “Sunday Night Football” on NBC. With World Series ratings at historically low levels, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred couldn’t swallow another reminder of how his sport has fallen from its national pastime heyday. Fox started the Series on Friday night, always a TV dead zone, so it could duck the NFL on Sunday and this Thursday. Oh, the pain in the MLB and network C-suites if Amazon Prime Video, in its first year of streaming the NFL on Thursdays, won a ratings night over the World Series.
“Obviously, we didn’t want to go head-to-head with the NFL on multiple nights,” Fox Sports executive Bill Wanger confessed to USA Today. “If you said, let’s start the World Series on a Thursday, you’d potentially be going head-to-head with the NFL on four nights. It’s a giant jigsaw puzzle, but every event has its place, and we maneuver the various properties to maximize all of them.”
If you’re scoring at home, the NFL has knocked out MLB and is throwing shade at the NBA. Now, it’s sparring with college football, which would be wise to start the regular season earlier to fit most of its expanded format into December. Any forceful movement into January risks bad blood from an opponent that doesn’t lose.
“Things are changing,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey told reporters. “We’ve got to deal with that reality and we have to make decisions.”
Do so very carefully. Or a test pattern might mysteriously pop up on screens during a national semifinal. Meanwhile, those of us who savor the best in sports entertainment will keep watching college football, and not the football that bores us.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.