So yesterday, in the College Football Playoff, Tulane lost to Ole Miss 41-10 and James Madison lost to Oregon 51-34.
Let’s be clear: Vanderbilt is the little guy and always will be. Our conference membership means we’re technically aligned with the “big boys” but no, we’re not. If you are taking the Alabama/Texas side of this argument, then you will be very disappointed in who does and doesn’t get included in the Super League that’s rapidly forming, because it’s probably not going to be us, and if
it DOES include us then I’m probably never watching Vanderbilt football again because our soul will have been sold to the devil. I don’t care that you don’t like the blowouts. I very much enjoyed Tennessee getting blown out by Ohio State in its only playoff appearance ever, because watching them cry is fun.
Tulane and James Madison losing big is not an indictment of their inclusion inasmuch as Tennessee getting blown out was not an indictment of its inclusion; Tulane and James Madison are the price you pay to have a championship with any legitimacy. If those schools wanted to compete for their own championship, the FCS is right there. If the SEC doesn’t want them included, then the SEC should stop scheduling them for guarantee games. (Which… they’re slowly doing, as the SEC and Big Ten and, to a lesser extent, ACC and Big 12 wall themselves off from the rest of Division I, which is even more apparent with basketball schedules. I’ll probably have more thoughts on this later.)
But if they’re going to be a part of the same division, then they should compete for the same championship. Inviting a token G5 team to get beat down is what you have to do to ensure that the championship is legitimate, to ensure that we’re only going so far in rigging the game and only doing it unofficially as opposed to officially. But increasingly the game is officially getting rigged, because the NCAA decided a few years ago that players should be allowed to transfer schools as much as they want without penalty and the rule against tampering became a bad joke, with any talk about “tampering” immediately resulting in people yelling at you about “WHY SHOULDN’T EMPLOYEES BE ABLE TO NEGOTIATE WITH OTHER EMPLOYERS, HUH? WOULDN’T YOU DO THAT AT YOUR JOB?”
(And the answer is, no, I wouldn’t, because I missed the Millennial boat on job-hopping every two years to get a slight raise. But I digress.)
Every development in college sports over the last few years has made me more and more disconnected from the sport. Vanderbilt goes 10-2 in a football season, and then gets screwed out of a playoff spot — not by Tulane and James Madison, who were included because the rules said they should be, but Alabama and Miami, who were included because they’re brand names and we’re not. Our 10-win football season comes with me having to learn who “Theo Von” is.
Can lawyers start suing the super league already instead of filing another lawsuit against the NCAA that will keep up on this chart? Because I hope we’re not part of the super league and it gets sued into oblivion.
