Choosing college football over the NFL
Last week’s NFL Draft attracted a huge televised audience, as per usual. A large part of that audience was comprised of the NFL fans and draftniks you’d expect, but some of it had notably different motivations. Instead of eagerly watching to see who their particular team picked or putting their mock drafts up against the likes of Mel Kiper Jr. and Todd McShay, some college football fans tune in mostly to laugh at how draft selections often don’t correlate to college careers.
To get a sense of why some NCAA football fans prefer mocking the draft to conducting mock drafts of their own and why others ignore both the draft and the NFL as a whole, I spoke to Spencer Hall, the man behind legendary college football site Every Day Should Be Saturday. Here’s what he had to say:
Andrew Bucholtz: There obviously are some exceptions, but a lot of college football fans seem pretty indifferent (at best) to the NFL as a whole. What’s behind that: ties to particular NCAA teams rather than specific players, the game-day experience of college football, the different style of play in the NFL, all of the above or something else entirely?
Spencer Hall: I am, but I don’t think that’s the norm. Try this metaphor: Saturday’s the main meal, and everything on Sunday is reheated leftovers. It’s good, but it’s not what you had last night. The reasons behind the differential are mysterious, but I suspect it has something to do with the level of indoctrination, especially in the Sun Belt. In the SEC, the NFL only really arrived in earnest 40 or 50 years ago at best. College teams have been playing their rivalry games since the 19th century. Marketing-wise, NCAA football had a half a century’s head start.
(The style of play in the NFL is milquetoast at the X’s and O’s level unless you’re watching someone like Sean Payton or Belichick coach, though. That doesn’t help.)
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A.B.: Specifically on the draft, is there something that makes it more interesting to college fans than the rest of the NFL? I noticed a fair number of college football types (including yourself) tweeting about the first round pretty extensively Thursday, and I know you’ve written plenty of draft profile-ish stuff over the last month (I particularly enjoyed the Gruden QB camp posts). Is that thanks to it being a slower time for college football, some sort of graduation-esque closure for prospects’ college careers or something else?
S.H.: It’s all of those, and a lingering bemusement at the NFL’s scouting apparatus. Matt Hinton has written extensively about recruiting rankings at the top holding steady through high school, college, and onto the NFL, and in some sense he’s right: blue-chips become first-rounders, and generally those people are pretty successful. That may be a matter of magnitude overwhelming even the most myopic scout or recruitnik, i.e. “this person is so superhumanly talented even the dumbest person imaginable can spot them”. Where it really gets fascinating is in the second and third rounds when you can clearly see how wrong the scouts have gotten something due to the hyperbolic scrutiny a two month run-up to the draft generates.
(Ask Ryan Mallett. The Patriots took him Friday night from the vault and didn’t even have to use a ski mask.)
As a college fan, it is also the last time you have any real sort of perspective talking about them. For instance, you can tell a Carolina fan who didn’t watch every game Cam Newton played last year, “Do not book Super Bowl tickets, because this dude spent the last year playing in a Wing-T retrofitted with a warp drive”. You can tell Patriots fans that they stole Mallett outright. You can’t help them deal with it, but you can tell Vikings fans that if Christian Ponder doesn’t explode the first time he’s hit on a play that he’s smart, mobile, and, um, yeah will probably explode from the elbow out when hit.
It’s also the last chance you get to see the guys before they go under the shield, and thus become much less interesting because they fall behind the PR cloak of the NFL.
A.B.: How do college fans handle the disconnect between players’ apparent value as pro prospects and how they were seen in college? A few guys that come to mind there are Jake Locker, Blaine Gabbert and Ponder, none of who had the greatest final seasons as NCAA quarterbacks but wound up as first-round draft picks this year, and then you have guys likeGraham Harrell and Jared Zabransky, who were tremendous in college but undrafted by the NFL. Does that make it hard for college fans to take the NFL seriously?
S.H.:We’re just as confused as you are, but there are reasons. We see them. The linemen are bigger, so QBs have to be taller. The DBs are faster, so accurate but half-armed passers become INT machines. We get that, and that many college QBs benefited from system play within frameworks that will not work in the NFL.
The root of the contempt is often the complete lack of innovation in NFL play, especially on the offensive side of the ball. Taking risks in the NFL is more expensive, sure, but Bill Walsh himself predicted that plays would become simpler and tempo would ramp up in order to confuse opposing defenses, and you still really only have the Colts doing that. Cam Newton ran a no-huddle at Auburn, but watch: Carolina will run a bare-bones plodding pro-style next year and saw his legs off to fit him in the bed of being AN NFL PASSER. (You’re supposed to read that in Merrill Hoge’s voice.)
It’s maddening to watch, but that’s the NFL.
A.B.: How does it feel to read a NFL scouting report on somebody you’ve watched and maybe cheered for for years? Are there particular areas the scouts are generally right or wrong about?
S.H.: They generally get it right with everything except character issues (which are almost always exaggerated). With quarterbacks a big arm causes complete hysteria, often obscuring large fundamental faults. They still get entirely too excited about wideouts. The top five receivers in the NFL went to Western Michigan, Kansas State, Alcorn State, Michigan and University of Louisiana–Lafayette, and yet we have Julio Jones and A.J. Green in the top ten.
A.B.: On that note, do you think the NFL weights game experience heavily enough against combine measurables? Should what players do in the NCAA matter more?
S.H.: I think they do now, but it’s a horrible position for scouts when you have Matt Leinart bomb out at Arizona but have a good starter in Matt Cassel at Kansas City. So much of a player’s success at any level is contextual, the byproduct of 10 other guys working in sync with him. Locker is a perfect example: his endurance through a rocky stretch at Washington is admirable from a character and leadership standpoint, but was his mediocre supporting cast to blame for his subpar passing? Conversely, is anyone really accounting for how much Auburn’s seasoned offensive line meant to Cam Newton’s success? I don’t envy the task, especially when so much money is attached to each guess. (And it is guessing. There are other, kinder words for it, but at the basest level it’s collective monetized guessing–just like everything else.)
A.B.: The NFL seems to be interfering with the NCAA season a bit this year, what with the moving of the New Year’s Day bowls and the potentially in-flux dates for the BCS games. How do NCAA fans see that? Should the NCAA have to accommodate the NFL?
S.H.: It would be insane to occupy the NFL’s space on Sundays, and the BCS should stay out of the NFL’s way when scheduling the BCS Title Game for ratings reasons. That said, if the NFL conflicts with the NCAA on New Year’s Day bowls, to hell with the NFL. I have no reason other than thorny, stubborn traditionalism to say that, and I don’t need another.
A.B.: Have the numbers of college-only, NFL-only, and college-and-NFL fans shifted over time? If so, which group or groups benefits?
S.H.: I have no idea. My guess would be that both are more popular right now than ever before, and that this does not seem to be a zero-sum game. The collective human viewing sponge has not reached a saturation point for either.
A.B.: Roger Goodell resigns and you’re appointed NFL commissioner. You’re told the NFL needs to attract more fans of the college game. What would you do to make that happen?
S.H.: Arena League motion rules to free up offenses. I’d do that if college football had a commissioner, too, but we’re an anarchic state without a monarch for the most part. I would also fire Joe Buck, but strictly for personal reasons.
With the NFL Draft in the rear-view mirror and summer now fast approaching, the traditional gap separating the two football solitudes may narrow. Considering the lack of progress with the on-going lockout, NCAA football remains a more than suitable replacement brand for the NFL’s otherwise exclusive fanbase. As for the college fans who feel every day should be Saturday? They’ve been fine all along.
Follow Spencer Hall on Twitter and check out his work at Every Day Should Be Saturday andSB Nation.
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