Even More Meaningless Games

(Photo Used With Permission)

It seems a bit too early in college football’s talking season to get this deep into such a fundamental debate, but recent events have forced my hand!

Yep. That’s right. I had no choice but to respond. There was no way I could sit on my hands and let this tragedy befall our beloved sport without offering my sincerest opinions on the matter. It was entirely unavoidable.

Starting with the 2024-25 college football season, the sport’s ultimate title will be decided with a 12-team playoff. For now.

(Shouldn’t it be a red flag that we’re already doing away with the new system before playing a single season under it?)

Expansion is utterly inevitable, I fear, as the creeping bloat of tournaments in recent years has come to show. Every professional league is adding more and more playoff spots, including the NBA where half the teams already make the playoffs at the end of the season.

Before we get into the crux of the argument, let’s set aside any illusions we might have. The real reason these championships are expanding is because it provides an added opportunity for the stakeholders to increase the size of their steaks. Or something.

The 2023 NFL playoffs averaged 38.5 million viewers per game in the leadup to the Super Bowl, and then had a staggering 120.4 million viewers for the famously unnamable event.

The most recent NBA playoffs, concluding in June 2023, piled up more than 5.4 million viewers per game. While those numbers may seem tame in comparison to the astronomical number of people watching the NFL playoffs, those numbers represent a five-year high for the Association. It’s also worth remembering that the NBA features seven-game series at (almost) every level of their postseason.

Because we really need seven games to watch a team with a losing record after 81 games get boat raced by probably one of the best basketball teams in the world.

Getting back to the matter at hand, the seven games that made up the 2023-24 College Football Playoff and the New Years Six drew approximately 15.1 million viewers per game, with a total of about 25 million for the National Championship Game alone.

If you’re pulling numbers like these, why wouldn’t you want to have even more games? Why not give yourself a few extra chances to sell those ads?

Sports are big business, and thus all the decisions being made have to follow what’s best for business.

In the short term, this approach may work. You may see television deals worth millions (billions) of dollars bringing heretofore unseen revenue into the coffers of the league offices. And the fat cats will keep getting fatter and meowing even louder.

But that doesn’t mean that these decisions are always best for the long-term health of the product…er…the sport.

I failed to mention the World Series above, and there’s a good reason for that.

Okay, so the reason is that I just skipped baseball because I only wanted three examples, but it fits the narrative now, so here we go.

Major League Baseball has been struggling to keep its viewership over the last few years, amid cheating scandals and Covid seasons and the apparently terrible attention span of those blasted Gen-Zers.

“We have a TV, but…we’re actually Mariners fans.” (Photo by Vivian Arcidiacono on Unsplash)

The 2023 World Series, which happened to be won by the “small market upstart” Texas Rangers, represented the fifth straight year of declining World Series viewership with just under 10 million viewers on average.

Executives blame the small-market teams in the Fall Classic, because everyone knows that Texans both hate baseball and that the 30 million people who live there don’t have TV.

Or it could be that the new playoff format punishes high-achieving teams and dilutes the playoff field right off the bat - pun not intended. Who wants to watch that?

The same thing tends to be true with March Madness after the first weekend. People love to see the Cinderella upsets early on, but then after a while, they prefer to see the best teams competing for the championship.

(Full disclosure, March Madness is one of those areas where the data “suggests” something without showing it conclusively. The numbers year-to-year aren’t enormously different in most cases, but there is certainly a trend.)

But maybe it doesn’t matter, right? Maybe it’ll all be fine because, after all, there will be even more meaningful games late in the college football season, right?

When there were just two teams that could play for the national championship at the end of the year, I guess the only games that mattered were the ones those teams played in. Or perhaps if a favorite lost late in the year, then that game mattered because it narrowed the field.

So basically, you had to be an undefeated team from a top-tier conference in order for your games to matter. Because undefeated teams from top-tier conferences are bulletproof.

That means that 99% of the college football games ever played have been utterly meaningless. Sorry. That’s the rule.

By that measure, USC’s 42-10 lopsided win at BYU on Sep. 18, 2004 means infinitely more than Tennessee’s riveting 30-28 victory over 11th-ranked Florida on the same day because USC won the national championship and neither Tennessee nor Florida were really in the running by the end of the season. Sorry, Vols. I don’t make the rules. I just lampoon them in very specific ways that prove my point.

Once the field expanded to four participants, however, the playoff meant more games were meaningful! Heck. There could be as many as eight teams in the hunt for the championship going into the final weekend of the season, right? That’s good television!

You know something? I take umbrage with this notion for many, many reasons.

For starters, every game matters. It matters to the fans. It matters to the players. It matters to the alumni who stake their personal pride and emotional well-being on the outcome of a contest between the world’s most freakishly athletic teenagers and young adults.

The games all matter. To claim otherwise is to devalue the sport you claim to love.

I think about all of the “meaningless” games I’ve been to over the years and I loved every single one of them. There’s no denying that Georgia is on top of the world in college football right now, no matter what those Michiga-losers would have you believe. And these games with playoff implications are exciting.

But I have also lived and died by Georgia football for more than two decades, and we were “out of the hunt” halfway through many of those seasons.

I think about the annual rivalry game against Tech. Are you telling me that nearly all of those hundred some odd contests were entirely in vain?

I will use this photo from the 2013 double-OT win over Tech every single time I get a chance to. (Photo by Larry Wynn)

The 2010 edition of “Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate” was messy and sloppy and full of ugly football. And you know what? Sending Tech home with a loss in that game was just as satisfying at 6-6 as it was in 2022 to go 12-0.

So it bothers me when people say that those games are “meaningless” because every snap of college football is dripping in tradition and meaning.

There are precious few games that I would really call “meaningless” in the history of college football. One of the easiest choices for a truly meaningless game is the 2017 Iron Bowl where Auburn defeated the top-ranked CFP team for the second time in the same season, upending Alabama 26-14.

That victory gave Auburn a spot in the SEC Championship with a potential CFP berth on the line if they could just beat Georgia for a second time in the same season.

Unfortunately, they could not. Both Georgia and Alabama would make the CFP that season and would ultimately meet in the Championship Game.

I can’t recall the outcome of that one, for some reason. Oh well. I’m sure it isn’t important. Probably just another meaningless game.

Before the CFP, Bama’s loss in the Iron Bowl would have gone down as one of the most crushing defeats in that series’ history. A previously undefeated Crimson Tide would have missed out on the conference championship game and any chance at the National Championship, and Auburn could have gloated about that forever.

Instead, the loss might have actually helped Bama, giving them a backdoor into the CFP and one less game to worry about wear and tear. And what can Auburn really gloat about when their archrival still won the title that season? (Oh. Right. That’s what happened.)

That is the definition of a meaningless game, where a loss didn’t matter at all. And it was only possible because of a playoff.

That’s not to say these kinds of allegedly meaningless games never happened before. Oklahoma once lost their conference championship game 35-7 against Kansas State and still went on to play in the BCS National Championship Game against LSU.

With a 12-team playoff starting soon, and the inevitable bloat of further expansion, you’re only going to see even more games where the outcome just doesn’t matter for one or more teams.

How do you feel about an undefeated Georgia resting starters in a rivalry game against Georgia Tech, knowing that a loss “doesn’t matter” when winning the SEC Championship Game would likely provide a first-round bye either way?

You may not be a Georgia fan, but let’s not pretend that we are the only program that could possibly see such an event in our near future.

We’ve been seeing this sort of thing going on in the NFL and other leagues for years. A team might have already locked down the first-round bye and will rest most of their starters. The game might matter if the opponent is on the verge of a playoff spot or could pick up a better seed, but there’s a very real chance that the game will have no bearing on the playoff picture.

And this kind of thing happens just about every season.

PICTURED: A royalty-free image of a man who’s final regular-season football game was a very meaningful loss to the Atlanta Falcons. (Photo by Cian Leach on Unsplash)

With an ever expanding playoff in college football, it is only a matter of time before we see this exact brand of “meaningless” game in a sport that once required excellence week in and week out.

We’ve already seen the SEC play around with decades-old schedules and rivalries in order to maximize entertainment value with late-season division games. On Georgia’s schedule, Tennessee replaced Auburn as the next-to-last SEC game of the year. Georgia and Auburn have been playing that same spot on the calendar for almost as long as the “Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry” has been in existence, but the SEC wanted a division game at the end to spice things up.

It worked like a charm in 2022, with the first ever #1 vs. #1 game going Georgia’s way in Sanford Stadium, but an expanded playoff would potentially make the move…say it with me…meaningless.

While conference games are less likely to suffer from the same fate, it is still entirely possible that a late-November SEC game will happen after one team or another has already locked up their spot in the conference title game. And with the end of divisions, it is even more likely that a late-November SEC game will have no bearing on who plays in the conference championship.

For years, people have been arguing that we need a playoff to save the sport of college football from an onslaught of meaningless games. All we’re doing is creating a miniaturized version of the NFL with four times as many teams.

College football has always thrived on being a wholly different product with more passionate fanbases, deeper regional ties, and an entirely different type of season than the NFL. What’s going to happen when the casual fan sees that the college game is no longer a separate thing from the NFL and decides to just watch the pros play?

The chase for the almighty dollar will, more often than not, lead to irreparable harm.

And what’s more, the higher the dollars, the tighter the margins. It won’t take much for the whole house of cards to come crashing down. The first hint of downturn in the sport’s popularity could spell doom for the broadcasters and everyone else who stands to lose from college football’s cash cow status.

Maybe college football’s collapse will happen quickly enough that we can actually save it.

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NOTE: The photo of Javon Bullard is from one of my media contacts. I know it sounds made up, but I have been told I can use their photos so long as I don’t credit them or their media outlet. I know. Just trust me.

Game 6 - UGA vs. Vanderbilt

There are few teams in the country right now as confusing as Vanderbilt.

After starting the season 2-0 with huge wins over Middle Tennessee State and Nevada, the ‘Dores very nearly pulled the upset in South Bend with a narrow 22-17 loss at Notre Dame. So that’s all well and good, there’s no shame in being 2-1 for Vandy, but then they got schooled by South Carolina and escaped a contest against Tennessee State in which, as Vandy head coach Derek Mason said, “football becomes secondary.”

On a secondary note, there is some good news. There are reports that the young man who was injured in last week’s Vandy vs. Tennessee State game is doing much better.

As for Vanderbilt, though, who knows what to expect from them? You think you’d have a pretty good handle on your opponents by week six, but Vandy has shown too many different faces to really grasp who they are.

Are they a really good team that just fell short in a huge road game against a traditional power? Are they a struggling team that will fall short in the conference yet again?

Even those wins over MTSU and Nevada look suspect to some, but those were big wins on the scoreboard. That’s not the kind of win that Vanderbilt would normally pick up. Sure, they would probably beat those teams, but not by so wide a margin.

When you break down the athletes and the stars, you can make many of the same arguments that you could for Tennessee. Kyle Shurmur has more passing yards on the season than Jake Fromm does. Lead running back Ke’Shawn Vaughn has about as many yards as Elijah Holyfield with three more touchdowns. Kalija Lipscolmb, Vandy’s top receiver, has almost 200 more receiving yards than Mecole Hardman and two more touchdowns.

“You know, I like Vandy’s chances this year.” (Photo via Telegraph.co.uk)

So a blind analysis of the two teams could yield some positive touchstones for Vandy, sure, but then you hit the same wall you did with Tennessee: depth.

The reason that these other teams have stars with more yards and more touchdowns than Georgia’s stars is because those guys are the best on their team by a wide margin. For most of Georgia’s top guys, the margin between them and the next man is minimal, if it exists at all. Holyfield isn’t demonstrably better than Brian Herrien or D’Andre Swift. In Swift’s case, there is an injury that has held him back. Outside of that, right now Holyfield just has the hot hand and is the flavor of the week. Any other cliches you want?

He’s the cat’s pajamas and the bee’s knees.

Same story for Hardman. He has to split reps with an insanely talented core of receivers like Terry Godwin and Jeremiah Holloman and Riley Ridley. Factor in exceptional tight ends like Isaac Nauta and Charlie Woerner and you realize why other teams can catch up to and surpass Hardman on the stats chart.

Even the starting quarterback is having to split reps. It’s just that kind of situation.

After the messy win against Mizzou where everyone complained about how well the Tigers ran against Georgia, people were afraid that our defensive line had gone weak.

So how do we feel about the fact that Tennessee only picked up 2.6 yards per carry last week and only rushed for 66 yards total?

The majority of Mizzou’s yardage against us came because of the scheme. We had committed that Drew Lock was not going to beat us, and he didn’t. He failed to pass for more than 250 yards and had no passing touchdowns. That’s a phenomenal performance against a likely future first-round pick.

Yeah, it would be great to say we’re going to key in on the pass and still dominate the line of scrimmage so well that a team can’t run the ball well against us, but a team with that kind of offensive imbalance welcomes a dedicated pass coverage. That’s what we did.

Then we did the opposite for Tennessee. They were such a run-heavy team that we committed to stopping the run, and we did so very well.

Tennessee only had 209 yards of offense against the Dawgs last week. They are averaging 360 yards of offense after what we did to them.

The defense is fine.

In fact, as far as scoring defense goes, the Dawgs are tied for fifth with just 13.0 points allowed per game. According to ESPN, UGA has the most efficient defense in the country. We have a whopping .4-point lead over Bama in that category.

So is there a real threat from Vandy?

Shurmur is 29th in the country for passing yards. That’s clearly better than most, with 1,231 yards to his name so far. He also has nine touchdowns through the air.

That’s good, right? Sure, Shurmur has an arm. But when you look at rating, he isn’t even better than average. Shurmur rates out at a 140.9 for pass efficiency, which sounds high, but he ranks 59th. That’s about 20 spaces below Lock and Feleipe Franks from Florida, and about 15 short of Jarrett Guarantano from Florida.

By the way, Fromm is sixth in that category.

Shurmur can be dangerous, but not against a good defense. And Georgia is easily the best defense the ‘Dores have seen thus far.

Can Vandy be a problem for Georgia’s offense? I doubt it.

You can protest all you want that Mizzou and Tennessee proved problematic for Georgia’s offense, but that’s not really true. We were our own problem. Two weeks in a row, now, the Dawgs have looked rusty on offense. Passes are missing their targets, blocks aren’t there, defenses are getting through the line and stripping the ball.

These are problems, but these are not forced errors. These are almost all unforced errors, and they are things that we have to get better about.

Leading up to Tennessee, head coach Kirby Smart said, “We’re focusing on us.” That has to be Georgia’s attitude while these errors abound. With some of the weaker opponents we’ve faced in the first half of the regular season, Vandy included, that’s not a problem.

“Really? Kentucky is a threat? Get outta here!” (Photo by Melanie Dretvic on Unsplash)

Looking ahead, though, we’ve got some tough cookies coming up: LSU in Baton Rouge, the Gators, Kentucky. Seriously, Kentucky. They’re 5-0.

But take a look back at the South Carolina game. That was a hostile environment against an upset-minded team that had the personnel to make us sweat. And everyone sweats in Columbia, SC because oh my word, that place is hot.

Even though that was the second game of the season, I imagine we were specifically planning for South Carolina.

That’s not to say that we literally didn’t game plan for Mizzou or Tennessee, obviously we did, but I think South Carolina is the last game we played where we were one hundred percent focused on planning for that game and getting that opponent down to a science.

And it was a huge win. One of the biggest the Dawgs have ever had in old Willy B. Stadium.

If we look a little shaky at times against Vandy tomorrow, I’ll certainly be worried.

They only allow 20.6 points per game so far this season, even if that does include a Notre Dame team before making a crucial quarterback change, so they can at least slow some people down.

But we are averaging more than two additional touchdowns per game in total scoring, and we’re holding opponents to a whole touchdown less than what Vandy is. If you want to pretend that there’s some one-to-one math in there, then we should win by three touchdowns.

Honestly, I’d be a tad bit disappointed if it was only by three touchdowns.

Last Week’s Picks

Dang it, Guarantano. If not for a stupid personal foul against Georgia last week, I probably would have gone 2-1. I very nearly went 3-0, but our offense couldn’t get loose for a lot of big plays.

• The Vols will not complete a pass more than 20 yards downfield. (This is not counting YAC, just where the catch is made compared to the line of scrimmage.) If not for two huge touchdown passes, I would have had this one. WRONG.

• Georgia will hold Tennessee to less than 3.0 yards per carry. As previously stated, Tennessee ran for just 2.6 yards per carry. CORRECT.

• At least three ball carriers for Georgia will have gains of 25 yards or more. Nauta had that nifty “run” for 31 yards, and both Swift and Fields had runs of about 15 yards in the last four minutes, but it wasn’t enough. WRONG.

My score prediction wasn’t too far off. I went with 45-6, which ultimately was only one point off the final total. Sure, I had a touchdown wrong in each direction, but that’s fine by me.

Three Picks and a Score

Like I said earlier, I have a hard time getting a grasp on Vandy, so I don’t expect much quality from this week’s picks. Take them for what you will.

• Vandy will fail to gain more than 13 first downs.

• Georgia’s three leading rushers will average 5.0 yards per carry or better.

• Shurmur will throw two interceptions and less than 250 yards.

Dawgs win 45-10.