I’m going to vent some.
Hopefully, with enough Duke content to make it worth your time.
Michigan’s win over Washington officially ended the 2023-’24 bowl season.
Finally.
Can’t wait until next season.
Yes, I have some ambivalence about pretty much every aspect of college football. You can’t have a sports event any more riveting than those two CFP semifinal games, both coming down to the final play in one compelling evening.
And it’s not hard to find games like that every autumn Saturday, game after game.
But that CFP title game didn’t quite meet the compelling threshold and the eventual champion is somewhat ethically compromised even by the standards of a sport that lives in ethically compromised.
NIL looks great on paper, as does the transfer portal. But there don’t seem to be any guardrails and I’m not sure how that gets fixed and I’m not sure how college sports survives if they don’t.
We’ll see how the NCAA’s attempt to rein in Florida State’s NIL excesses works. Maybe some sense will come out of all this. But the NCAA isn’t exactly on a winning streak in courtrooms and FSU seems to be in something of a litigious mood these days.
And, of course, there’s the whole destroying-entire-conferences-for-the-sake-of-TV- bucks thing.
I’ve tried to frame some coherent thoughts on these subjects several times but the landscape always seems to shift before I get to the finish line and not in a good way.
Maybe down the line.
So, I’ll stick to bowls for now.
I recall a conversation I had a couple of decades ago with Bill Dooley. I’m sure you recall Dooley as the successful head football coach at North Carolina, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest.
And a nicer guy than his outwardly gruff demeanor might have suggested.
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