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Let’s be real. Compared to the NFL, the on field product sucks. It’s no different, skill wise, than the G Leauge or AAA baseball. Maybe even worse. Yet we watch and love it. Why?
1 – It’s local. Traditionally, it was your school. Especially in places like SLC, Provo, Stillwater, etc. You didn’t have a professional team, but you had YOUR football team.
2 – The players were local. Traditionally the kids on the team were local kids. I have never watched high school football and never plan to. But I like to bag on Dalton Schultz for not going to Utah. I love seeing Barton get burned on the Commanders and going, “hey, look, it’s Barton. He’s from SLC.”
3 – It was affordable. NFL games are nuts. All my kids are from Philly. I was going to take my oldest to the Philly/Seattle game until they moved it to Monday night. For the same amount of money, we can go to the Vegas Bowl. You could get cheap seats and afford to take the family.
4 – You could dream of that special season. Even though it wasn’t reality, you could dream about your team having a 1984. You could see the national champion winners from the pre 1970’s and think, “hell if they could win a title, we could get lucky one time.”
5 – Bowl games were a huge deal and you got to play teams you never got to play anymore.
6 – Winning a conference championship gave you a sense of pride as you typically worked with/associated with people from teams in your conference because the game was so local. It gave you something to talk about.
All of that is gone now. All of it. It’s not local anymore. We will play in Orlando next year. That is about as non-local as you can get. I don’t think I’ll ever run into a UCF fan here on the west coast. That game will come and go and no one will care. I’ll watch it, but I won’t talk about. Here in Seattle, there are OSU, Oregon, UW, WSU, USC, UCLA grads everywhere. There is always someone that cares about the Utah game and visa versa. Not anymore.
The transfer portal and NIL have taken away the local aspect. Even the bigger conferences has as well. There is so much turnover on teams, how do you ever learn who was what? The days of having Marcus Williams play like absolute horse s**t his freshman year and get better then elite are gone. The days of Devin Lloyd sitting for two years, having the starter quit and Lloyd, who knows the system inside and out, step in and excel are gone. A game that already is worse than the NFL will get even sloppier.
And the money…you could relate to the college kids. We all have memories of college and the struggle and working hard to make something for yourself. A 19 year old backup QB making a million dollars at Utah who might not even be any good? How do you relate to that? How do you have patience with that? How do you root for them to get better? The expectation is that they are good and ready to go.
Take Wilson. He is a legacy kid. He should come in, sit behind Rising, maybe sit a year behind Rose and then push to start his JR year, take the job and be successful and we all love him and talk about him for decades. Instead, he will come in, make some money and if he doesn’t start in 2025, he’s gone. And he will probably transfer to another school and then another before starting as a RS JR at BYU. And if he struggles as all young players do, we will all bag on him. That sucks for a kid who grew up dreaming about playing for Utah. That amount of pressure isn’t realistic.
The games aren’t that affordable any more. Enough said. The bowl games suck now. FSU is in the Orange Bowl and there have been rumblings of them not even going. That’s insane.
And the emphasis on national titles has ruined conference championship games and with how Utah was treated in 2008 and how FSU was treated this year…there is no chance of a special season. You can win it all if you are a blue blood. Outside of that, if FSU can get left out, then Utah 100% will.
This isn’t college football and I’m not sure how long this version can last. Nothing that made it great is still there. And if I want to watch good football, I’ll just watch the NFL.
Over the last couple of days, I’ve been going on a tour of all major USC affiliated websites and YouTube channels to try to get a sense of how they feel about this game.
It’s been an interesting journey and really shows the difference between USC/Utah and even probably LA/SLC.
Bottom line up front, this game has almost taken an Armageddon-like perspective amongst the USC fanbase and associated media.
It’s almost as if this game is turning into a referendum on Riley’s future tenure with the team. The conventional wisdom I’ve seen states that if USC can’t beat an undermanned Utah team at home, a Utah team that’s beaten them three times in a row and in which they have the revenge factor going for them, a Utah team which has little to no offense, who else remaining in their schedule are they going to beat? Oregon? Washington? UCLA? And all of this while having the supposedly best college football player in the planet on their team. What’s going to happen when he leaves at the end of the season?
So, if Utah beats USC in the Coliseum tomorrow, that win has the potential to completely ruin their season and turn an already restive fanbase against Riley. You talk about second and third-order effects, this game definitely has the potential to have serious downstream repercussions for USC.
In closing, the funniest thing about all the YouTube channels that I reviewed was the massive and constant presence of Oklahoma fans who are fanning the flames of dissent against Riley. Their dislike of Riley is so great that they don’t even refer to him by name. They call him The Bitch Out West or TBOW for short. I had to look that up because I didn’t know what it meant and it was popping up in almost all comments.
