Let's take a moment to remember the college football fixtures that left us in 2023.
Jokes About Michigan Having Half of a National Title Since 1948
No matter how you choose to diminish their season, it still happened.
It's a free country, so you can say whatever you want about overcoming corny, manufactured and self-inflicted adversity, earning multiple NCAA investigations (for cheeseburgers, or stretching, or breathing too much air - remember, it's always a haters' conspiracy), infusing the Pageviews industry with a dazzling and audacious scandal so fake and meaningless the head coach accepted a second three-game suspension and is now actively negotiating an immunity clause as all extremely innocent parties do as a condition of staying in Ann Arbor.
A collective nothingburger, which also happens to be the focus of the first NCAA investigation against them. Say whatever makes you feel better. You won't be able to make Michigan's magical 2023 season un-happen.
And neither can the NCAA. They were really good! You can take part in the cognitive dissonance and excuse-making their own fans adopted for decades to help cope with Ohio State's accomplishments, but that will have the same impact on their title that their communal mental masturbation had on the ones you still wear faded tee shirts commemorating.
Michigan got its own version of a magical-slash-impossible Ohio State 2002 x 2014 season - there are photos of it and everything. There's only one defensible way to dull what the Wolverines accomplished, and that is to point out it wasn't exactly original, once you strip away the scandals.
You don't have to travel too far back in time to find a team shutting out its B1G West opponent in the conference championship game, beating Alabama in the CFP semifinal and then depositing an overmatched Pac 12 opponent into a Texas dumpster to take home the coveted golden fleshlight.
That happened recently. There are photos of it and everything. So much for authenticity. Boring as hell, Michigan. America liked this show much better the first time.
Related goodbyes: Ohio State's uninterrupted B1G QB dynasty, Michigan's command of the rivalry being dismissed as a glitch.
Dec 1, 2023; Las Vegas, NV, USA; Oregon Ducks wide receiver Traeshon Holden (5) reacts after a play against the Washington Huskies during the third quarter at Allegiant Stadium. © Stephen R. Sylvanie-USA TODAY Sports
The Pac 12 Conference
The Pac 12's final football game took place while two-thirds of the country was sleeping.
You could not script a more poignant or appropriate adieu. Washington and Oregon joined Southern Cal and UCLA in making the money jump to playing more games during waking hours while giving B1G fans and athletes upgraded destinations.
Change is hard. Jet lag? Merely annoying. But good for them, and good for us.
You know what's better than spending a weekend in NE Indiana, Central Illinois or taking that miserable drive to State College? Everything. If you're very young or even still waiting to be born - shout out to 11W's fetal readers - this sport is not the culturally-embedded regional series of cults we grew up with anymore.
Related eulogy, coming up next - right after a five-minute commercial block featuring trucks, hardware stores, dick pills and carbonated beverages.
Related goodbyes: B1G West, B1G East, debates over which conference has the best mascots
College Football as a Sport
The corpse was still warm when the 2023 season began, but our favorite third of the calendar dropped its charade way back in the mid-1980s when courts ruled TV restrictions for college football were illegal.
This game spent its first 75 years choosing obscurity to sell a couple extra tickets
It happened right as sports-dedicated broadcasting networks began showing up on cable subscriptions. We've been watching TV shows ever since, and over the past couple of decades they've become overproduced vehicles for advertising sponsorships. Our corporate masters stopped pretending only recently.
So dissolving conferences is about as meaningful as a character getting killed off of a series and replaced with a new one. Decisions like these are being made for television audiences. Shout out to my Rutgers readers; you're basically Janice from Friends.
College football is a TV show produced to pull at your heartstrings and wallet so that you bet your heart while losing your mind.
Florida State ran the table and was left out of the penultimate TV show of the recently completed season explicitly because of how television producers felt about the Seminoles. Their backup quarterback just wasn't interesting enough for that audience, so they literally killed their undefeated season in favor of a more flawed but TV-friendly character.
FSU's backup QB (I know he was a Buckeye commit for awhile but he's not interesting enough for me to remember his name or look up) should have simply chosen to be more interesting. He should have been Cardale Jones. That guy was appointment television.
This season the TV show elements leaped into a new frontier, with clock stoppages going away in favor of a faster moving game, which is to say the play-by-play announcers now slide even more commercials and advertisements into their narration in-between plays while the clock is running. Ads during the game. Innovation, baby.
Graphic overlays on the field. Plugs for shows you'll never watch. You don't realize how awkward this is because you're used to it, and then you attempt to make a GIF out of a play and there's a The Masked Singer graphic on top of Marvin Harrison Jr.
Advertisers don't even wait for a pee break to sell you apps for your phone to make gambling as easy as possible. College football is a television show, produced to pull at your heartstrings and wallet so that you bet your heart while losing your mind.
Related goodbyes: The value of 1st downs in a time crunch and the ambient sounds of televised crowd noise without narration
In 2023 we experienced some new - albeit largely inconsequential - lows this season from officiating crews.
False Hope for Competent Officiating
Time of death varies by consumer, but this was the year I stopped expecting anything out of officiating crews. Let's be clear, this isn't Buckeye fan bitterness; there's a whole world of bad calls beyond the four hours we spend agonizing over them on Saturdays.
The kind of infractions that cannot be ignored going unflagged are commonplace in college football now, which encourages players to commit them as a standard practice. Penalties are no longer identified by how obvious they are. Flags get thrown seemingly at random.
And with gambling now flanking advertisers at the head of the college football table, it's not conspiratorial to suggest officials might be betting on their own games. Do you know what the most bipartisan issue in America is today?
It's insider trading - both parties absolutely love it and defend it. Happens in broad daylight, all the time. Imagine believing refs don't bet on their own games. Imagine believing refs are robotic rule enforcers and not emotional humans with bills to pay.
They don't just miss calls, they manufacture them. This season we watched a line judge argue with Ryan Day on the sideline, and then on the very next play - cancel a Marvin Harrison touchdown by throwing a flag after the touchdown to penalize the Buckeyes with illegal pre-snap motion that didn't happen.
Extremely late flag thrown by the line judge on Marvin Harrison Jrs negated TD yesterday. Penalty was for illegal motion (at the snap), but flag doesnt come out until the ball is nearly in his hands.
— Kyle (@Jones) October 8, 2023
Penalty didnt matter, as Marv scored again on the next play, but not a pic.twitter.com/bHF1tSYcS1
Millions of people watched it! Officials are not even pretending anymore, so it's wasted energy to believe the next game you watch will finally be the one that's competently officiated.
Related goodbyes: The Securities and Exchange Commission
Rivalries
Michigan won the final edition of The Game that's mostly cut from the original Toledo Strip/Early 20th Century cloth. Starting this season, Ohio State can play Michigan as many as three times in a single season.
Three times! That means it's now mathematically possible for a five-year Ohio State football player to matriculate into the real world with 15 Gold Pants. It's now within the realm of reality for the Buckeyes to take their 5-star aliens off Michigan's side of the field so their rickety special teams unit can cook on 4th & 1 nearly 10 times in a single season. Angina stocks are skyrocketing!
Oklahoma and Oklahoma State are no longer in the same conference, but we've had preparation for the avalanche of rivalry disruption - Nebraska and Oklahoma rarely see each other anymore. Oregon and Oregon State share a state and little else; ditto Washington and Washington State.
Those rivalries are on life support. Granted, this is a TV show we're talking about - do you remember what The Civil War did, ratings-wise? The Apple Cup? No one does. No one cares. That's why they're being moved to TV Land, or TNT at 3am while The Game could now be played in November, December and January.
Related goodbyes: Seasonal depression, regional bootleg tee shirt futures
Oct 28, 2023; Pasadena, California, USA; Colorado Buffaloes head coach Deion Sanders enters the field before the game against the UCLA Bruins at Rose Bowl. UCLA defeated Colorado 28-16. © Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
The Veneer of Amateurism
Over 1,000 players jumped into the transfer portal on Instagram Monday (let's just call it that). That's 12 full rosters on just the first day of the first of two transfer seasons.
Student-athletes finally, almost, have the same mobility their coaches have, which is almost how it should be; society could benefit from some commitment infrastructure to reduce chaos across the board. The lack of governance is pouring gasoline on emotional decision-making. That metaphor makes no sense - stay with me, I'm on a time crunch.
Alabama is expected to hire Buffalo head coach Maurice Linguist as a defensive assistant, likely working with the secondary, sources tell @ClowESPN and me. Linguist, who finished his third season at UB, is the second sitting FBS head coach to join Kalen DeBoer's defensive staff.
— Adam Rittenberg (@ESPNRittenberg) January 16, 2024
If you're upset about players being hyper-nomads in search of perceived favorable situations, you should be absolutely furious about head coaches taking demotions to join more popular television shows which happen to pay better. The guys with the whistles and the ones with the helmets take on some risk in jumping.
I sat in Ohio Stadium 30 years ago and watched Eddie George fumble twice inside the Illinois 5-yard line. After the game, a full booth of sad morons at the Varsity Club - author included - discussed, voted and agreed that Eddie should move to linebacker after the season. I mean, look at him. JoePa was right. He should have been a linebacker. Illinois would be devastated at the news.
But instead of switching positions - or jumping into an imaginary transfer portal - Eddie stayed at running back and at Ohio State. His number hangs in the North end zone currently, near where Joe Burrow's might have gone had...you know what, never mind.
Illinois still got its chance to be devasted the following season, but for a much better reason.
Name, Image and Likeness is in its first iteration of an opportunity that was far too long in materializing. But no one is in charge. This is a boon for wealthy athletic departments or schools with one or more billionaires swimming in liquidity. The late T. Boone Pickens was simply born too soon.
That said, he lived just long enough to believe that Bedlam would last forever.
Related goodbyes: None. Santa is still real. Gum stays in your stomach for seven years. Earth is flat.
Player Availability Transparency
Florida State should have lied about Jordan Travis' injury, but that's just one example. The Seminoles could have lost in Pasadena instead of the Crimson Tide - but that probably wouldn't have done the same number the Rose Bowl ended up doing.
Programs have no incentive to be truthful with player status, and if you would like to see who is pioneering this behavior look no further than the Ohio State Buckeyes. Ever since the pandemic created a new climate for disclosing player availability, they have surprised us just about every Saturday.
Short of being seen in a walking boot hobbling into a campus Chipotle, we have no idea on any given Saturday who is going to show up on The List. TreVeyon Henderson played most of the Notre Dame game with cracked ribs, which nobody knew about until he discussed the cheap shot he took mid-game - four weeks after he returned from that injury no one could really define.
And even the players who play hurt are mysterious. Devon Brown's ankles, Kyle McCord's ankles, MFJ's ankles, everyone's ankles - it's very difficult to clearly identify who is hurt and who is injured until that list arrives, embargoed until a specific time by the Ohio State athletic department, which Pete Thamel will then leak ahead of time without consequences every Saturday.
It's been two years and I still have no idea what happened to TC Caffey. Was he hurt? Academics? Rule-breaking? The statement at the podium was we're not going to have him for awhile okay, is he taking the Bezos space rocket somewhere? So mysterious!
Is it lying, gamesmanship, the truth no one wants to accept, any of our business, none of our business, none of your business or something else? Availability is another unwanted and exciting variable which only adds mystery and intrigue to our favorite TV show.
And just like Michigan winning three straight, this is no longer a glitch. It's a trend. It's normal.
Related goodbyes: Pinocchio, alas he was only 140 years old
Oct 28, 2023; Madison, Wisconsin, USA; Ohio State Buckeyes running back TreVeyon Henderson (32) runs through Wisconsin Badgers linebacker Maema Njongmeta (55) during the second half of the NCAA football game at Camp Randall Stadium. © Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK
Rebuilding Years
Free agency means never having to wait to be competitive again.
Ohio State kept a decade's worth of NFL-eligible rising juniors this offseason, which means they'll have plenty to replace following what they intend to be a CFP run that ends in a confetti shower on their heads.
That was made possible by NIL. The underside of that blade makes rebuilding years unacceptable. Ohio State's Alamo Bowl season (google it) was deemed acceptable because the recent national champion Buckeyes were breaking in new...well, everything, and they put Michigan in a blender to end the season. That always helps.
That's no longer a path for a program like this. Rebuilding no longer takes place during the course of the schedule - it's something which needs to be completed after the bowl game and prior to fall camp. When JT, Jack Sawyer, TreVeyon, Jordan Hancock, Denzel Burke et al leave for NFL paychecks in a year, the throttle will stay full.
It's not just an Ohio State thing, either - Wisconsin fans weren't exactly thrilled with Luke Fickell's inaugural 7-6 campaign. If they were happy with seven-win seasons in Madison, they would have kept Paul Chryst - he cost a lot less. Arizona was 1-11, went 5-7 last year and just finished 10-3. That wasn't a rebuild, it was a tear-down.
Deion Sanders turned over his entire roster, twice, in the concerted attempt to eliminate rebuilding from Colorado's vocabulary. Programs with title aspirations will reload every year, and when they finish 13th or worse at the end of the season - they'll reward fans by sending a scout team to their bowl game.
Related goodbyes: offensive jokes, funny movies, making phone calls
Ezekiel Elliott and Urban Meyer raising the 2015 Sugar Bowl trophy after No.4 Ohio State upset No.1 Alabama.
The Ride
The BCS entered our lives during the 1998 season, with amazing timing - Ohio State was returning a team absolutely loaded with upperclassmen, leadership, talent - it had no gaps or conceivable flaws.
Just in time for the death of the Mythical National Championship or MNC, one of the first abbreviations to appear on fledging internet message boards. Anyway, Ohio State missed finishing in the top two, which was as far as college football's first tournament was willing to go.
Twelve football programs will punch their playoff tickets in December. It's hard to find a season where the Buckeyes finish outside of the top 12, though there is some fine print involving Group of Five programs. Either way, getting into this tournament has a lower degree of difficulty for your team, which made it into half of the CFP Final Fours and just barely missed out on the other half.
Here are your 13th place finishers of recent history: 9-3 LSU, which basically lost to the ranked teams on its schedule. In 2022 Florida State had a three-game losing streak - that's how you miss the playoff. BYU went 10-2 in 2021, losing to two unranked teams during the regular season and a third in their bowl game.
Behind them you have an 8-3 North Carolina team, the 10-2 Alabama team which Burrow broke and sent spiraling, 10-2 Washington State, 9-4 Stanford, 9-3 Louisville, 10-2 Northwestern and 9-3 Georgia. Those are the first teams left out of the playoff starting this year.
Which means the dread we bring with us into the 2024 season will mostly be our own, self-inflicted and specialized trepidation. Making the playoff without beating Michigan...again...would be an automated transaction for literally every other program, past or present.
If the Buckeyes finish outside of the top 12, they will have bigger problems than just missing the tournament. Finishing 10th this past season fomented an introspection into if the program had peaked and was facing the type of inevitable decline literally every other program, past or present has had to face this millennium.
As for the sport's other participants, the spots from 5-12 are now in play and playoff greatness is more accessible than ever. Winning it all is one thing - but getting invited to the dance just got that much more fun.
This is a good one for the sport. And it will make your favorite TV show better than ever.
Goodbyes that miss the cut: Mel Tucker's guaranteed contract, cutting wrestling promos directed at 86-year old men who went to bed three hours earlier, the Alabama Crimson Tide football program, rejected 5-star quarterbacks who proceed to put the Buckeyes in hell for three years, Ohio State's Biletnikoff drought, Brian Ferentz.
