Feeling bad, but not sorry — an important distinction when it comes to the two biggest stories of this college football season.
Well folks, we’ve finally made it.
Following an eight-month offseason in which we’d eventually come to salivate at the mere notion of college football and/or an interesting story pertaining to it, we’ve since blown through yet another 15-week schedule in seemingly record time — all the while bitching and moaning about countless events/incidents along the way.
In other words, some things never change.
Now the glorious celebration that is bowl season and the College Football Playoff therein await us in just a few short weeks. So, naturally all that the loudest factions of the sport want to shout out into the ether about is how they’re still pissed off about something or another.
Exhibit A, is of course, Florida State, and its exclusion from the last ever four-team playoff.
We’d be remiss, however, not to mention that it took an unprecedented surge down the season’s homestretch by Renegade and FSU in order to steal away what had previously been all but an absolute lock for 2023’s biggest persecution complex ‘winner’ — the Michigan Wolverines.
By this point even the most casual of sports fans has at least passing knowledge of the sign-stealing fiasco that took place in Ann Arbor, which, among other things, ultimately led to the three-game suspension of Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh — his second such suspension of the season no less.
Meanwhile, Florida State dropping out of the top four in the final College Football Playoff rankings in favor of #4 Alabama (and #3 Texas) has dominated the conversation of the sports world ever since it came to fruition on Sunday.
These two stories — one precipitated by an uncontrollable injury to a star quarterback, the other brought about by some shall we say ‘less-than-sporting behavior’ from a coaching staff that also happens to work in one of the more brazenly self-important athletic departments you’re going to find (which is saying something) — have without a doubt become a pair of the indelible memories that will live on from the 2023 season.
Now having said all of that, I would sincerely like to let all of the non-diehard, ‘us against the world’ Wolverine/Seminole supporters out there know that it is in fact OK to both view and discuss these two separate ordeals with a degree of emotional intelligence.
And in so doing, I would encourage you to possibly consider adopting some version of the following realization that I’ve come to amidst the swirl of these particularly impassioned college football ‘controversies’:
I can feel bad about something that has happened, but that doesn’t mean I have to feel sorry for you.
Need a bit more explanation?
Of course you do.
Without it that sentence more or less reads like a bunch of psychobabble BS — which I’m sure after getting through this piece some may still argue that’s all it is.
(So, I’ll do my best to convince you otherwise.)
Feeling bad
Let’s start with this:
I feel absolutely awful for FSU quarterback Jordan Travis.
The gruesome leg injury suffered back on November 18th that would end both his season and college football career is the kind of thing that makes you feel sick to your stomach when it happens to any athlete in any sport.
I feel badly for his teammates who were there to witness the physical and emotional pain that it clearly caused their senior signal-caller, and more importantly their friend.
Whether the terrible misfortune of injury happens to you specifically, or ‘merely’ elsewhere within the ranks of a team that you’re a part of, it’s a miserable experience to undergo each and every time.
Now top all of that off with the fact that Travis’ absence — and the subsequent cratering of the team’s offense to close the season — was the overwhelming factor in FSU being left out of the College Football Playoff and you’re probably not a living, breathing human being if the entire confluence of events/bad luck doesn’t bum you out for the young men at the heart of it all.
I also feel badly for the hundred or so players (including walk-ons) on the current Michigan roster, who, amidst an undefeated season were completely blindsided by a scandal that they themselves had nothing to do with.
Rather than be surrounded by conversation about the team’s very real championship prospects, the Wolverines instead spent more than a month being inundated with questions about one of the wilder college football stories in recent memory. And as the culmination of it all they’d spend their most important, challenging stretch of the season without their head coach on the sidelines.
In each of these cases, and through no fault of their own, you had a bunch of players whose goals and dreams for their season were being hindered by outside forces beyond their control — and that sucks.
But that’s about it.
Not sorry
For as deep as my empathy extends toward the players and the unfortunate circumstances that were thrust upon them, it also more or less ends right there.
I do not feel sorry for Florida State fans nor any other parties with a vested interest their football team’s success.
Not when the school’s head coach and athletic director are putting out borderline delusional manifestos in response to the issue at hand, not when the ACC commissioner follows suit with a similarly ridiculous statement of his own, and certainly not when your most vocal advocates in the college football media sphere often resort to silly, conspiratorial arguments and/or blatant falsehoods about how the College Football Playoff selection process actually works.
The reason I feel all of zero sympathy regarding FSU’s omission from the tenth and final four-team playoff is because the reason it happened at all has been sitting in plain sight for more than a decade had anyone bothered to look.
The selection committee will select the teams using a process that distinguishes among otherwise comparable teams by considering:
Conference championships won,
Strength of schedule,
Head‐to‐head competition,
Comparative outcomes of common opponents (without incenting margin of victory), and…
Other relevant factors such as unavailability of key players and coaches that may have affected a team’s performance during the season or likely will affect its postseason performance.
That is language pulled directly from the CFP Selection Committee Protocols — a document, it should be noted, which was unanimously adopted by, among others, 10 different conference commissioners (including the ACC’s).
By the very nature of a four-team playoff it has always been a possibility that one of FSU-backers’ favorite talking points — being an ‘undefeated Power Five conference champion’ — could have been irrelevant to the selection process in a given year (i.e. there could be four other undefeated P5 champs who get in and the fifth is left out).
Meanwhile, the tragic nature of the Jordan Travis injury and its potential impact on his team’s playoff selection has been accounted for (and approved) in writing ever since the inception of this championship format.
If the notion of such a thing was so bothersome to Florida State and/or the ACC before a few days ago when it ultimately bit them in the ass, they had all the time in the world to address it.
(I understand we as human beings often tend not to push for change until we’ve been personally affected by something, thus I ‘get’ why FSU & Co. are angry. But for one, we’re talking about college football here not civil liberties, and two, it takes a real loser to cry foul about the rules of a game which they themselves played no small part in ratifying.)
Meanwhile, I’ve never felt sorry for the pro-Michigan contingent either.
Why should I when your head coach has the gall to proclaim the Wolverines to be ‘America’s team’ in spite of concrete evidence of the program’s over-the-top, elaborate cheating efforts — which ironically probably weren’t even all that necessary given the legitimate talent already in place across the roster and staff?
I cackle in bewilderment that the might and tradition which ‘Go Blue’ supporters are typically dying to preach unto the rest of collegiate athletics have been attempted to be spun as a woe-is-us angle by the winningest program in the history of the sport.
Again, I feel bad that a group of innocent players had one of their finite number of seasons playing college football riddled with obstacles they neither could’ve, nor should’ve ever been expected to foresee.
But it was their coaching staff that cheated. It was their coaching staff that got caught. And it was their coaching staff that got punished.
There were plenty of folks saying a suspension of Jim Harbaugh would be ‘unfair’ because it could hurt the players. So, you can’t punish him because to do so for wrongdoing that occurred under his purview might negatively affect something else that’s also under said purview?
“Yes, your honor, I stole the television and stereo system from the electronics store, but you can’t make me return them and pay a fine because then I won’t be able to afford food for my goldfish.”
(I promise no animal is actually going hungry in this less-than-perfect, semi-analogous scenario, nor am I in any way equating coach/player relationships to that of an owner and his/her pet fish.)
When someone screws up and is punished for it, they tend to forfeit some of the authority over exactly what the consequences for said screw-up will be. That’s kind of just how it works.
So no, I don’t feel sorry for Michigan in the least.
Emotions and intellectual honesty don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
I understand that it might be asking a lot, particularly of those who ‘bleed’ Garnet and Gold or Maize and Blue, but is it possible for us as a greater college football society (I won’t get greedy and extend it any further beyond that) to evaluate our feelings in a more truthful manner?
Of course, Michigan fans were upset. You’ve got a team that could very well win a national championship, and any development that could jeopardize that is going to scare the hell out of you.
(It turns out you went undefeated and earned the number one overall seed anyways, so perhaps you could’ve relaxed just a little.)
And naturally Florida State fans are irate. Three weeks ago, you thought your team could win a national championship led by your do-it-all star quarterback.
Then a catastrophic injury occurred and suddenly — 13–0 record and all — you’re left out of the playoff altogether.
(BTW, you know damn well you weren’t even sniffing the title without Travis under center.)
I understand that anger is a natural response in circumstances such as these. But is it possible to process that anger without brainwashing oneself into believing that someone, everyone is ‘out to get us?’
Can one not verbalize their disapproval of a selection process that’s been in place for over a decade while also acknowledging that said process has been in place for over a decade — the outcome which resulted this year, though you may disagree with it, being reasonably within the scope of the established CFP Selection Committee mission/principles?
Or as a fan of this sport will you resign yourself to mindless tirades, lazy conspiracy theories and wallowing in an endless cycle of self-pity until the next unconscionable ‘injustice’ comes along?
Because if that’s all you’ve got left to stand on than I suppose I’ll have to reverse the statement at the heart of this piece.
In that case I don’t feel badly about much of anything, but boy do I feel sorry for you…