The defending NBA champion Golden State Warriors messed around and added Boogie Cousins, basically completing their starting lineup’s transition into the Monstars. The impossibly rich just got even richer, and everybody, including NBA players, was pretty mad online.
How was this fair? How could a team that once won 73 games — with three all-stars before adding a fourth — now add a fifth? How can allowing so much talent to accumulate with one team be allowed? What about competitive balance?
Well, if this scenario makes you upset, college football might not be for you. Because this basically happens every year over here.
Here’s one simple comparison:
Depending on where you look, college football has about six or seven teams with those odds. Again, that’s out of 130 teams, not out of 30.
College football talent distribution is not even close to fair.
There are 130 FBS programs. You know how many signed a 5-star recruit in 2018? Just 10. Georgia got seven of them. Clemson added five. 2017 was a similar story. 33 recruits earned five-star status, and Alabama got six of them. Ohio State signed five. Only 12 schools signed any at all.
The recruiting disparity is significant across all levels of college football, with a group of about a dozen schools dwarfing the talent their peers bring in. In 2018, Ohio State signed 23 blue-chips (five and four star recruits). The entire Big Ten outside of the Buckeyes, Michigan, and Penn State signed only 21. Texas signed 19, Oklahoma had 13, and the rest of the Big 12 had 19. USC signed 17; the bottom eight recruiting schools in the Pac-12 signed 14.
And that’s all just in the power conferences. Most entire mid-major conferences typically sign one or so, tops.
And this is important, since this talent distribution basically decides who can win a title.
Recruiting rankings aren’t perfect, of course, but just like in the NBA, you aren’t winning a national title in college football without lots of elite players. And access to that talent isn’t even close to equal.
No college football team has won a title since the beginning of the BCS era without signing more blue-chip athletes than non-blue-chip athletes. That’s always going to be a small group of teams, and you can guess them without looking them up. Alabama. Ohio State. Georgia. USC. Clemson, these days.
Sure, that doesn’t mean those teams will win every game. And teams with plucky, under-recruited stars might upset those squads every once in a while. But at the end of the day, it’s the team with a roster full of stars that wins, and tons of those are crammed onto the same rosters. Just like the NBA.
This isn’t a new thing. College football has never had true parity.
This isn’t the NFL, with hard salary caps and a draft and rules to help ensure competitive balance. College football certainly wasn’t balanced when it birthed the sport, when Northeastern sportswriters and administrators would ignore any team more remote than Ann Arbor as ignorant brutes unworthy of being mentioned in the same air as Princeton and Yale.
It wasn’t true during World War II, when liberalized transfer rules allowed for schools to assemble super teams. It wasn’t true in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when a lack of scholarship limits allowed a few schools to sign classes of hundreds, in part just to keep them away from other teams. It wasn’t true in the late ‘80s, when the deregulation of television money flooded the industry and created tectonic shifts between the haves and have nots. And it was basically never true for schools outside of major conferences, locked out of bowl games with actual title stakes. Yes, BYU fans, I know about 1984. Okay, that was one time.
Since the times when the biggest recruiting battles involved the Chicago Maroons, the best prep players have gone to the biggest programs, the ones willing to spend the most money and who made the biggest investments, not with the underdogs.
So we pretty much already know who is going to win. Is that bad for the sport? You tell me.
So if you’re a fan of, like, 100-plus FBS programs, you’re probably never going to win a title. We can predict with a high degree of certainty, without even really studying the rosters, that the 2018 champ will come from one of the 10 best recruiting programs in the country.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons to care about all the other games, and if you’re a fan, you already know that. You know there’s weird, drunk, late-night Pac-12 football. You’ll want to see the unique adjustments teams make to compensate for talent deficiencies. You’ll care about the passion, bands, pageantry, and loads of fun football being played elsewhere. You can watch and love Arizona, Navy, and FAU, and loads of other programs, even if national titles aren’t realistic goals.
If parity over who might win the actual title is the most important thing to you, hey, I’m not going to tell you how to fan.
You’d probably love the NHL or the NFL. And that’s totally fine!
But if what Golden State is doing feels unrighteous or wrong on a deep level, don’t look under the hood of college football.
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