Five Reasons Why College Football is Better than the NFL

Most people have a love/hate relationship with football.  They either love it – and can’t get enough of it – or they hate it.  Like most sports, I like football, though I don’t enjoy it as much as some other sports, like baseball or hockey.  But, over the past few years, I’ve come to the conclusion that college football is better than pro football.  Here are 5 reasons why I believe that college football is better than the NFL:

Tradition: The Baylor Line.  The Ohio State band dotting the i on the script “Ohio”. The 12^th man and kissing your date after a score at Texas A&M.  Rolling the corner and the war eagle at Auburn.  Howard’s Rock and running down the hill at Clemson.  Playing “between the hedges” at Georgia.  The Sooner Schooner at Oklahoma and Chief Osceola at Florida State.  The list goes on and on.  Virtually every major college football program has unique traditions surrounding its team and their fans, traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation for decades.  Sports can be a wonderful, unifying thing that brings people from disparate backgrounds (politically, socially, economically) together to cheer for a common cause and these various traditions play a huge role in that.

Atmosphere: This is closely related to the aforementioned item, but I think it deserves its own category.  Much like the way that the atmosphere at a college basketball game is much better than the atmosphere at an NBA game, the atmosphere at a college football game far surpasses the atmosphere at an NFL game.  There are lots of reasons for that.  The marching band playing a fight song to which tens of thousands of people sing and clap along.  The thousands of students – many of whom are near the field – standing the whole game, some of their faces or bodies painted and others dressed in all other manner of crazy outfits or school colors.  In pro sports, those seats closest to the field or inhabited by the wealthy businessman who got a free ticket through work and is more concerned with talking shop than watching the game.  But, at a college football game, when you have the students right next to the field, the atmosphere can be absolutely electric.  I recall going to the Baylor-Texas A&M game at Kyle Field in College Station when I was a freshman.  At kickoff, I had 72,000 people (it’d be 100,000+ people today) chant that they wanted to beat the hell of me.  The whole stadium seemed to sway when they sang the Aggie War Hymn.  I don’t like the Aggies, but the atmosphere in that stadium was amazing.  In addition to Texas A&M, I’ve been to games at some other major college football stadiums (including Texas, Oklahoma and Notre Dame) and the atmosphere and pageantry at those games blows the atmosphere at NFL games out of the water.  When there is a big upset in a college football game, the students rush the field and celebrate with the players and by perhaps tearing down the goalposts.  You don’t see that sort of thing in the NFL.

Offense:  College football is home to the spread offense, the wildcat and the triple option.  Offensive experimentation is welcome.  Trick plays are fairly common.  The NFL is home to three yards and a cloud of dust.  This season, only 2 out of 32 NFL teams are averaging more than 30 points per game, while 10 teams average less than 20 points per game.  In college football (FBS) on the other hand, there are 67 teams averaging at least 30 points per game.  College football is home to wild, back and forth games with scores like 61-58, 50-47 and 52-46.  The NFL is home to plodding, boring games with scores like 16-15, 16-13, 19-12, 9-3 and 17-14.  (Those are all actual scores from week 2 of the 2016 NFL season, by the way.)  I appreciate a great goal line stand as much as the next guy, but when the punter is one of the more prominent players on your team, that’s not a good thing.

Overtime:  College football and the NFL approach OT in very different ways.  In college football, each team gets the ball at the opposing team’s 25 yard line and attempts to score a touchdown or a field goal.  If the game is tied after that OT, it goes to another OT.  Beginning in the 3^rd OT, teams who score a TD must then go for a 2-point conversion.  In the NFL, the winner of the coin toss gets the ball.  If they score a touchdown, the game is over and the other team never even gets the ball.  If they kick a field goal, the other team gets the ball.  If they score a TD, the game is over.  If they score a field goal, the game continues.  If the score remains tied after 15 minutes, the game ends in a tie.  It’s kind of convoluted.  However, there exists a very real possibility that the team that loses the coin toss never even gets a chance to score, which seems fundamentally unfair – to put that much emphasis on something as random as a coin toss.  College football’s OT rules may result in inflated statistics and crazy scores, but there’s no denying that it is action-packed and suspenseful.  The NFL’s OT rules, on the other hand, blow.

It's Not All Business: Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of money wrapped up in college football – obscene amounts when you consider that it’s an amateur sport for which the players do not receive direct compensation…well, allegedly.  In most states, the highest paid public employee is the football coach, which is crazy.  But it’s not ALL about business.  For instance, most college football stadiums are named after an alumnus or a former coach or a donor, rather than being raffled off and named after the highest corporate bidder.  This gives us stately stadium names like Sanford Stadium, Faurot Field, Kyle Field, and Neyland Stadium, rather than clunky corporate names like M&T Bank Stadium (nee PSINet Stadum), Hard Rock Stadium (nee Sun Life Stadium, Landshark Stadium and ProPlayer Stadium), NRG Stadium and Sports Authority Field at Mile High that you see in the NFL.  In the NFL, the league dictates what coaches can wear on the sidelines and what kind of socks the players can wear on the field.  Lately, the NFL has even moved to forbid teams from streaming video and highlights of games on their websites and social media, all in an effort to protect their almighty dollar.  Worst of all, NFL teams turn their backs on supportive fan bases and move to another city just because they think they can make more money somewhere else.  It happened to Baltimore.  It happened to Cleveland.  It’s happened to St. Louis twice.  It’s happened to Los Angeles twice and it’s soon going to happen to Oakland for a second time.  The NFL has no loyalty to the cities it inhabits or the rabid fan bases that support their product.  Their only loyalty is to their pocketbook.  While college football certainly has its flaws, we don’t have to worry about the Buckeyes packing up and moving to LA or the Nittany Lions moving to Portland.  We can rest assured that, through good years and bad, we can head to the great college towns across America to watch football on a glorious autumn Saturday without having to worry about whether or not we’ll have a team to support next year.

The NFL is supposed to represent the top echelon of football in the United States, but for the reasons listed above, I’ll take college football over the NFL any day.

Thanks for reading!