College Football: Conventional Wisdom Can't Help You Now

Will Lewis — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 07:44:45 -0400

We stand today 75 days until college football season.

As college football fans, we are currently chest deep in the thick of the wasteland that is the summer months, or offseason.

Our only hope for refreshment from the monotonous baseball chatter? Preseason magazines. Blogs. Youtube clips of years past, watching and wishing you could emulate that same feeling of last year's game against Texas, Auburn, or Ohio State.

All the while, amidst the fantasizing and the dreaming, we speculate. Who will be the chosen one of 2008? Who will the Mythical National Championship monster choose as its favorite son this year? Who has a time machine to travel into the future and retrieve the answers we so desperately seek? (Seriously, if anybody has one of those, let me know.)

The sad truth is nothing will do. The pre-season magazines might as well be printed on toilet paper. The blogs can go ahead and include commentary on the Presidential Race, for maybe then they will be closer to accurately selecting a winner (shameless plug of the day: www.heyjennyslater.blogspot.com).

No, the gravity of the preseason question is that out of the 120 D-I teams competing in college football, not one is capable of beating all of the other 119. There is no correct answer.

What last season proved to me is that not only that any team can hang with anyone, but that any touted team can turn out to be a complete wash (e.g. Louisville, Michigan for however long, Notre Dame).

Georgia could quite possibly go into their schedule this season and have LSU completely shut down without a proven quarterback, or Auburn flounder under their new offensive system, or even Arizona State collapse under the preseason pressure.

Who knows? Georgia could even go into the meat of their schedule and lose six games to teams they should or should not have lost to, a la Tennessee 2005. Anything can happen now because the perennial doormat teams of the past have figured out that they don't have to settle for what they have traditionally been given.

Welcome to the New World Order of College Football, people, where it's not about who will excel, but instead who will collapse.

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College Football: Conventional Wisdom Can't Help You Now