Written by Congratulations to the Sam Houston State Bearkats for winning the NCAA Football FCS Division championship last week. It was a strange game that ended a peculiar football season, and, in many ways, it may have been a sign of things to come.
In Huntsville, Texas, Sam Houston State University is about a half-hour drive north of where I live. The Bearkat quarterback is from here. Once known as a teacher’s college, it has grown tremendously recently due to the changing demographics of Texas and its proximity to the Houston metropolitan area. Texas has grown so much that the two large state universities have become very exclusive, and the third, Texas Tech, is on the opposite side of the state. Enrollment is up at all of the next tier of public universities in Texas. So is the quality of their sports and academic programs.
The Bearkats have used their location as an advantage for recruiting. Five of the thirteen largest cities in the United States are within a three-hour drive from their campus. Many recruits from the area who go to large universities transfer to Sam Houston to be close to home if things don’t work out. They are in contention nearly every year and had made it to two consecutive title games in 2011 and 2012.
I have to admit that I didn’t watch any of their games. Even here in Houston, it didn’t get a lot of attention until after Sam Houston won. I had meant to watch the title game last Sunday, but I forgot about it. It’s hard to think of watching football this time of year. The NCAA delayed the FCS season to the spring due to COVID-19. I probably would have been at the golf course, but it was raining. So I was home watching the Astros game and the golf tournament.
My loss. It was a great game. The Bearkats came from behind to defeat top-rated South Dakota State after a one-hour weather delay and scored the winning touchdown with sixteen seconds remaining in the game. It ended an improbable run through the playoffs that included several comebacks, including one over perennial FCS powerhouse North Dakota State. Had the season been played in the fall, it would have been hard for anyone to stop the Bison with #3 overall NFL draft pick Trey Lance playing quarterback.
The FCS division, and all divisions in college football other than the top one, have a playoff to determine their champion. The top 24 teams qualify, with the top eight teams getting first-round byes. This year, only 16 teams qualified in a shortened playoff due to the delayed season. As a result, Sam Houston had to win four consecutive games to earn the title.
There is always a lot of debate about how to reform big-time college football. We all know that recruiting is out of hand. The post-season is a product of lucrative television contracts and out-of-date traditions. Wealthy boosters build state-of-the-art facilities in return for influence on who is named the next overpaid coach they will want to fire in two years. The conferences are a joke, who at the same time try to rebuild nostalgic rivalries while raiding each other of teams seeking revenue. The result has been a lower quality product, a bunch of bowl games that nobody understands why they exist, and Alabama wins almost every year.
I know this will never happen, but wouldn’t it be great if the NCAA scrapped the bowls and the BCS playoff system and replaced it with a complete playoff system as the FCS division has? And, better yet, reform recruiting to prioritize recruiting in-state or neighboring state athletes? Of course, you can keep the conferences and the money flowing from TV contracts, but layering the FCS system on top of big-time college football would produce a much more exciting product. In addition, encouraging students to play closer to home would allow their friends and family to watch them play and take some of the craziness out of the recruiting process.
The current system allows the rich to get richer and congregates the top recruits from around the country at a small number of schools. Unfortunately, not all of them succeed, and many end up transferring if they do not end up as starters. As a result, hotbeds of high school football talent in California, Florida, and Texas get raided by coaches from around the country. Somehow, this leaves the schools in these states at a disadvantage. As a result, Texas, USC, Florida, Florida State, and Miami have fallen far behind Alabama, Clemson, and Ohio State in relevance.
Somehow, the NCAA has been able to keep up some level of parity in basketball while continuing to build excitement for its tournament. They seem to have a system in place that can evolve and change with the rest of society. Likewise, college baseball has continued its tradition of having its World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, every year while tweaking the format of its playoff system. Hopefully, they will figure out how to create an exciting and fair college football playoff before it is too late. It should be easy, given that such a system is already in place for their lower divisions.
College athletics is about developing their student-athletes while providing exciting competition. So it’s too bad that the best athletes in their most popular sport are denied the opportunity to go on run through the playoffs like Sam Houston State did this spring.
For now, I’ll enjoy the fact we have a football champion here in Texas. And, maybe next season, I’ll watch one of their games.