By JOHN P. WISE
One Great Season
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Five college football conferences played a total of six intra-league games over the weekend. That normally doesn't sound like a big deal, but it was the first weekend of the brand new season.
YOUR THOUGHTS: Should Teams Start With Conference Games?
I feel like the sport needs better uniformity with regard to scheduling. I understand why we have unusual start times -- to accomodate television, of course -- and in more recent years games are played on unusual days. Like every day of the week, it seems.
Baseball teams play 162 games, so if you lose your opener, you might have some time to regroup and still be a contender. In college basketball, schools can end up playing 40 games in one season, but they don't get into conference competition until they've played at least a dozen or so.
But in football, you have just 12 chances overall, and only eight or so in league play. And now that the sport has taken on a perfect-or-bust mentality, there's more pressure than ever to win evergy single game on your schedule.
And while I know college football is a game of easy logic, surly coaches and tough young gladiators, I still think it's possible to arrange the ledger in such a way that you don't open your season with a high-stakes game right out of the gate. Coaches will cite the requirement to be ready to play every week, but most BCS squads have at least two non-league cupcakes in September; why not schedule them to open like everyone else does?
And then there's the issue of the Big 10, which concludes its schedule before Thanksgiving while many other schools are playing two Saturdays after it. Florida and LSU definitely were better than Ohio State when each dismantled the Buckeyes in consecutive BCS Championship games. I'm not making excuses, but I think we can all admit that OSU's 50-day layoffs didn't help its cause. Same with Penn State and Illinois the last two years in Rose Bowl humiliations suffered at the hands of USC.
College football teams begin the season on the same weekend; they should end around the same weekend as well. If a handful of leagues want to have conference championship games, that's great, but then the schedule needs to be arranged so that they don't have bye weeks. Just because you can't see uniformity, just because it's not tangible enough to carry over a goal line and just because it can't line up and smash into a tackling dummy, it doesn't mean it's not a factor when bowl season rolls around.