A Jersey Guy: Let the CFB Season Begin
It will start slowly, with the end of a 15 month recruiting dead period on Tuesday.
It will pick up on July 1 when the issue of compensating football players for their skills by allowing them to receive extra financial benefits through their name and likeness (NIL) will kick in.
And it will pick up the pace in the fall when the one-time transfer (without penalty) phase which has opened up a sort of "free agency'' in college football will become more real with the start of the 2021 season.
Welcome to the wild, wild west in CFB, which will be a vast difference from the uncertainty and chaos of last season's pandemic dominated season, where merely getting the game played was a major accomplishment.
Allowing recruits on campus for the first time in 15 months has turned the tranquil period of late spring, early summer into a mid-season frenzy of activity as the recruiting process moves from a zoom environment to a period when players can actually visit the places they will live in for the next few years.
But it is more than that.
There are also seismic rumblings from the top where the college football format--now a four-team playoff--will be discussed and inevitably changed.
It is also a period when negotiations for new television contracts are being seriously discussed.
While there will be no definitive announcement for at least the next several months, count on a playoff expansion-with my best guess being that adding 8 more spots will be the arrangement that is brokered with the strong possibility of a $1 BILLION a year package.
The format:
12 teams, with the first four teams receiving byes and first round and quarterfinal games played in on campus (highest-seed gets home field) sites on the second and third weeks of December.
Such an arrangement would fill the December college football calendar with nothing but meaningful games, starting with the conference championship games on the first weekend of December.
The current Final Four bowl match up, starting with the New Year's Six bowl games would remain unchanged for the next few years at least.
Another looming possibility would be ESPN, which is working hard to become the prime outlet for the playoff system, to revamp its bowl plan.
ESPN currently owns 17 bowl games, which it stages at various spots throughout the country from mid-December through the New Year's holidays.
What would make sense would be for the network to take most of the those bowls and stage them on a steady basis through the holidays in Orlando, Fla, which is the ESPN southern base of operations with numerous athletic facilities.
ESPN's Florida "campus''' already has athletic fields for soccer, lacrosse and football. It could easily take some of that land and turn it into a min-stadium (15,000-20,000) and then package its bowl games as part of a Disney-World Holiday Sports package, where hotel accommodations and tickets to bowl games could be part of a package deal.
What sounds better to you, a Christmas week trip to Detroit for a game between MAC and ACC second tier teams or a trip to Orlando and Disney World, plus the bowl game?
That plan may take awhile, but rest assured that the expanded playoffs and the chaos that will be created by the advent of free agency and a form of "pay for play'' will change the face of CFB much more quickly.
Even without that, it is a season which hopefully bring the return of packed stadiums and the drama of such intriguing opening weekend match ups such as Miami vs. Alabama or Clemson vs. Georgia.
Let the games, the fun and the chaos begin.