“Why is bigtime college football the ONLY level of football at which some people want to claim the players just can’t take the wear and tear? Clearly, that’s just an excuse”
Bigtime college football ends too many fine student-athletes’ prospects for professional success. And for what truly higher purpose?
A balance must be struck, and it does not include adding additional win-or-go-home games to a college football season that is already long enough. There is no law that requires colleges to put the finishing touches on an elite few players’ respective skill sets at the expense of ten or twenty times their number in terms of the student-athletes who are not yet ready for NFL speed and violence (few really are, even at the elite level). Once again, the elite players who are arguably ready for the transition from college to pro already know this fact, and respond by getting the heck out of dodge as soon as they get the chance, much to their respective AD’s and Head Coach’s consternation. They know their schools will consider the career-ending injuries that some of their number will inevitably suffer (yes, including gruesome concussions, something nobody can possibly train enough to avoid when their number comes up) as just another broken egg necessary to preserve the National Championship omelette manufacturing line.
I am not advocating hobbling the sport at the college level. Rather, I am suggesting that we should not seek to definitively separate the wheat from the chaff come the annual bowl season. The players should not be burdened in that way.
Some guys get career ending injuries. Its unfortunate but it happens at every level of football. Its a violent sport. Everybody knows that when he chooses to play.
A balance must be struck, and it does not include adding additional win-or-go-home games to a college football season that is already long enough. There is no law that requires colleges to put the finishing touches on an elite few players’ respective skill sets at the expense of ten or twenty times their number in terms of the student-athletes who are not yet ready for NFL speed and violence (few really are, even at the elite level). What are you talking about when you say "at the expense of ten or twenty times their number in terms of student athletes? This isn't gladiatoral combat. Guys are getting career ending injuries by the dozen every week. What is the "balance" you are talking about? Everybody else at every level of football has no problem playing 15-16 games a season. Division I football players can handle it too.
Once again, the elite players who are arguably ready for the transition from college to pro already know this fact, and respond by getting the heck out of dodge as soon as they get the chance, much to their respective AD’s and Head Coach’s consternation. They know their schools will consider the career-ending injuries that some of their number will inevitably suffer (yes, including gruesome concussions, something nobody can possibly train enough to avoid when their number comes up) as just another broken egg necessary to preserve the National Championship omelette manufacturing line.
You grossly overestimate the number of career ending injuries. Most of those are not to future NFL prospects. Only a small percentage of players even in Division I college football go on to have NFL careers. As for concussions, that's been way overblown in the media. We don't have a lot of good data yet. All we have are a small group of SELF SELECTED long time NFL players who thought they had a problem. You can't extrapolate such a small sample and one that was inherently a biased sample to begin with to make assumptions about all NFL players. You especially cannot then extrapolate backwards and assume that guys at the college level who have played for years shorter than even an average NFL player have some high risk of CTE. And besides that, we don't know that that is a major health problem anyway. We've had several generations of millions of American men play high school football with no widespread CTE epidemic. Several hundred thousand have played college football in that time with no widespread CTE epidemic. Don't you think we would have noticed it by now if it were such a big problem?
I am not advocating hobbling the sport at the college level. Rather, I am suggesting that we should not seek to definitively separate the wheat from the chaff come the annual bowl season. The players should not be burdened in that way.
I am suggesting we should settle it on the field via a playoff like they do in high school football, in every other division of college football and like in the NFL.