You have to decide what this is going to be.
College football doesn't understand what it's here for.
I said I wasn’t going to get sucked in this season, and of course I was wrong.
There is no defensible reason why a college football season should have taken place this year other than that the system that it feeds—an ugly, exploitative system that is a business in every possible way except for a few boxes checked on some forms a hundred years ago—demanded it. We needed to have a college football season because there’s a massive apparatus built up around it, a television ecosystem screaming for content to justify the dollars spent on the guarantee of that content, dollars that go to everyone aside from the people making the content.
I believed all of this at the beginning of the season, and I believe it now, and increasingly this belief is making it harder and harder to reconcile my love of a sport that has more irreconcilable issues than most.
But in spite of all of that, I still love college football, more than any other sport. I love it because it’s a big, messy, u…