The funny thing is that I am just as excited about Tech football as I was last week. What’s completely changed in me is my opinion of the rivalry and especially national championships in football. I’ll admit that I’m incredibly biased here, but every bit of the bad taste the Bama-LSU championship left from after the 2011 season came rushing back tenfold. What’s the meaning of being a national champion? Is it the best team that season? You can’t really make that case effectively in either case because the the head-to-head record is 1-1. In fact, it could be argued that in 2011 Bama earned a bye week by losing to LSU since they didn’t have to play in the conference championship game to get to the national title game. If a team wins its conference, the idea is supposed to be that the team in question is the best team in the conference. How, then, can it be argued that another team in the conference is better without dismissing the results of actual games as meaningless? And once we start doing that, how do we decide which games actually matter?
Or to put it another way, why do two games provide a more conclusive decision than one game of which team is better? Bama lost to Texas A&M, a team that georgie didn’t even play at all. What does that have to do with the head-to-head between Bama and georgie? Why does Bama have to beat georgie twice to prove superiority, but georgie only has to do so once (while getting two chances to do so)? It’s just so incongruous and subjective as to make it rather meaningless. At least conferences have very clear, specific, and impartial conditions of victory.
Long story short, I’m done caring about any kind of “relevance” beyond the conference. This year was the most fun the ACC has been in a long time, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s the first time in a long time that neither Clemson nor FSU was a step above the rest.
Our rivalry with georgie was fun while it lasted, but our athletic departments are so different at this point that we might as well have a rivalry with the Atlanta Falcons. The point of watching sports is entertainment, and if I’m being honest, COFH is neither fun nor entertaining for me anymore. It was fun when they at least pretended not to be a professional sports team, but those days are over, and I don’t think they’re coming back. Thank goodness I don’t live in Georgia right now, and the worst fans I have to deal with are WSU or Oregon fans, which don’t even come close to the awfulness of the barking, slobbering masses in Athens. Sorry, this got really long and ranting, but my point is that I’m done giving a rat’s *** about the Georgia Bulldogs or the College Football Playoffs.