The long offseason provides diversions to keep the mind on college football, but it is still sometimes a struggle to cope with gaps in the calendar.
Every sport goes through its lull periods. No season lasts 52 weeks only to start up anew on the flip of the calendar. In that regard, it isn’t as though the college football offseason is uniquely set up to frustrate its fans with inactivity.
Once the season ends, the calendar unfolds with recruiting periods and draft preparations. Right now, most of the FBS teams across the country are still locked into their spring practice schedules. The NCAA is still trying to fight for its continued relevance. When you get down to it, there really is never a dull moment even when it comes to these periods of limited action or outright inaction.
What that on the table, however, there is no substitute for four full quarters on the gridiron with real stakes on the line. Fans can find diversion in the NFL Draft, or the sporadic attempts to start new pro football leagues in the spring. They can get hope up looking at recruiting rankings and tracking media notes about each practice and scrimmage. The calendar provides enough opportunities to keep college football on the mind that we never really step fully away.
But it is never quite the same as the adrenaline rush of going to the stadium, donning the team colors, and getting loud for 60 minutes. As I sit here with my Sunday morning coffee, I find myself locked in one of those lull periods that inevitably pop up on the calendar in the natural rhythm of the offseason.
Struggling with the limited nature of an artificially short season
Part of that lull comes down to the setup of the regular season and postseason. College football, when you parse it down, has the shortest calendar of any major sport in North America.
NFL teams play four more games in the regular season, a full month’s worth of action. They also have a postseason that provides fewer viewing options but more meaningful conclusion over a protracted length of time.
Major League Baseball spans 162 games, the season already alive now and stretching until college football returns again in the fall six months down the road. In similar fashion, the NBA and NHL have long regular seasons and multi-game rounds in the postseason that can provide a fan of a championship team as many as 110 opportunities to watch their favorite in a given year.
Even when you dive into other intercollegiate sports on the calendar, the seasons stretch longer. The culmination of March Madness ends a five-month march to the NCAA championship. Soccer, wrestling, baseball, swimming and diving… all of these other sports have similarly elongated structures to their seasons.
Of course, football is uniquely framed as a sport of violence compared to these other intercollegiate sports. Limiting the number of opportunities to get injured is a valid reason to debate the length of a season for athletes who are not paid salaries for their efforts.
But the artificial restrictions on FBS seasons goes in the face even of other divisions on the college football pyramid, which have multi-round playoff systems for determining their champions. No sport operating on an annual basis, whether professional or amateur, has such a small sample size as one finds at the top tier of college football
The impact on fans of artificial scarcity in the calendar
Fans are hardly the largest concern in the equation when it comes to structuring the annual calendar of games for the college football season. The evidence for that claim can be found on many levels, from the scheduling of games on weeknights to late shifts of start times to accommodate television broadcasters.
While the NCAA and its member conferences and institutions of higher learning lean on the excuse of maintaining a season that doesn’t overtax an athlete’s ability to also be a student, that concern is only selectively applied. If it was truly a concern, there would never be games on weeknights. The schedule would be designed to maximize player rest and to ensure that they have full opportunities in whatever classes they personally wish to take.
That it is not speaks to what really drives the sport: the almighty dollar. In this instance, the truism that it is the name on the front of the jersey rather than the name on the back that matters is relevant in ways the phrase never expected to apply. Student-athletes are fodder for our entertainment, and recognizing that can make these moments of artificial scarcity in the calendar at least a little more tolerable.
A restricted supply of football also increases the demand once games recommence. But that is small solace in April, when a fan can lean only on tracking spring practices and wondering where their old favorites will land on NFL rosters to pass the time before the long offseason begins in earnest.
That there is some rationale for truncating the season hardly makes these moments easier. What they do, however, is make the return of the season that much more precious for those of us who love the sport. Fanaticism never dies, but it is left fallow in its dormancy for long stretches.
And this can ultimately be a good thing for us as fans, paradoxically painful though it might be to wake up on a Sunday morning with one’s voice intact and a clearer mind from a decent night of rest. It doesn’t always make it easier in the moment to cope with the frustrations of another weekend without football, but it is perspective worth keeping in mind as we wait for the summer to pass and football to return.