College football is at a dangerous crossroads in the sports life cycle. Around the country, much of the focus is on winning a national championship, which is never a bad goal to shoot for as that is the whole point of the sport after all.
At the end of the year there is only one national champion though, so does that mean the rest of the season is a complete waste if it isn’t your program celebrating in a rain of confetti at the end of the year?
For Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian, that reality is harrowing, and he warns college football that not celebrating the smaller victories could ruin the beauty of the sport that fans have come to love.
The Message Sarkisian Wants College Football to Know
For the Longhorns, the expectations every year are to be one of the few teams fighting to bring home a national championship at the end of the season, the same lofty goals many colleges have around the world. For some programs, though, that quest isn’t feasible every year, as they’re unable to field competitive teams each cycle.
“That’s part of the problem in college athletics. Everybody is chasing one end goal and we’re losing sight of the small victories along the way. We live in an era of college football that’s playoff or bust.”
That sentiment is compounded within the SEC. Every year, pridefully, fans of the conference hang their hat on the fact that the 16 teams in the SEC make up the best conference in the country. For some, that makes every week exciting, for others, it makes weekly matchups daunting.
“The disappointment for the majority of these fanbases is because they all live with a playoff or bust mentality, and that’s the mentality right there with the question you asked: we’re minimizing the value of an SEC championship, and one team gets one of those.”
For a sport that was once defined by regionality and the thought of a rivalry win being the highlight of every year, the “playoffs or bust” mentality takes away from those achievements. For Sarkisian, if everyone is only thinking about the end-of-the-year success, it devalues the regular season and, furthermore, the conference championship.
If you take away the value of those, then the season stops being meaningful for the first six weeks of the season, burning value in otherwise significant matchup. If college football loses that, the heart and soul of what it was founded on, then the sport ceases to be what it once was. Sarkisian is painfully aware of that, and now he is trying to sound the alarm before it is too late.
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