May 22 2008
Grandpa Joe Speaks the Truth
I’ve never particularly cared much for Penn State or Joe Paterno. No solid reasoning, just not a team I cared for and I almost always thought they were overrated. However, Joe Pa is off speaking the truth about college football.
Here is a true veteran of college football speaking about the lack of a playoff:
“To be frank with you, I don’t know what the reasons are not to have a playoff,” Paterno said during a speaking appearance in Pittsburgh. “You can talk about missing class and all that kind of stuff, [yet] you see basketball go on forever. You have a lot of bogus excuses, but obviously the majority of people who have the say don’t want it.”
How true is that? The official college football season typically runs September - January for most programs, with December basically a month off. Most teams schedule about 12 games. Which if they play every weekend from September, their season ends in November. If they are invited to a bowl game, they play a single game in late December, or early January. So that is at most 13 games over more than 4 months.
College basketball? Teams schedule about 30 games from mid-November to mid-March or 5 months. They will schedule as many as 3 games a week and if they perform well in post season tournaments (conference and NCAA), they might tack on as many as 8-10 additional games. National final participants, Memphis and Kansas played 40 games and finished the 2nd week of April.
How exactly would one or two more games in a playoff extend the season such that the football teams would be missing an unreasonable more time in comparison to the basketball teams?
Joe Paterno, an 81 year old man, who wears glasses thicker than Shamu’s aquarium glass can see the system is bogus.
