The Pecan Park Eagle

Which team from the SEC, Big 10, Big 12, or PAC 10 is going to win it all in 2011?

I love college football, even though my school, the University of Houston, goes out there to play every year with s snow ball’s chance in hell of winning the national championship. Still, if I simply resist looking too closely at the growing divide between the “haves” and “have-nots” of the college football world, I can get excited over the fact that QB Case Keenum is coming back for a record sixth year at UH – and pretty much joy-fired over the fact that the Cougars open the season at their home in “The  Rob” against the only club on their schedule with an even remote chance of reaching the top rung of NCAA Division 1 football, the UCLA Bruins. Our other eleven 2011 foes are a tad on the also-ran downside. The Cougars’ 2011 schedule include schools like Mississippi Body & Fender Repair, Tulane, Florida Home for Retired Nuns, and Rice.

Not much traction for digging deep and going faster or further in that dirt.

I don’t want to wear us out thinking too long and hard about this fine mess of undisguised professionalism that passes for college football today, but I do hope to make a point about the system seems to be growing more like professional wrestling by the day.

The beneficiaries of the status quo seem to include only or mainly these groups: the NFL, the Colleges, TV Networks, Media Sponsors, Select Alumni with Deep Pockets and Mountain High Egos, the College Coaching Fraternity, and the few college players who go out there and prove that they are worthy of millions from the professional clubs. I guess we’d also have to include the post-season bowl games and the swarmy confederacy of sleazy agents that also feast on the way things are.

The vast number of college players who participate get nothing beyond their years of playing for alma mater and the show of things. They are of value to their schools for as long as they can play, but a sad and large number of them end up leaving school by age 22 with no degree – and no future in the NFL. Yet, the fact remains, these are the guys who made it all work for the beneficiary class. Had there been no faceless warrior players in the college football trenches, there could have been no canvas to paint with glory for artists like Auburn’s Cam Newton, the 2010 Heisman trophy winner.

Now we get the news that the University of Texas and ESPN are teaming up to launch the “Longhorn Network,” a 24/7 television exposition of UT sports as the land of opportunity for all the world’s best athletes, including the trench-warriors of college football. Now other big schools will be forced to either get their own non-stop TV networks, or else, get buried by the “just-do-like-Nike” familiarity brands of UT Sports Live and the kindred rival school networks that are certain to follow them..

Let’s be practical. There’s not enough channel space on Comcast to house all the Division 1 colleges, even if they all wanted and could afford their own 24/7 sports stations. Providing space would require the cable/satellite  networks to shut down too many of the Spanish-speaking gospel, soap opera, booby-dancing game shows, and Latino soccer channels to make room for American football schools – and that is never going to happen.

Give or take a few more, we may end up with these following schools having their own 24/7 all sports networks: Notre Dame, Texas, Oregon, Boise State,  Oklahoma, Alabama, Florida, LSU, Ohio State, Michigan, Nebraska,  USC, and UCLA.  Then we will be able to simply sit back and watch the forces of market familiarity drive 90% of all the best athletes in the country to these schools alone. In time, some writer may note that all our national championship games consistently include only schools from the TV network group.

On the day that happens, and maybe we are already there without the private network help, college football will be on a level with professional wrestling. Only a few select challengers will get to face off for the title each year. All other schools will simply show up as well-compensated opponents for the sake of drawing a pay-day and helping fill out the regular season as the psychological set up for the “big game.”

GO COOGS! BEAT UCLA!