College Football Is Becoming the NBA, and Fans Are Not Happy
It speaks volumes that the only real intrigue from the semifinals of the College Football Playoff games was whether Oklahoma Sooners star quarterback Kyler Murray would eventually go to the NFL or MLB.
Other than that, everything that was expected to happen did across Saturday night’s games.
The Notre Dame Fighting Irish continued their brutal streak of horrendous bowl game losses in a dispiriting 30-3 defeat at the hands of Clemson. And as expected, Oklahoma couldn’t get nearly enough defensive stops in a marginally exciting 45-34 loss to the defending champion Alabama Crimson Tide.
Now, Clemson and Alabama will face each other in the College Football Playoff for the fourth straight year. It will be the rubber match for the national championship, as the two have exchanged wins in the title game (last year, Alabama beat Clemson in the semifinal.)
Yawn.
Before I go any further, I’d like to make it perfectly clear that I love both the NBA and college football. I honestly couldn’t tell you a thing I learned in school in 2006, but I can vividly remember the Rose Bowl game between Texas and USC, as well as the horribly officiated NBA Finals between the Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat that year.
I’m also not one of those whiny sports fans who incessantly complains about “super-teams” and pines for perpetual parity. If you have a problem with dynasties and dominance, you are officially not allowed to wax nostalgic about the good old days of Michael Jordan’s mid-90s Chicago Bulls.
But given that, even I have to admit that I’m getting a tad bored with two of my favorite sports over the last half-decade.
Fan complaints about the recent dominance of the Golden State Warriors are well-documented at this point. The Warriors have been to four straight NBA Finals, each time against the Cleveland Cavaliers, and have as good a chance as any team to make it again this year.
Now, you’re beginning to hear eerily similar complaints from fans who are as sick of Warriors-Cavs as they are of Clemson-Alabama.
ESPN posted a tweet promoting Alabama-Clemson “Round 4,” which makes sense given that the network shelled out millions to air the College Football Playoff.
ESPN couldn’t have been happy with the response they got.
Those are just a fraction of the responses, but virtually all of them follow the same rhetoric.
Yes, there’s a part of the sports fan in me that appreciates the fact that I’m witnessing true greatness in the form of the Crimson Tide and Warriors. Boring or not, it’s no small feat to win as many championships in as small of a window as each team has done.
But it’s pretty clear that the public is getting fed up with watching this greatness ad nauseam.
At least the Warriors’ window could very well be closing. Their players are aging and stars like Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson and DeMarcus Cousins could all leave as free agents next year.
Unfortunately for college football fans clamoring for parity, the windows for the Crimson Tide and the Tigers could stay open for quite some time. As long as Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney remain at Alabama and Clemson, respectively, there may be no end in sight to those teams’ dominance.
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