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The most interesting thing I heard at Ohio State on Tuesday was Ryan Day comparing the state of college football to the age of the dinosaurs.
Yes, really.
Aside from this being internet search engine gold — college football, dinosaurs and changes most people don’t like? Heck yeah! — it sort of makes sense.
Let’s break it down (video and the full quotes after the ad break; remember if you click on an ad in the newsletter I’ll get compensation and you don’t have to do anything else. No purchase necessary. Just a click!)
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Ryan Day has been the head football coach at Ohio State for seven-plus years now.
That seems like a long time, but it’s really not.
Jim Tressel had the job for 10 years. John Cooper stalked the sidelines for 13 seasons, and of course Woody Hayes’ tenure lasted for 28.
(Day is about to outlast Urban Meyer, interestingly enough, but I digress…)
But what about the dinosaurs?
I mean those things were around FOREVER.
Like me, you probably learned about them and were fascinated growing up.
Ryan Day is close to my age, so he probably did, too, but I guess a little refresher never hurts.
“I mentioned this to somebody the other day, and I went on a couple visits with my son, and so I had a little free time traveling, and so I watched that Netflix documentary on the dinosaurs, and if you want to feel insignificant, watch that because it talks about how the dinosaurs were on Earth like 250 million years ago, and throughout time, it got all the way to like 65 million years ago.”
Um, yeah, OK? What does that have to do with college football?
“Over that time, the world changed. The climate changed. The Earth changed, and some dinosaurs figured out how to continue to adapt, and some died, and I guess that's a little extreme, but I think it's kind of the way it is in college football.”
Oh, now I get. He might be on to something.
He was talking about the process of integrating 51 new players this spring thanks to a large freshman class and more than a dozen college transfers, which is apparently going about as well as can be expected.
Of course change is inevitable, but it’s come at a breakneck pace since Day became the head coach on Jan. 2, 2019.
The transfer portal existed, but it was new.
It has become more and more prominent over the years, thanks largely to judges crippling the NCAA’s ability to enforce many of its eligibility rules.
The introduction of name, image and likeness compensation changed recruiting, making it more about money (at least for some prospects) and eroding long-time advantages some programs had thanks to years of success, proximity to talent and/or willingness to pay players under the table.
Now even when Day wins the battles to get those elite prospects on campus, he has to re-recruit his whole roster every winter, including guys who haven’t even played yet but already got a lot of money to sign and sit the bench and are being offered more to go somewhere else.
“The people who know how to adapt are going to continue to move on, and the ones who don't, they die, and so as frustrating as it all is, as much as we all want to just pull our hair out and throw our hands up and realize that this is all extremely crazy — even being with some of the NFL personnel last Wednesday when they look at you and say, ‘You are insane to be in college football.’ They're right, but either you adapt or you die, and so this is another phase of it is bringing in a whole — half of your team is new. They've never played a down of football here, and we're not allowed to lose a game, so we're going to adapt, and we're not going to die.”
Sometimes I think the sport of college football is doomed to go the way of the dinosaur because I know a lot of changes are turnoffs to fans, and rightly so.
I support players being able to make money on their skills and reputations just like any other student, and some of the freedom to change schools brought about by the portal was necessary.
Striking down the year-in-residence rule for transfers (making them sit out a season while at their new school) still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, at least from a legal standpoint, but that is where we are.
I think there is a downside to some of this freedom for the players, too. Some I’m sure would be better off sticking out and making it work at at least one of their schools (easy for me to say, I know), and some never even find a new home.
The transactional nature certainly has some negatives, and it all obscures the pathway to college for many players, especially those who aren’t slam-dunk Division I prospects.
Fewer scholarships are getting offered to high schoolers as some schools keep spots for college transfers who are older and more mature.
(There was supposed to at least be a trickle down of scholarship pushing some prospects to lower levels, but that is not really how it has worked, and for some simply taking a Division III offer instead of Division II is not an option because many of those institutions are small private schools that are a lot more expensive.)
What does the future hold for college football?
Unfettered transfers and ballooning payments might not be the meteor that kills college football, but I also wouldn’t rule it out.
After all, the meteor itself (if the theory is correct, anyway) was just the beginning.
Other changes are hastening the move to a more “professionalized” model, and I know a lot of fans simply do not want college football to become NFL Lite. If they did, they would just watch the NFL.
Simply paying the players I don’t think is a dealbreaker for most fans, but everyone likes familiarity. Lack of that has killed college basketball for 20 years, though it might be making a comeback, ironically thanks to some of the changes listed above. (But former pros from Europe also might just take over the sport now that they are eligible for some reason.)
Nonetheless, college leaders’ pursuit of money to pay the players (and continue enriching themselves) certainly endangers the whole enterprise if it leads to a “Super League” for college football, a 24-team CFP or a significant expansion of the NCAA Basketball Tournaments because I don’t think either of those changes would be commercially successful.
But as Day said, it’s going to be a matter of adapt or die while everything sorts itself out.
OK, so I managed to write 1,000 words on college football and the dinosaurs…
I guess I better save some for Friday when the next edition of This Week in College Football comes out, right?
I think so. Be sure to check the inbox and spread the word (and click those ads).
Have a great rest of your day….
REMINDER: If you want to see more of what's being said during Ohio State interviews, check out my YouTube channel. I’ve also got a new Facebook page you can find here.
BONUS COVERAGE:
Spring football is into week three, so the stories are starting to pile up.
The new OSU WRs coach met with reporters for the first time Saturday, and I wrote for PressProsMagazine.com how Cortez Hankton is clearly not trying to be Brian Hartline 2.0, but that’s not all:
Over at MensJournal.com, I noted that the first two winner’s of the MLB Player of the Week had a couple of surprising things in common (good news for baseball fans in Ohio) and the choice for this season’s Hard Knocks team is unusual.
ONE MORE THING:
I created that header image using Google’s Gemini AI. That’s part of Google’s tools for work that help me operate my newly formed small business. If you’re interested in checking those out, let me know!