With all the talking heads on TV proclaiming that this season is unlike any other, I’m curious how the community feels. Totally new landscape of CFB or just more of the same? How do we all feel about:
- Helmet communication (for only 1 player on the field per team except on free kicks)
- Tablets on the sidelines (up to 18 per team)
- The 2 minute timeout
- Corporate logos on fields (no longer requires the stadium to be named after the sponsor)
- New homes for Arizona, ASU, Cal, CU, Oregon, ou, SMU, Stanford, Texas, UCLA, USC, Utah, Washington
- Expanded playoff (probably too early to tell on this one)
- New TV deals (SEC on ABC, B1G on CBS)
- Current season of Fansville (Ewers could be a Heisman candidate but he sure won’t be winning any Oscars)
For reference, here are the P4 vs P4 records so far:
- ACC: 6-8
- B1G: 5-5 (or 5-6 if counting ND)
- Big XII: 5-6
- SEC: 8-5 (or 8-6 if counting ND)
I would say that although a lot has changed, it feels less like a paradigm shift than when NIL or the transfer portal were introduced. Even the introduction of targeting as a rule or the clock no longer pausing on 1st down felt like bigger changes than some of these, at least to me.
Transfer portal is something I forgot about.
I’m unfamiliar with the details of how it operates but I think it’s a good idea in general. After all, if non-athletes can transfer whenever they want, and if coaches can take a new job elsewhere without having to sit out, athletes should be able to move around too.
I am concerned for the vast majority of athletes who aren’t good enough to go pro, because of issues with getting transfer credits to count toward your degree plan, that they may have trouble finishing in four scholarship years.
I’m also concerned about the potential for abuse of the portal by unscrupulous coaches & athletics administrators.
It’s a side effect of the degree to which we all care about this silly sport, and the fact that schools have been recruiting marginal students who love the game more than class for decades. They know they de-facto can’t collude to bar scholarships to transfers anymore, so it is what it is. Every solution depends on artificially restricting the movement of certain students because someone claims to know what’s good for them, but doesn’t give two shits about schools poaching over club chess scholarships or offering merit aid to transferring non-athletes.
I’m all for a regime that controls movement, but they have to compensate the players to give up that flexibility. Otherwise, who among us wouldn’t go someplace we liked better to play the game we love either for the last time as a competitive athlete or to take one more bite at the apple of a professional future? I think you almost have to be a touch delusional to play up to your actual FBS potential, whatever that is.