In the flurry of news items coming out of the presidential inauguration, one of them stands out for its uniqueness: J.D. Vance’s complaint, a few days before being sworn in as vice president, that he would prefer to have spent the evening of January 20 at the Ohio States vs. Notre Dame title game.
Fortunately for Vance, a proud Buckeye alum, Ohio State won. (Unfortunately for my own Indiana family, Notre Dame lost.)
Television executives were disappointed. The game had the third fewest viewers out of the last eleven college championships. This is unsurprising when the 12-team playoff format — a massive expansion over the 4-team system that existed until last year — has pushed the title game so late into January that not only did it conflict with the inauguration, but the NFL playoffs (which in the past have always started after the college champion is decided) were mostly over by then as well. In short, it’s possible for people to get tired of watching football, and this year, most of us did.
The season finale wasn’t the only part of college football that suffered. The conference championships, played in the first week of December, are practically a non-event under the new rules. I remember last year how excited most fans were about those games, since back then they were make-or-break events — winning its conference didn’t guarantee that a team would advance, but teams who didn’t win weren’t going anywhere.
But this time, three out of four Power-4 championships sent both the winner and the loser to the playoffs. Even more bizarrely, the eventual national champion, the Ohio Buckeyes, made the playoffs without even playing in the Big Ten championship. To add to the commotion, the one team that began the playoffs undefeated — the Oregon Ducks — was eliminated after a second-round loss to the Buckeyes, who had already lost a game to Oregon in Week 7, before losing again to Michigan in Week 14.
In short, college football used to be a sport where every game mattered, and playing for a national title was the reward that a team earned by playing very, very well all season long. (Out of the ten champions between 2014 and 2023, five had perfect seasons, and the other five had only one loss each.) Now there are hardly any make-or-break moments until the playoffs themselves, when a lucky four weeks just might outweigh a lacklustre season up to that point.
The question of how we came to this point has both a simple answer and a complicated one.
The simple answer is that expanding the playoff to twelve teams was a gross overcorrection to a genuine problem: under the old rules, a team might go undefeated in a good conference (as the Florida State Seminoles did in the SEC in 2023) only to get passed over by the ranking committee in favor of one-loss teams with slightly stronger schedules (the Texas Longhorns and Alabama Crimson Tide). Letting the Seminoles get left out like this was indeed an embarrassment for college football. Even so, there were plenty of less radical ways to fix the problem — the ranking system could have been rebalanced to give more weight to perfect seasons, or the playoffs could have been expanded to six teams rather than twelve.
So it’s clear that there had to be other motivations, and that’s where I think politics comes in — not electoral politics, obviously, but the same baleful centralizing trend that we’ve seen at work in so much of public life. National institutions are swallowing local ones, and the people in charge of these institutions (or at least the athletic ones) are increasingly concerned with money and spectacle rather than good old-fashioned sportsmanship.
For most of its history, college football in America has been a very local affair. Boys aspired to play for a school that they grew up near, or that their relatives had attended or played for. Local rivalries mattered more than just about anything else — almost every Auburn or Berkeley player cared more about winning the Iron Bowl or taking home the Stanford Axe than he did about how his team ranked in the AP or Coaches’ Poll. Nor were most people even bothered by the fact that those polls often disagreed about which team was best, or that other “selectors” (famously Richard Nixon in 1969) also tried their hands at declaring a champion.
The fact that bowl-bound teams had a half-and-half chance of winning their bowl game and finishing the season on a high note was also a plus; playoffs, after all, are bound to end depressingly for all the teams but one. And also, even after a unified national championship was established, the fact that there was only one such game — and that one or at most two regular season losses ended a team’s chances of getting to play in it — kept most fans focused on local rivalries.
Like so much of American life, college football was just better when it was less touched by the firm hand of centralization — before twenty or so teams with national TV fanbases and lots of money to pay their best players got to run roughshod over the smaller schools, schools that have to get by with youths who go there because of family or geography, or even (imagine this) because they aspire to get a certain kind of education.
Obviously, this decay didn’t happen in isolation. The same centralizing, spectacle-seeking ethos was also behind the nationwide trend of putting lots of resources into elite student athletics while letting physical education for ordinary K–12 students slacken or even disappear — a trend that has clearly done much more to harm the typical American child than any changes in how NCAA championships are awarded.
There are people who like to complain that modern Americans care too much about sports; they often say that if ordinary Americans weren’t so distracted by “bread and circuses,” then we wouldn’t be so morally depraved or politically impotent. This is a claim that I mostly disagree with.
It is indeed possible to overindulge in spectator sports. But if you look at the big picture of American history, you’ll see that a century ago, our ancestors were just as enamoured of Babe Ruth and Knute Rockne as our generation is of LeBron James and Matthew Stafford. And the Americans of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were not soft or lazy.
Neither, for that matter, were the classical Greeks, who saved Western civilization at Marathon and Thermopylae and Salamis and Platea, who invented theater and philosophy, and who discovered that the Earth is round — at the same time that they were constantly getting passionate about athletic contests.
And yet, there is a big difference between an Athenian youth of the fifth century B.C., stripping down to run or wrestle in the Olympics with the expectation that, win or lose, he will return to his city and continue his education in rhetoric and law and philosophy and military tactics…and versus a Roman slave-gladiator throwing spears at a tiger, or knifing another slave to death in the Coliseum in front of a roaring audience of fifty thousand Plebs.
The Greek is competing at Olympia to honor his parents and his city; he is driven by pride of place, and the athletic games are part of a broader educational program that prepares him for citizenship. The Roman gladiator has no connection to any particular place, the crowd has no real loyalty to him and is just there to be entertained, and the only future the man is preparing for — on the off chance that he isn’t killed sooner or later — is that he’ll win enough times to be freed and get rich.
Fortunately, American athletics has not yet sunk to the level of blood sport. But in most other ways, we’ve been moving toward the decadent, late-Roman bread-and-circuses model and away from the Greek education-and-virtue-and-love-of-your-hometown model.
Sports are important to the American way of life. When we let them get too centralized, or let them devolve into a pure money-chasing spectacle, America suffers. Whether it’s neglecting P.E. for ordinary students because we’re concerned only about elite athletes who draw a crowd or letting second-rate teams win the national football title because eleven playoff games makes for good television — either way, we aren’t being true to our heritage.
There are Americans who want to get rid of most or all athletic scholarships in an attempt to make American universities more “meritocratic.” (Some of these people, like Vivek Ramaswamy, even pass themselves off as conservatives.) I hope those people never prevail.
Doing well at a sport is a sign of good character — it is a sign that a young man or woman is driven, disciplined, and (for some sports and positions) a quick thinker and a natural leader as well. And although the kind of intelligence that standardized tests measure is also important, it is only a narrow kind of intelligence, and not nearly as all-encompassing as the faux meritocrats make it out to be.
These people, if they got their way, would make our country more like South Korea — a place where life for young people is a miserable grind, with teenagers often spending fifteen hours a day at school and test prep as they compete for limited seats in a narrow circle of prestigious universities — and at the end of it all, their country has wound up with a fertility rate of about 0.8. (China, Taiwan, and Singapore are almost as bad, but for reasons I don’t fully understand, the Koreans have it worst.)
We Americans need to do everything in our power to avoid this fate — whether that means keeping athletic scholarships in place or making physical fitness count in high school GPA or raising the status of trade schools relative to four-year colleges or simply not giving the Ivy League schools (whose academic standards are often lousy anyway) so much unearned prestige relative to other universities.
At the end of the day, I would be very happy to live in a country that pursues balance and moderation on these things — a country where teachers can look at a skilled high school mathematician or debate team captain and see a youth whose education won’t be complete until he can run a 5.5-minute mile, and has lifted enough weights to build a handsome figure, and where a top football talent might choose to play at a small university rather than a large one because he admires the small school’s academics, or because his father played there.
And I would also be happy to see an end to the twelve-team college football playoff. Because it is absurd.
It is absurd for the title game to be played after most fans have already lost interest due to being halfway through the NFL post-season. It is absurd for most of the conference championship games to send both the winning team and the losing team to the playoffs. And it is absurd for the only undefeated team in the regular season to have to play against — and possibly lose to — a two-loss team that it has already beaten once.
Were I put in charge of the whole system, I would probably revive the old Bowl Championship Series — where the Rose Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and Orange Bowl took turns as the Championship Bowl — albeit with a few modifications. To make sure that any undefeated team that’s not in a minor conference gets a chance at the title, I would (1) reweight the ranking system so that undefeated teams are always at the top unless they played a very weak schedule, and (2) solve the occasional problem of a season with three undefeated teams by holding an ad hoc playoff game between the #2 and #3 seeds a week or two before the title game.
But that is probably too much to wish for. As it is, I would be content if the people in charge of the College Football Playoff had the good sense to step back from the brink and do next year’s tournament with six or eight teams.
After all, I am at a school with a top-tier football program, and if, sometime after I graduate, I get elected vice president — and if, in that same year, my alma mater is playing in the season finale — and if January 20 happens to fall on a Monday — then for goodness’s sake, I don’t want to have to choose, as J.D. Vance did, between the title game and my own inauguration!
Twilight Patriot is the pen name for a young American who lives in South Carolina, where he is currently working toward a graduate degree. He also has a Substack where you can read more of his writings, such as this recent essay about how the science and engineering of the Christian Middle Ages deserve more respect than they usually get.
Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).
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