Seismic changes mean college football entering new era

It has been seven months since the last college football game, seven months since we watched, mouths agape, as the Alabama offense treated Ohio State with the same disdain the Crimson Tide held for the first 12 defenses that tried to stop it.

That game in south Florida signaled the end of what always will be remembered as the COVID-19 season, a season of fits and not-starts, a season in which some teams played five games and some played 12, a season in which stadiums served as mostly empty TV studios.

“There was nobody in the damn stands. That’s what I remember,” Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi said.

We are promised full stadiums this season, give or take the Delta variant. No one, not even Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban, wants to return to the oddity of college football in 2020. But when we said goodbye to last season, we didn’t understand we were saying goodbye to college football as we knew it in the before times, too.

A new era is dawning, and as of today, a new website has dawned to cover it. We turned on the lights at On3 as fast as we could, and we turned them on just in time to chronicle a season with the most change in generations.

It’s an era in which Alabama, the school that gave us the Million Dollar Band in 1922, now has the Nearly Million Dollar Quarterback almost a century later. Hey, everyone, don’t forget to apply sunscreen to those pale forearms. We’re paying players above the table now. The initials “NIL” have elbowed their way into the college football lexicon, right there next to PAT, RPO and SMU.

It’s a season in which vocabulary has failed us. Last year’s seniors stuck around even if we don’t have a name for them. “Super seniors” is a reference to sixth-year players, not talent. The decision not to penalize players who lost part, if not all, of a season to the pandemic will deliver a bonanza of talent, depth and experience in 2021.

It’s a schedule in which you can’t tell the players without a program because hundreds of football student-athletes are suiting up for new teams without having to redshirt. It’s hard to believe, but the transfer portal means that the college athlete now has more control over where he/she plays than most pro athletes, who traded away the freedom of early-career movement in collective bargaining. Chase Brice, the fifth-year quarterback for Appalachian State, has played for more teams (also Clemson and Duke) than Mookie Betts, the eighth-year outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Not every benefit is measured in dollars and cents.

It’s a time when coaches, who never have been agents of change, understand the need to be on the right side of history, if not recruiting. Finding a coach who complains about a student-athlete leaving early to transfer — or about NIL or every other change that benefits the player — is like finding a coach who complains about too many home games.

Adapt and change

Mack Brown, who turns 70 this month, coached his first college game in 1983 at Appalachian State (the Mountaineers, then in Division I-AA, stunned Wake Forest 27-25). Thirty-eight seasons and one un-retirement later, Brown, the oldest FBS coach, has embraced the new college football. “I’ve told the players, ‘If you’re unhappy, life’s too short,’ ” Brown said. “ ‘Come to me this afternoon. I’ve got papers, and we’ll let you sign the transfer portal papers, and we’ll help you go somewhere.’ ”

Never mind the havoc wreaked with the depth chart. Teaching a player to respond to adversity by working harder? So old school. The coaches have only their salaries to blame. When coaches began making millions, the disparity between their paychecks and the benefits accruing to student-athletes became too glaring to ignore.

After years of protest about what the players deserve, they suddenly are swimming in freedom, which comes with a lot of responsibility and no user manual. Hundreds of the almost 1,600 players who entered the transfer portal have failed to find another program, and let us all wring our hands in unison.

And it’s a season in which the biggest changes in college football will be discussed thoroughly, even if they won’t happen for a while. The reverberations of Texas and Oklahoma abandoning the Big 12 for the SEC in 2025 (at the latest) are big enough that in the past 10 days, no one has uttered a syllable about playoff expansion. You remember the proposal to expand the College Football Playoff from four teams to 12? If big news comes in threes, and there’s something out there waiting to be told, we all need to learn to think bigger.

The purely selfish, remarkably destructive and completely understandable joint decision by Texas, Oklahoma and the SEC is being felt throughout the highest levels of college athletics. It hasn’t even been a decade since the FBS paired off in Power 5 conferences and the Group of 5. Now the SEC and the Big Ten are putting up their own velvet ropes within the Power 5. The Big 12 is gasping for breath, the Pac-12 is starting over (and way behind) and the ACC has a foot on each side of the ropes.

The ACC has a historical identity as a basketball conference, as anyone who has ever watched the Duke-North Carolina rivalry can attest. When the ACC welcomed in Florida State in 1992, and peeled away Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College from the Big East a dozen or so years later, the idea of football driving the ACC bus was implicit. But it felt like anyone who came out and proclaimed football to be the most important sport in the conference would have to surrender his or her ACC Basketball Tournament tickets.

Dean Smith is no longer with us, Mike Krzyzewski is coaching his final season, Clemson is on the medal stand of college football programs and who’s kidding whom?

“As I’ve stated since my first day as ACC commissioner, football must be number one priority for us,” Jim Phillips, who replaced John Swofford in February, said in a speech at ACC Media Days. Asked the following day to elaborate, Phillips said, “The reality is, that’s college athletics in 2021. Our conference, our programs, are driven by the sport of football.”

That’s not new, of course, but the ACC making it official policy is new. And by the way, Notre Dame held up its end of the deal, moving out of the ACC after a one-year rental. The Fighting Irish are independent once more, perhaps the only part of 2021 college football in which everything old is new again.

(Graphic at top of page by Jason Hapney)