An "I Told You So" Post

The first few games of any college football season produce a ridiculous amount of speculation and hyperbole from the sports media. I think this phenomenon is worse in college football than in any other major sport. Perhaps it's because there are real things at stake in these speculations: a high early-season ranking can give a team an inside track towards a late-season bowl game.

In my last post, a writer waxed on and on about how wonderful it was "for the game" that Miami, Notre Dame and Michigan are back. Well, all three of those teams responded in kind by looking like shit this past week. Let me review one quote from Mr. Schrager's article:

Win that affair and Miami has not only a top-three team in the nation, but also the inside track on a BCS title game berth.

Whomp. Here's this article in a picture:


And in this post, Dennis Dodd settles the question of BYU's eligibility to play in the title game. Whomp. They got killed by a not-so-amazing FSU team. Though it's not impossible that a team from a non-BCS conference could get to a high level, the unqualified statement that a non-BCS team could prove itself to be without a doubt one of the top two teams of in the country is still... stupid.

And of course, HatGuy, who infuriated me as he got all over himself excited about how Notre Dame might have surpassed its recent mediocrity. Turns out that Notre Dame is a middle-of-the-road Big Ten team or so. I know Notre Dame gets a lot of airtime on this blog (for obvious reasons), but I think it's pretty clear that even in the fifth year of the Weis regime, Notre Dame is an 8-4 or 9-3 team at best.

And watching the incredibly-overrated Ole Miss and Cal losses suggests that writers, as usual, get more excited about good storylines than they do good football. In all three of these cases - Schrager, Dodd and HatGuy - the writers got overly excited about a good storyline and neglected to do any real thinking about the teams in question.

Maybe it's just me smirking in hindsight, but the first few weeks of any college football season seem unusually full of bullshit.