College Football Pet Peeves

It's that cold, dark time of the year between the National Championship Game and next season's spring games that every football fan dreads. After Feb. 1's national signing day, we college football fans will be eagerly awaiting any bit of insight, speculation or news that we can get our remote-grasping hands on, all just to hold us over until the disheartened students begin filing back into classes marking the inauguration of a new football season.

During that time, interesting stories about our beloved college football are at a premium for us sportswriters. To solve this problem, we get the privilege of looking at the sport from a unique and creative perspective to keep the millions of fans entertained.

With that objective in mind, I'm going to take this opportunity to air my grievances about the sport that I love. These are a few things about college football that annoy me.

This article is meant to be light-hearted, not a platform to legitimately complain. Please take it as such. As always, feel free to post your own pet peeves or agree/disagree with my own.

Spotting Out-of-Bounds Punts

This is a big one for me.

It's both funny and irritating to watch the line judge run up the field after a shanked punt, eyes locked forward (instead of on the point on the field where he thinks that the punt crossed the boundary), only to stop suddenly, seemingly at random.

In the days of high-definition, cable-mounted cameras, that's the most technological solution college football can come up with. Given, in the grand scheme of things, that shouldn't be the NCAA's biggest concern, but I, for one, will not let college football's dark little secret go unspoken any longer.

It's an imperfect system in which one person has to both spot when the ball both crosses the boundary and at what yard line it did so, all will looking at the ball dead on (usually). That's not easy for anyone to have to do, but Philadelphia Eagles' punter Jeff Feagles had an interesting take on the matter in a New York Times article from 2009.

I won't go as far as to suggest that the NCAA implement lasers, though.

Punters Faking Injuries

Speaking of punters, they are the subject of my next pet peeve.

I know punters aren't the most respected players on the field, and it might have something to do with them faking injuries. The football field is not a place to showcase your performance of Romeo and Juliet, so get up.

To make matters worse, referees reward these fakers with defensive penalties more often than not. I look forward to the day when faking an injury is an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty of its own. I'm sure that would end the faking pretty quickly.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the influx of European punters in American football and soccer's reputation for egregious acting on the field. I'm probably reaching a bit on that one, but all I know is that it needs to stop.

Forward Progress

It's not the idea of forward progress that annoys me. It's how it is implemented in certain situations.

Imagine two scenarios:

A receiver catches the ball downfield and is immediately contacted by the defensive back and driven back a few yards. Before the whistle is blown, the receiver breaks free of the tackle and attempts to reverse field by running further back, where he is tackled. Because that player lost yardage of his own accord, he doesn't get his forward progress.

Now imagine that it's 4th-and-inches. The quarterback takes the snap from under center and jumps up, sticking the ball over the first down line before pulling the ball back and falling backwards behind the line of scrimmage. In this example, the offensive team would be given forward progress even though the ball carrier lost yardage of his own accord.

Those two scenarios show a double standard that I find annoying and frustrating.

Preseason Polls

All I heard coming into the 2011 season was how dominant the Oklahoma Sooners were going to be. On paper, they were the best team in the country by far. Too bad for Bob Stoops that the games are played on the field.

All polls are subjective by nature—I get that. Even the computer polls are weighted to favor a certain statistic over the other. So, why don't we wait until we actually see the teams play on the field before we give them a ranking?

Preseason rankings give us fans and sportswriters something to discuss leading up to the season. The problem is that these rankings are very difficult to change until a team loses. Yes, teams 15 to 25 can change because of a bad performance, but a preseason No. 1-ranked team isn't likely to move far from that spot without a loss. It's unfair for possibly superior teams to get denied a top spot because the No. 2 team hasn't given them any reason to lower them.

Changing this pet peeve is a hopeless battle, but hopefully my next one is already in motion.

No Playoff

This one is more than a pet peeve; it's a burning rage that sits deep in my belly, keeping me up at nights.

Every year college football fans get more and more fed up with CFB's lack of a playoff. After this season, with four teams having legitimate claims for a chance to play for a championship going into the postseason, talks of a plus-one format have sprung up as high as the NCAA's president, according to a report from the AP.

I could (and probably will) fill a whole article on this one, but that will have to wait for another time. I just felt that a list of annoying things about college football wouldn't be complete without including the biggest annoyance of all: the BCS.