College Football: Wait Until October

Is anything worse than the end of college football season? Anybody who has ever lived through a college football Saturday suffers through nearly eight months longing for the first kick-off of the next season. For the college fan, football is the world's greatest team sport. Basketball and baseball can be fun, but there is nothing that compares to the sport that dominates those months that end in the letter "r".

The average male college football fan find cannot resist glimpsing the team rankings found in those glossy pre-season college football magazines while the wife is shopping through the aisles of the local super-center or drug store. Expectations particular heighten when  a fan reads that his or her team is expected to "make some noise" during the upcoming season.

Unfortunately, we tend to have too much confidence in those writers who get paid to write the evaluations for those magazines. It's not that those magazines are encouraging writers to create glowing articles about fan-heavy teams, it's just the fact that predicting the outcome of football games many weeks in advance is complicated by all kinds of complexities. Injuries, player arrests, quitters (players and coaches), academic troubles, and even the weather can and do affect the outcomes of games. No matter how much a writer studies the game, he or she cannot predict all of the things that can go wrong with your favorite team.

There is another problem with college football. Nobody has seen the team chemistry factor in action prior to the first few games. Team chemistry changes more on a year-to-year basis in college sports than any of the pro sports. Seniors graduate and underclassmen quit or go pro. A new crop of freshmen and transfers arrive on campus every season.

The National Football League has a preseason schedule that allows us to preview the team rosters in action before the real games begin. The pre-season games don't offer a perfect preview of and NFL team, but the discerning observer can usually tell which teams are ready for prime time and which teams are just coasting.

The first few weeks of the college football season can be pretty bizarre. Odd upsets and stunning blowouts can turn those pre-season college football magazines into waste paper in a matter of as little of sixty-minutes of  game clock.  Here is a new Law of College Football for you: THE FIRST THREE WEEKS OF SEPTEMBER ARE  USELESS FOR  PREDICTING HOW GOOD OR BAD COLLEGE FOOTBALL TEAMS WILL BE AT YEAR'S END.

The first three or four weeks of college football season are comparable to the early phases of the NFL exhibition season. A few things become immediately obvious while watching the first few college games every September. First, a lot of teams are just not ready to roll out  while new players and new systems are still in the early stages of installation into the overall team chemistry.

Some highly touted players just don't live up to their billing or past performance. Some previously overlooked players suddenly start playing like all-stars. Some coaches will appear to have lost their minds, or at least their intelligence, during the off-season.

Some traditional cream-puff teams that usually lack depth at mid-season as injuries kick-in, can surprise and will present formidable opposition for the powerhouses that tend to arrogantly overlook the competition. Team such as The Citadel or Louisiana-Monroe can and have scored big upsets of near misses during those first few weeks of the season.

Alabama fans were briefly fooled into dreams of a national championship early this year when the Clemson Tigers failed to make an appearance at the Peach Bowl in Atlanta. That dream of glory was short-lived when little Tulane forced the Tide to rely on special teams to save them from total embarrassment in the very next game. Clemson will get better and Bama will also find equilibrium by the end of this season.

Alabama needs digest that lesson and then look across the state of Alabama at Auburn to learn how teams are supposed to peak at the end of the season, not in September.

Auburn teams under head coach Tommy Tuberville have a history of improving from week-to-week over the course of the season even after a rough start. Auburn focused on fundamentals and finding a quarterback during their first two games this year. Things like fundamentals and identifying players are what a pre-season should be all about.