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The pros and cons of football

By Staff | Dec 27, 2013

We interrupt this holiday week to bring you a few notes on the football season.

First, the Patriots have had a good run and it was nice the way they won their division, but this is not a team that’s going to bring home the Lombardi Trophy for winning the Super Bowl.

They’ll probably land a home playoff game – maybe even a couple – but this is an injury-riddled group being held together by bubble gum, bailing wire, duct tape and Tom Brady’s ability to pick apart defenses. If they sustain any more injuries, they may have to suit up Jonathan Kraft, the owner’s son, just to fill out the roster.

In that light, it’s best to keep our expectations modest. This is a year to appreciate how far the franchise has come from the Bad Old Days when the Patriots could be counted on to snatch defeat from the jaws of certain victory.

Thankfully, those Patriots are long gone and with Tom Brady, there is always hope.

Let us consider, meanwhile, the rest of the football landscape.

While the Patriots are synonymous with football for most fans in this region, the professional game takes a back seat to college football elsewhere in the country, especially the South.

The college game seems to flourish despite the best efforts to kill it by the people who run it.

There was a time, however, when college football deserved top billing and its fans waited all year for one glorious day.

It wasn’t that long ago, either. New Year’s Day was The Day in college football, when eight of the top teams in the country played in the four biggest bowl games, and the season was over on Jan 2. We griped about the lack of a champion or a real playoff system, but there was no losing track of which games were being played, or on which day: The Cotton, Sugar, Orange and Rose bowls were the only four that really mattered. Now, the college football season gets stretched out like the worst reality show ever made.

Time was, you had to be an elite team to get invited to any bowl game – even one not played on New Year’s Day.

Not anymore, thanks to the “everybody-gets-a-bowl-game” culture – a con driven by ESPN and the other television networks that prefer mediocre college football programming over, well, just about anything else, apparently.

Boston College used to be New England’s major college football team, and maybe they will be again. They once featured a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback on a captivating team that played in a New Year’s Day Bowl that people actually cared about. The Eagles finished 7-5 this year in a basketball conference and are one of several teams, you could argue, that should probably stay home. Instead, they’ll play Tuesday in the AdvoCare V100 Bowl. (We are not making that up, but we had to look it up. It used to be called the Independence Bowl.)

There are now so many bowl games now that nobody can keep them straight. The bowl system has become a farce. Games carry names that sound like they came off the set of Breaking Bad, and some teams that received bowl bids don’t even have winning records. But, hey, somebody has to play in the Lenny’s Auto Body Southwestern Salsa and Refried Beans Bowl. (OK, we totally made that one up, but it wasn’t much of a stretch.)

The bright spot is that, starting next season, college football will start an abbreviated football playoff system to determine a legitimate national champion – something which should have been done 30 years ago.

There will be no honor in such a system – the NCAA had to be shamed into the playoff format by a drop in televised bowl ratings – but there will be obscene amounts of money.

Which, to the people in big-time college sports, is the only thing that matters.

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