College Soccer Finals or SEC II Championship? – San Bernardino Sun

This comes from the reason “be careful what you want.”

On Monday night, are Alabama and Georgia playing for the national championship of college football, or is it the 2nd Southeast Conference championship game? Either way, unless you live in the southeastern quadrant of the United States, this is going to be a quaint story.

The idea, back in 1998 when the Bowl Series Championship was meant to determine a true national champion every year, was that having a real championship chase would make college football big. better and better than ever.

But consider: Of the 32 who attended the semi-finals over eight seasons of the College Football Playoff, the league that replaced the BCS final one game in the 2014 season, 10 were from the SEC and six from the Coast Conference. Atlantic Ocean. Alabama is in the finals for the sixth time in seven years. When was the last time a team outside the SEC or ACC appeared in a championship game? It was CFP’s first year, when Ohio State moved to Oregon, the only time an outsider won.

Go back further than that. In the 16 years of the BCS title game, nine teams were won by the SEC, two by the Florida State of the ACC and one by Miami (then in the Big East and later the ACC). Of the 32 slots, 19 have been filled by teams from that southeast quadrant.

See a pattern? College football has become what NASCAR used to be, the exclusive property of one region of the country. If you come from or belong to that area, no problem. Otherwise, and unless a kid from your school (say, Mater Dei’s Bryce Young) is playing for Alabama or Georgia next Monday night, you might be wondering if there’s a better way to spend your evening. me.

Many prospective viewers seem to be wondering. Rankings for this year’s two New Year’s Eve semifinals, Alabama vs Cincinnati late afternoon and golden hour Georgia-Michigan in the East, are down 12% from their last New Year’s Eve semifinals in 2016, according to Anthony Sportico’s Crupi. . The Eastern primetime Georgia-Michigan battle drew just under 17.2 million viewers. For comparison, Ohio State-Clemson at prime time on December 28, 2019, attracted 21,151 million viewers.

Including simulcasts on ESPN2/ESPNU, the Cotton Bowl averaged 16,647 million viewers and the Orange Bowl grossed 17,192 million. The two-game average was 16.92 million, down 1.5% from 17,186 million for the NYE inaugural in 2015 and -12% from the NYE semi-final in 2016 (19,291 million).

– Anthony Crupi (@crupicrupicrupi) January 4, 2022

Maybe it’s an Ohio State thing. This year’s Rose Bowl between the Buckeyes and Utah attracted 16.6 million viewers during the 2 p.m. PT period, Rose Bowl ratings aren’t the second best semi-final of the CFP era. (Ohio State-Washington had 16.9 million viewers as of January 1, 2019.) What’s more, in the crazy closing minutes of Ohio State’s 45-42 win, viewership jumped to 19.7 million. . Apparently, Ol’ Granddad still has the power to draw.

But the potential drop in viewership for the playoffs is an issue college football has to deal with. Another show was on display early in the New Year’s morning, when ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit and Desmond Howard began their “get out of my lawn” routine on the network’s “College GameDay” morning show, disparaging reality. that players would opt out of a bowl game – namely, four Ohio State players skipped the Rose Bowl.

and, as fit for a show that doesn’t even need to be shown, the hosts are claiming that “the youth of today are entitled and it’s the video game’s fault” nonsense pic.twitter.com/4EdBuTivH

– Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) January 1, 2022

Herbstreit went as far as to say: “Players don’t love football these days,” which is not only a classic “my old days” statement but also a sign that he is not reading it correctly. room. Later that night, when Mississippi senior defender Matt Corral injured his ankle in the Sugar Bowl and his NFL draft stock strained, debated whether a player should risk the injury , in those cases, flared up again, especially after ESPN’s Joe Tessitore talked about how Corral did it “the right way.”

pic.twitter.com/YvATaK9MVK

– sportsvids1 (@ sportsvids1) January 2, 2022

Allow me to respectfully disagree with Joe Tessitore. There is no “right way”. Corral can potentially cost millions of dollars. Most media people were not in this position. Playing bowls is not a “wrong way to do it”. This is a business.

– JT (@ TarH2O23) January 2, 2022

As noted above, those opt-outs don’t affect viewership.

But a player who spends his entire season playing the College Rugby Round and falling has every reason to feel like another feat is a consolation prize. Shout out allegiance, sure, but remember it’s a two-way street. How loyal was Brian Kelly to the Notre Dame players on his way to LSU when the Irishman still had a playoff spot left?

For more on loyalty and how it doesn’t always flow both ways, we might recommend checking out former Ohio State defender Marcus Williamson’s Twitter thread from New Year’s Day. Among other things, it shows that when Urban Meyer was fired at Jacksonville for trying to bully NFL players, it was just a continuation of what he did at the college level.

What do these problems have in common? Stay with us.

The failure of the CFP – both in terms of the performance of the participants and the results of the semi-finals, much of which has not been completed in years – may or may not be resolved by an expansion to eight, 12 or 16 teams. And getting other parts of the country (hello, Pac-12!) back to the level of the ACC and SEC isn’t going to happen quickly.

Rose Bowl viewership – also likely spiked by Utah viewers watching Utes’ first visit to Pasadena – believed in that consolation prize syndrome, but the game solves that problem for the sake of value. of the entire season and the commentary was directed towards which team made the top four. This wasn’t the early ’90s when Herbstreit and Howard were competing, and as No.1 and No.2 rarely pitted each other in a stalemate, there were all sorts of debates about which team/conference/region was the one. the best and sometimes we even have more than one team win the national championship.