You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will (25 page)

There are Plains states we consider to be eternally fertile in football. Take Oklahoma, where they live and die with football. How does Oklahoma stack up? Five years ago, according to
rivals.com
, Oklahoma was producing twenty to thirty recruits a year. Two years ago it had sixteen. For the 2013 signing date, just ten.

The gap is widening. The SEC is getting stronger. Depending
on what side you’re looking from, it’s either a problem that’s getting worse or an advantage that’s getting better.

But wait, there’s more
.

When Alabama beat Notre Dame in the BCS title game, it was easy to forget the particulars amid the ritualized slaughter that took place. This great showdown between the revitalized Notre Dame program produced a game that was 35-0 shortly after halftime. Once the game was over and Notre Dame was exposed and everyone was finished with all the bowl games, I wondered what would have happened if Notre Dame had had to play Florida, Ole Miss, or Georgia the week following the blowout loss to Alabama. What if they’d had to play
any
SEC team the following week?

Notre Dame was undefeated in the regular season and reached the national title game, but it would have been an underdog to at least
four
SEC teams. The Irish would have been underdogs to
Ole Miss
. Remember, Ole Miss destroyed Pittsburgh and gave Alabama a real push. Notre Dame should have lost to Pitt and might have lost by 50 to Alabama if Nick Saban hadn’t backed it off.

We all know the SEC is better, but when it’s placed in context, the dominance is so stark that it’s sometimes easy to ignore. And it’s not getting any better. This disparity is huge, and it’s growing. The Oregons of the world that just roll over people, bury the playbook, and sit their starters—they can’t move the ball against the SEC teams.

And that Auburn team that held Oregon to 75 yards rushing? The Tigers weren’t even the No. 1 defense that year in the SEC. They were third.

But wait, there’s more
.

Where is the competition going to come from? Who out there can—pun intended—turn this tide? The Big East is falling apart.
The Big 12 is gasping for air. The Midwest is losing population and recruits.

Where? Who?

The only teams I see with an opportunity to puncture this bubble are either Urban Meyer/Ohio State or USC. Meyer is an extraordinary recruiter and he will dominate what’s left of the topflight Midwest recruits while dropping into the South to poach a few major guys just because of who he is and what Ohio State stands for.

The advantage for USC is this: they don’t have to compete against a bunch of college-football monoliths for California recruits. They’re one of the few colleges from Denver to the west that is committed and all-in on football. In a good year, USC can get eight to ten of the top players in the state of California. And they can do that every year. Even Alabama is not going to get the top six players in the South—they have to battle everyone else for them.

Yes, coaching is important, but to compete in this new world, recruiting is key. If he survives, I think Lane Kiffin is a good enough recruiter to keep USC going through all the NCAA issues it had. They kept him around because they know the history of college sports: if you have qualms about a coach, at least find one who can recruit. If he leaves, you know he’s leaving players behind for the next guy. It’s great to have a Bobby Knight type, someone who can coach like crazy but can’t recruit, but when he leaves, you’ve got no players and no Bobby Knight to coach them.

It’s the best advice I can give an athletic director: if you’re going to fail with a coach, at least fail with one who can recruit.

Either Ohio State or USC could possibly build up an arsenal that has an SEC-level appearance. But if you look through a wide lens, it’s daunting. The South has always had a religious zeal for the sport, but this is getting ridiculous. The amount of revenue being
raised, the salaries being paid, the championships being won, the talent being produced—it’s in danger of getting out of hand.

But wait, there’s more
.

If you listen closely, you can hear little murmurings of what I would call fear around college football. Meyer was recently quoted as making some statements that could be construed as criticism of other Big Ten coaches for their lack of aggression on the recruiting trail. Meyer is clearly a cutthroat recruiter; his first order of business as Ohio State coach was to flip several recruits from other Big Ten schools, which some coaches suggested violated a gentlemen’s agreement between the coaches in the conference. And that’s the thing about Meyer: he’s coached in the SEC, so he knows recruiting has nothing to do with being a gentleman.

In early February of 2013, Meyer was a guest on a Columbus radio station. He was discussing an upcoming meeting with Big Ten coaches. Here is what he said:

Do you hear a little fear, or at least concern, in those words? Can’t you hear him saying, “Fellas, help us out a little here?” He’s saying they have to get some of those players from the South, or they’re never going to catch those guys. He’s saying he can’t be the only one fighting the fight, or else he’s bound to lose it, too. If only Ohio State and Michigan are capable of putting together top ten recruiting classes, those kids are going to start to go somewhere else.

The northern-climate schools used to have it good. Real good. Twenty-five, thirty years ago, the places to play were mostly cold
and drizzly: Notre Dame, Penn State. Washington, Nebraska, Ohio State, Michigan. What happened? I’ll tell you what happened: ESPN happened.

When ESPN decided to go full-bore into televising college football, the landscape changed. When the network went from televising fifty games to close to five hundred, the kid who wanted to be on television didn’t have to go to Penn State and suffer through terribly cold winters. You no longer had to go north to be on television. You could have 74-degree fall days
and
get maximum exposure.

It takes a lot of factors to build this kind of dynasty. And like most dynasties, we either love them or love to hate them. There’s no middle ground. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, it’s the SEC’s world. The rest of college football is just trying to find enough oxygen to survive in it.

Robert Irvine is a celebrity chef who—like nearly every celebrity chef—owes his fame to television. He has a Food Network show called
Restaurant: Impossible
, where he storms into struggling restaurants and goes commando on their staff and business model in a made-for-TV attempt to resurrect their lagging fortunes.

Irvine brings an acerbic tongue and a successful formula. It starts with three words: Less is more.

Trim the menu. You don’t need eight different penne pasta dishes and four different risottos. Figure out what you do best and stick with it.

If only the sports world could figure this out. Can someone please cut back the menu, reduce the noise, pare the fat?

We’re catering to an audience of indiscriminate gluttons. We’re on a steady diet of more: more broadcasters in the booth, more playoff games, more expansion teams, more bowl games, more teams in March Madness.

If sports were a restaurant, its menu would have five pages of chicken entrees: chicken Marsala, chicken Parmigiana, chicken cacciatore, chicken Milanese. On and on with the chicken dishes.

We’ve gotten duped into thinking more is better.

More is
not
better. More is simply
more
.

What does
more
do? It dilutes the talent, clutters the landscape, and clouds our opinion of what really matters.

Can someone please give me less? How’s that for a revolutionary concept: I want less. Cut it back, reduce it, do whatever you have to do to trim the sports menu.

We need a Robert Irvine for the sports world.

Maybe I’m out of touch. Maybe it’s just an unavoidable quirk of the culture. Maybe
more
is inevitable.

Every time I watched coverage of the presidential election on one of the news networks, it would drive me crazy. Twelve different political pundits are jammed onto one set, jostling to get out their sound bites. There’s so little time to deliver each message, and nobody has a chance to provide anything remotely resembling depth.

It’s gotten the same way in televised sports. If ESPN and the NFL Network add any more people to their draft coverage, it’ll be a Broadway musical.

Les Melkiperables
.

More, more, more. March Madness, one of our last remaining five-star gems, is on its way to becoming March for Everyone Who Can Beat Virginia Tech on a Good Night.

The tournament is up to sixty-eight teams. That’s too many. What makes it even more absurd is that no 16 seed has ever beaten a 1 seed. Four 15s have beaten a 2. Do we really need four more teams that can’t be found without a GPS, who play in gyms without baseline seating?

It might get worse. Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim has suggested the NCAA increase the number of teams in March Madness to ninety-six to make for a better tournament.

Hey, I’ve got a great idea: I think the Four Seasons should drop its room rates to $26 a night to make it a better hotel.

As it stands now, the attendance at first-round games of the tournament is poor, even with the new pool format that allows for teams to stay closer to home. You can trot out the whole “Cinderella” argument to bolster the case for more teams, but that’s mostly a smokescreen. Yes, occasionally a VCU or George Mason will make an improbable run to the Final Four. A crazy story like Florida Gulf Coast does happen every once in a while.

But rare exceptions prove one thing: they’re rare.

In college football, Louisiana-Monroe once beat Nick Saban’s Crimson Tide. Appalachian State once beat Michigan. Should we include those schools, if unbeaten, in BCS bowls? Since when have we changed foundations, budgets, or plans based on rare exceptions? Sixty-eight teams is too many. Ninety-six would be way, way too many.

Why are we so intent on overkill? Tell me this: If there’s a power outage, do you immediately go out and buy an $8,000 generator or do you light a candle, open a bottle of wine, and make love to your wife? You mean you can’t make it twelve hours without electricity?

That’s what a ninety-six-team NCAA Tournament would be: an $8,000 generator for a twelve-hour power outage.

And then there are the bowl games. Don’t even get me started on bowl games. We now have a bowl game sponsored by a credit union. You mean a feed store wasn’t available? The local tire shop couldn’t make it fit in the budget? By the way, do the members of the credit union realize their fees just went up so the third-string safety for the fifth-place Pac 12 team can get a $1,500 swag bag with the newest noise-reduction headphones?

You can’t tell me there’s a market for some of these lower-tier bowls. Your typical music video has more people in it than you’ll find in the stands of some of these bottom-feeder bowls.

Okay, so maybe this doesn’t affect you as a sports fan. You don’t like bad bowl games, so you don’t either attend them or watch them on television. But the overkill in sports—especially pro sports—can’t help but impact your life if you’re a fan. More teams and more games translate into more average players on rosters and more people like you paying more money for bad products.

I’ve got a theory on life that applies to this discussion: if you don’t have a nickname by 17, you don’t need one. Nobody wants
to call you Gator or Big Daddy. Similarly, if you didn’t have a pro sports franchise by the ’70s or ’80s, you probably didn’t deserve one.

We don’t need most of the teams that have arrived since then.

Let’s take a look at a few of the most recent franchises introduced in America. I’ll just give you a list:

What do most of these franchises have in common? They’ve struggled from the moment they entered their respective leagues. Some of them had so little support they no longer play in the same city. There was simply no market for them.

But the beast had to be fed.
More
is the only thing that mattered.

The same principle, sadly, seems to apply to the media. Sideline reporters in football and basketball can be valuable; so can pit reporters in NASCAR. The viewers need to know when a fuel valve breaks on Jeff Gordon’s car. But three announcers in the booth and two more on the sideline?

Five
people? Seriously? It takes only four to perform open-heart surgery.