A little more than six months have passed since Jameis Winston’s last-second touchdown pass topped Auburn in the last BCS national title game. We’ve been through the coaching carousel, winter workouts, spring football, summer workouts and, frankly, it’s time to start talking seriously about college football again.
Luckily, college football writers have what you need. Starting with next week’s SEC Media Days (a four-day event in which more than 1,000 members of the media are expected), leagues from across the country will bring in commissioners, coaches and players to talk about the 2014 season and the issues facing the sport.
Some coaches and players will be media magnets. Others will speak chapters and verses from the book of unwritten clichés, prompting members of the media to run for the nearest caffeine fix.
Regardless, some hot topics are guaranteed to emerge, giving fans and writers something to discuss before preseason practices open in early August.
Here’s a look at the hottest topics in the college football media frenzy.
College football is a win-now affair. Period. With an ever-increasing amount of money coming in from the new College Football Playoffs and enhanced television contracts, head coaches face pressure to win big and win consistently.
If they don’t, the heat builds up very quickly under their seats.
A number of major FBS coaches will face that pressure this fall. that of Florida Will Muschamp went from 11-2 in 2012 to 4-8 last fall, a season that included an embarrassing home loss to then-FCS team Georgia Southern. Virginia’s Mike London is 6-18 over the past two seasons. The same goes for Illinois’ Tim Beckman.
Kansas’ Charlie Weis is 4-20 in his first two seasons at Kansas, and West Virginia’s Dana Holgorsen is coming off a 4-8 season. Rutgers’ Kyle Flood is 6-7 and is coming off a tumultuous season that saw the Scarlet Knights’ 2014 recruiting class collapse.
These coaches, and many others like them, will all receive questions about their professional status. They’ll do their best to deflect them, and you’ll have your share of stories like “Coach X isn’t feeling the heat” or “New coordinator will help Coach are as inevitable as the failure of the Internet in overcrowded media workrooms across the country.
For virtually its entire lifespan, the Bowl Championship Series has been the whipping boy of college football. No matter how many adjustments, changes, or fixes were made, fans were not happy with the BCS. The All-SEC BCS title game between Alabama and LSU in 2012 was the tipping point, and later that year the College Football Playoff was announced.
A committee composed of college football administrators, former players and coaches and others associated with the game will select four teams to participate in the first playoff serieswhich will culminate with the national title game at AT&T Stadium in Texas.
This will be a major topic of discussion across the country this fall, simply because so much is unknown. What are the exact criteria of the selection committee for selecting the domain? Schedule strength is an important factor (the Power 5 leagues, which will likely make up the entire playoff field, have taken steps to improve their rosters), but is it the most important factor?
Will the SEC begin a new reign of dominance, or will Florida State build on the 2013 national title? Will a Big 12, Pac-12 or Big Ten team show up?
How long will it be before discussions about expanding the battlefield begin: when the TV contract is up for renewal or the first time a worthy contender is left on the outside as a fifth team ?
The shiny new nature of the playoffs will generate plenty of discussion, and we’ll be here, ready to listen.
In late March, the Chicago branch of the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Northwestern University football players qualified as employees of the school and had the right to unionize, giving a new wave of interest in an already hot topic.
If the Wildcats voted to unionize, what would that mean for the rest of college football?
Only private schools would be allowed to unionize, but would that mean they would be able to pay their players? What other consequences would successful unionization have?
Would this affect the continued push for players to receive “full participation fees”, an entirely different debate than unionization?
The Wildcats voted in late April, but the results of the vote are not known because the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, D.C., announced it would do so. review the decision and likely won’t make a ruling on the matter for months.
Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald urged his players to vote against the unionaccording to Associated Press.
All of this can be managed through communication. Its a question of confidence. I just don’t believe we need a third party between our players and our coaches, our staff and our administrators. … Whatever they need, we will get it.
Either way, you can bet that Fitzgerald and other Big Ten coaches, as well as other coaches nationally, will be asked about unionization, O’Bannon affair and the debate on fee-for-service payment, which will bring an interesting dimension to this month’s discussions.
Over the past five years, player safety has become a very real part of college football. Rules were put in place prohibiting helmet-to-helmet contact, with players being ejected from the game and suspended for the next game if they committed such fouls of a malicious nature.
Kickoffs have been increased by five yards to reduce kickoff returns, which can be dangerous events.
And this week, the NCAA made a recommendation that teams hold no more than two “contact” practices per week and use independent doctors to evaluate players’ injuries.
What do the coaches think? Do players have an opinion on their safety or current attempts to improve it?
We’ll likely hear more about this over the next month, and the comments and positions that emerge from the discussion should be fascinating.
This fall, college football’s realignment era finally comes to an end at a fence. Forty-four programs play in a different league than in 1997, which does not take into account teams that moved from the FCS/Division I-AA ranks to the FBS.
Next month, the last big wave of realignment will take place. Louisville joins the ACC, Maryland and Rutgers join the Big Ten, and a horde of new teams join the American Athletic Conference, Conference USA, and the Sun Belt.
The movements bring with them a certain amount of intrigue. Can Louisville compete with powers like Clemson, Florida State and Virginia Tech in its new digs?
Was winning the Washington DC/Baltimore and New York/New Jersey markets worth adding Maryland and Rutgers to the Big Ten, or will they further dilute a league that has recently struggled for national relevance?
Is the realignment finally complete, thanks to the ACC stabilizing the landscape through the signing of a concession of rights by its members? Or is this just the calm before another storm?
Now that realignment has taken place, banishing the Big East/AAC from college football’s main table and solidifying the ACC’s place there, the real fun begins. Which leagues really benefited from it? What moves will seem stupid in five years? No one knows yet, which is part of the fun.
