7 quick pieces of advice for NFL fans who want to try CFB (2024)

What’s wrong with the NFL’s product quality? Nothing, in my opinion, because my team is 2-0.

But not everyone agrees with me. More than in any season in recent memory, people from all sorts of backgrounds — fans and media from the NFL side, college side, and from general sports perspectives — are complaining about what the NFL puts on its fields, all in addition to the league’s failures over the years to adequately address off-field actions by certain players and owners.

So, again, what about the product actually used to be better, beyond just the general vibe in the air?

Here are the three valid and well-argued opinions I’ve found:

1. Layers of professional incentives have encouraged offenses to attempt six-yard checkdowns over and over and over.
2. Probably nothing, because basing a strong opinion on a two-week sample size is silly.
3. Probably nothing, because the whole thing has always been designed for a few dozen rich guys to make each other richer, not to actually compete. (I protest the innovative and competitive Arthur Blank being included in the lead art for this post, but the rest stands.)

Whether the NFL’s actually gotten worse at putting on football games or not, the only thing that matters: People think the NFL’s gotten worse at putting on football games.

Meanwhile, nobody’s complaining about college football being boring.

This isn’t a PLEASE LIKE MY SPORT battle. We don’t have to sound like college fans vs. NBA fans during March Madness.

I’m just saying: Only one level of the sport has had a third-and-93 this year.

Some NFL fans have admitted the college game is more entertaining, though. I prefer college and think Sundays are still fine, relatively, but ...

... if any NFL fans are interested in adding Saturdays to their football weekends, I have a few recommendations.

• Alabama, Clemson, and Oklahoma look like the best teams that have actually played other good teams.
• Ohio State has lost a game, which always ignites a state crisis.
• Many other teams are probably good, but if you don’t want to admit a rival is good, just say it hasn’t played anybody and/or looked bad against a specific team.
• If you’re unsure whether a team is good, that means its fans are probably either calling for the coach to be fired or mocking the non-believers, depending on whether last Saturday was a loss or a win.
• All caught up!

The labor situation has been dicey for many decades. Too much money coalesces at the top. Only a few teams actually have any hope of contending for a national title. Player health is a massive issue. Teams often hire dull retread coaches instead of innovating, then fire the dull retreads after three years and do it all over again. But, folks, enough about the NFL’s problems, folks.

Trick plays inside of trick plays, bizarre games being decided by blown coverages, a 45-point upset, a triple-overtime West Coast game extending a Saturday to nearly a 16-hour experience, a 98-0 game that could’ve been way worse, fans being literally caught red-handed amid rival statue vandalism, a 34-point comeback won by a fake spike when the clock was already stopped, a team making a social media hero of its trash can, a kicker re-kicking his own blocked kick, a game being won via a walk-off fake punt, Big 12 foxes frolicking, and Les Miles taking a hot mic on a search for the restroom: these things all happened within the first fifth of college football’s 2017 regular season. Every Saturday, the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen happens.

Teams score a lot. We know.

Everything is off the rails. We know.

No one is truly in charge, and there are often no adults to be found. We know.

This is real:

We know.

It’s so dumb. We know. We love dumb, and you can, too!

You’re free to ignore all those 49-6 games between ranked teams and cupcakes. I know the concept of a totally meaningless game is troubling for some pro sports fans, but just pretend it’s Browns-Jets.

If your NFL team is in the AFC, you might have an NFC team you also kind of root for, or vice versa. One in each conference!

Well, college football has way more than two conferences.

Maybe you have a dormant fandom or some personal ties to a specific school. Great! Put that team on your list. After that, the single biggest college football fandom insight I can give to anyone, after almost a decade of covering this sport professionally and a lifetime in college football country, is to try rooting for a bunch of teams.

Teams who’ll entertain you, if not necessarily themselves. Let’s do at least one per power conference:

• Every ACC team except Boston College is capable of pants-on-head wackiness, but let me especially recommend Clemson, which is the fun version of Alabama, and Louisville, which is Lamar Jackson.
• Oklahoma State, if you want the uncut dope of Big 12 to-hell-with-everything-that-ain’t-points experiences. CFB Hipster Twitter’s favorite team. Oklahoma is basically the same team.

• From the Big Ten: Purdue, believe it or not! After years of drudgery, these underdogs do lots of interesting little things on offense. CFB Hipster Twitter’s other favorite team. (For absolute maximum COLLEGE FOOTBALL ZANY OFFENSE PEW PEW PEW, you should also root for an Oklahoma State-Penn State postseason game.)
• In three games, the Pac-12’s UCLA has pulled off the second-biggest comeback in the history of the sport and lost a 93-point shootout upset. QB Josh Rosen is our current Brett Favre. (The actual Pac-12 answer is whoever’s playing in the game scheduled latest on Saturday.)
• In the SEC, watch any SEC West game not involving Bama, except for the one Bama game per year that gets weird. You’ll usually know when that one’s coming. Try to avoid SEC East games, usually.
• In the non-power ranks, things get even sillier. Half these teams are nuts. Memphis, San Diego State, and USF are the main ones to know, at the moment.
• You can also watch the teams with the most draft prospects, to later enhance your NFL experience. Here’s a scientific formula for determining which college teams those are: They’re the teams that are highly ranked in the polls. Remember how much everyone hated that Texans-Bengals Thursday nighter? Anybody who watched Clemson last year found at least something to enjoy in it: more Deshaun Watson.

Sports are fun, and we can all like more of them together!