Perhaps my earliest memory of the sport of amateur football was the 2000 Sugar Bowl, when Peter Warrick Jr. and the FSU Seminoles fed Mike Vick and the Virginia Tech Hokies into a human-sized blender.
My recollection of that game was hazy, as I was all of 8 years of age when the game kicked off on Jan. 4, 2000, though I remember pulling like hell for the Hokies.
Did I do that because I was raised in the “Hokie, Hokie, High” of V-Tech fandom, you may ask? No. I did that because, one, Vick was the first CFB player I remembered being fascinated by and, two, I really disliked FSU (which is something I still hold near and dear for … some reason).
The end result of that first CFB title game was a 46-29 shellacking by the Seminoles that left V-Tech searching for that elusive first national championship trophy.
Fast forward a quarter-century and the Hokies have yet to find that bit of hardware, though FSU has been through hell and back (and vise versa), winning another title in 2013 with a championship game loss to Oklahoma in 2000.
The long and short of this rambling start to an essay, dear reader, is that the greatest thing about college football is how easy it is to find a partisan take on a given game, regardless of your personal connection to either team that’s on the field.
I say all this in large part as I’m looking at a barren bracket when it comes to the inaugural, 12-team College Football Playoff, with four teams that I grew up indifferent (or apathetic) about playing for a title.
What started as a bracket full of upstart darlings like ASU, Boise State, Indiana and SMU has been rendered down to the “blue bloods” that helped kick the sport into its never-ending nosedive towards corporatism.
While I’ll happily tip my hat to the head coaches (and athletes) that got the Buckeyes, Longhorns, Irish and Nittany Lions into the national semifinal, I can also keep in mind that each of them played no small role in the demise of the West’s last true athletic conference.
Without UT’s wandering eye and constant need for adoration, we wouldn’t have had the Longhorns wandering off to the greener pastures of the SEC.
Without Notre Dame’s recalcitrance towards leaving its long-held football independence, we probably would have USC and UCLA in the Pac-12, with the Fighting Irish taking up a much more geographically sensible spot in the Big Ten.
Without Penn State’s initial move from D-I independence to the Big Ten all those years ago, we wouldn’t have a blueprint for the others to follow in the years to come.
And lastly, without Ohio State’s glutenous athletics spending, we wouldn’t have such an endless need to keep up with the Joneses in college football, ultimately keeping gymnasts from USC from having to fly 2,500 miles to compete in a mid-week meet against Rutgers in the year of our lord 2025.
All of this is to say that finding a rooting interest is possible in any given CFB contest, even if you’re forced to pick between the cancer and the plague that’s driven the sport away from that distant memory we hold onto from all those years passed.