Rakes Report #260: Unsolicited Tips on How to Better Enjoy College Football
It's a very strange sport but has much to offer.
It’s understandable to find your relationship with college football existing in an odd place. I personally love it dearly and devote a tremendous amount of time and mental energy to it, and yet I've reached the point of acceptance where if a magic wand were waved and it disappeared entirely, I believe that might be a net good. Because this is a giant contradiction I've done a lot of self-interrogation regarding the sport in addition to having ongoing conversations with people I trust about the best ways to approach it.
What follows is a mini manifesto of some of the guidelines I attempt to follow. Do I falter in this quest? Often, but these signposts have kept my college football experience mostly positive despite the fact it has been and continues to be mined for every last cent by bad actors. (Notre Dame recently winning 14 games also really helped.)
Sometimes I am part of or observe interactions that make me wonder why someone is a fan, as their highs are limited or dismissed and their lows are more pronounced. Perhaps you will not find all of these to be useful but hopefully one or two can assist in some way. When you finish, I would very much love to hear your suggestions for maximizing enjoyment. Without further ado:
You get to decide what’s important and what matters
I’m starting with this because it’s the one I want to hammer as the sport continues to evolve. There are recent concerns about maintaining the value of the regular season and a debate that has raged for years — quite annoyingly, if I do say so — about the existence of lower-tier bowl games and the answer is always the same: Things matter if the fans decide they matter. This past bowl season was extremely competitive so if you and the people you enjoy college football with decide that the Cure Bowl is very important, guess what? It is.
If the television networks and administrators destroy the FBS, then we can all decide we’re more into the FCS or lower divisions. If you and your friends want to get extremely invested in the Sun Belt race this fall, then that matters. If you want to track rivalry trophy winners, great. College football is a giant buffet offering so many delightful options to peruse and a focus only on the national championship is limiting your happiness. Rings culture is a poisoned chalice that should be avoided at all costs.
Every team doesn’t suck…
Call this the “Ain’t played nobody” corollary. One of the golden rules of pro wrestling is that when you’re cutting a promo, you can say a lot of stuff about your upcoming opponent — why you hate them, why you’re going to beat them, why their mother is a woman of ill repute, etc., etc., etc. — but the thing you absolutely should not do is make it seem like your rival isn’t capable or worthy. Otherwise, why should people want to pay to see you fight? What good would it be for your reputation to beat some bum?
There is an instinct among college football fans to talk themselves into every team being some sort of fraud that hasn’t proven themselves. The best recent example of this was the amount of people who treated 2024 Penn State like they were Purdue. Sure, there were some red flags (close games at USC and Minnesota; limited ranked wins; no offensive touchdowns scored against Ohio State; being coached by James Franklin) but by every metric they were a top-ten team even if they were ranked a couple spots too high in the polls. Even flawed teams ranked at the edge of or outside the Top 25 bring positive qualities to the table and are capable of stretches of good ball. The question to ask yourself is if every team in the sport is awful except maybe one or two at the top, why are you spending your time following it? Have some respect for decent or good teams even if they aren’t perfect.
…but also every team isn’t going to win out
There is a mania that tends to hit segments of the college football community in early to mid-October, where they look at a number of teams who are undefeated or have one loss and start panicking about what happens if they all win out when that never, ever happens. One of the stranger discourse boomlets this past season was when there were earnest questions after the calendar flipped to October about whether an 11-1 Notre Dame team would make the playoff. Of course an 11-1 Notre Dame team was going to make the playoff!
It’s very, very hard to win all of your games and most teams are not going to do that over a six-week stretch. For example: Miami, Iowa State and BYU all entered November with zero losses and exited it with two. Some teams do take care of business and maximize their potential — in 2024 that included Notre Dame after their early loss, Indiana and Penn State outside of their defeats against the Buckeyes, Texas when not playing Georgia — but many more do not (Ole Miss losing to Florida, Alabama losing to Oklahoma, the aforementioned Miami debacles).
Do: Root for upsets early and often. (Tennessee dropping an early October game to Arkansas was extremely helpful, otherwise the Irish could have maybe been playing Ohio State in the first round.) Don’t: Schedule watch and try to run 19,000 simulations before November at the very earliest.
Appreciate greatness (and misery)
We are so lucky to get to watch these dudes in action. Think about how good the average Division I athlete is and then think about what it means when Xavier Watts always ends up in the right place at the right time despite eleven offensive players and an entire coaching staff trying to outwit him. Or when an elite tailback like Jeremiyah Love, Audric Estime or Kyren Williams is running both past and through guys who are in the top one percent of physical specimens in the world. Maybe your favorite school’s game isn’t going the way you like or you’re watching two random teams on a weeknight not fully invested, but work to appreciate the flashes of brilliance because taking it for granted is a big mistake and an opponent of joy.
Likewise, be sure to revel in the misfortune of others, as they will generally not care and in many instances celebrate when your favorite team loses. Don’t be an asshole about it* to people you care about who happen to root for other teams but smiling evilly while basking in the schadenfreude is really fun.
* Unless you’re capable of taking it at an equal level to the dishing.
Remind yourself that teams evolve over the course of the season and sometimes just have bad days
College football teams are not static. If you watch a team in the early weeks of the season and then base your entire November analysis on that, there’s a good chance you’re wrong. Sometimes it’s something obvious like swapping a quarterback, but other times it’s incremental, as players get used to a new scheme or underclassmen pop on the depth chart. All evolutions are not necessarily positive, as teams that start strong can and do falter down the stretch. Sometimes, they have multiple arcs over the course of three months (2024 Kansas was snakebitten in close games and started 2-6, then ruined the seasons of Iowa State, BYU and Colorado in consecutive weeks, then went out with a whimper when trying to earn bowl eligibility in Waco).
Sometimes teams just have an off day, perhaps a bad matchup or a flurry of turnovers or an arduous game right before a bye week (sometimes all three of those things at once). You may recall the 2024 Fighting Irish suffered a historic defeat but still played some decent ball the rest of the way. If you only watched South Carolina’s 27-3 loss to Ole Miss, you wouldn’t have a representative view of their season, which was otherwise victories or close losses to good teams. These losses still count when it comes to rankings — Notre Dame wasn’t seeded as highly as they could have been and South Carolina missed the playoffs entirely — but judging a team based on their worst day alone is generally unwise and is tied to “Every team doesn’t suck” above.
Do not purposefully seek out bad takes nor expect outside validation
Between national and local outlets, services like Rivals/247/On3, podcasters, YouTubers and random people who post on social media, there are roughly nine million college football takes available at all times. Occasionally a take is so egregious you have no choice but to gawk at it, or a person carries enough weight in the sport (such as Kirk Herbstreit) they deserve to have their takes monitored and criticized. But the idea of purposefully seeking out disrespect for your team so you can take umbrage? Not ideal.
You’re telling me College Football Personality A, who has hated Notre Dame for years, said something disrespectful about them? Wow, wild. Or some people picked against the Fighting Irish or rated them a few spots lower than average in the AP poll? Okay. If you find a pundit is constantly annoying you, stop reading, listening and/or following them on social media. If you, like me, occasionally listen to podcasts where it’s 85% interesting/fun/informative but 15% aggravating, don’t focus on the 15% unless it’s particularly egregious and you feel compelled to share with your friends so you don’t lose your sanity. I would prefer every bad take not be brought to my digital welcome mat and dropped like a pet leaving a dead animal.
Diversify your lenses
This is more for pundits but I think it works in deciding what kind of college football info you’re getting. There are a lot of ways to approach the sport, viewing it from the lenses of recruiting, or advanced stats, or Xs and Os, or gambling, or off-field gossip and social media posts. There’s no One True Way* to love college football but taking a little bit from as many columns as you like can help improve the experience.
* I have come to accept there is a wrong way that drains the joy out of the game, which is combining the gambling approach while also hammering the “STARS MATTER” recruiting angle. That latter position means you end up defending Mario Cristobal a lot while screaming at the 2% of college football fans who don’t think having more talented players means anything, which can’t be fun.
Exception: If your approach is vibes-based and just enjoying watching as many games as you can with no consideration of the talent composite or F+, god bless you. I’d much rather have a long conversation with that fan than hear one solitary second of someone discussing their single-game parlay.
Staff turnover is inevitable and a sign of a healthy program
As fans, we understandably get attached to assistant coaches and want them to stay forever but you should want other programs and the NFL banging down the door to try and hire your guys because they’re doing so well. If you can keep a coordinator for three years — the length of Al Golden’s time in South Bend, for example — before they get a promotion, that’s great. Dan Lanning was defensive coordinator at Georgia for three years before he got the Oregon job. Todd Monken was the Dawgs’ offensive coordinator for three years, winning two titles and then moving back to the NFL. A little different because they both had previous head coaching experience, but Lane Kiffin was at Alabama for three years before moving on and Steve Sarkisian was there for two before getting the dang Texas job. Jim Knowles spent a whopping four years at Oklahoma State and three at Ohio State, and so on and so forth.
Losing coaches stinks and not all of their replacements will live up to the previous standard but it’s good to remember there are so many good coaches out there we don’t know about. Consider Clark Lea: In 2016, he was the linebackers coach at Wake Forest. Five years later, he’d been the defensive coordinator for two playoff teams and had a job offer from Vanderbilt. Or Lincoln Riley, who was the offensive coordinator at East Carolina in 2014 and three years later was head coach of Oklahoma. The come-ups can happen really, really fast and unless you’re deep in the weeds you’re not even going to know who’s going to appear on lists to fill vacancies until they start being reported.
(All that said, I’m still holding out hope that Mike Denbrock is an exception that proves to be Marcus Freeman’s Brent Venables, who spent a full decade churning out elite defenses at Clemson.)
Additionally: Roster turnover is also inevitable. If it reaches the point of an exodus that’s concerning and we need to look at what’s going on with the program, but guys are going to leave for playing time, because they want a change of scenery or myriad other reasons.
Remember that winning is hard
Of course we had to end here. You’re choosing to watch a game played by 18-to-22 year olds. No one is making you do this, even if you feel an obligation to family or friends to be invested and/or you’ve made it such a core part of your identity you’d feel sheepish backing away from it.* The players are going to mess up, the coaches are going to do things you don’t understand, referees are going to infuriate you, teams are going to lose games they should absolutely win and in general it’ll be weird. Embrace that and celebrate every single victory and positive play because there are only a dozen-ish Saturdays a year where you get the chance to feel these emotions.
* It’s a potentially pervasive issue that some people spend years viewing themselves as big sports fans and even after they no longer derive much if any joy from following stick with it anyway, either out of a misplaced sense of obligation, a grasping at nostalgia, a fear of seeking new hobbies or numerous other possibilities.
That’s all I have. The main reason I would protest the magic wand striking college football from this plane of existence is one of its clear benefits is the heavy lifting it does in community building across so many different programs and fanbases. I am very grateful for the fellow fans in my life and especially thankful for all of you who chose to read this. If you’ve got other suggestions for maximizing your fandom experience, please send them over or post below. Until next time, please take care of yourselves and each other.