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The reigning NBA champion, Golden State Warriors, was amused and added Boogie Cousins, essentially completing the transition from their starting lineup to the Monstars. The incredibly rich has just become even richer, and everyone including the NBA players was quite angry.
How was it right? How can a team that has already won 73 games – with three stars before adding a fourth – can it add a fifth? How to allow so many talents to accumulate with a team? What about the competitive equilibrium?
Well, if this scenario makes you angry, college football might not be for you. Because this happens basically every year here.
Here's a simple comparison:
Depending on where you look, college football has about six or seven teams with these chances. Again, it's about 130 teams, not about 30.
The distribution of college football talent is not even close to equity.
There are 130 FBS programs. You know how many have signed a 5-star rookie in 2018? Just 10. Georgia had seven. Clemson added five. 2017 was a similar story. 33 rookies earned the status of five stars, and Alabama got six. Ohio State has signed five. Only 12 schools have signed it.
The disparity in recruitment is significant at all levels of college football, with a group of a dozen schools exceeding the talent of their peers. In 2018, Ohio State signed 23 blue-chips (five and four-star rookies). The entire Big Ten outside Buckeyes, Michigan and the Penn State only signed 21. Texas had signed 19, Oklahoma 13 and the rest of the Big 12 19. The USC signed 17; the last eight Pac-12 recruiting schools have signed 14.
And it's all right in power conferences. Most full mid-major conferences usually sign one or two, tops.
And it is important, since this distribution of talents in principle decides who can win a title.
The recruiting rankings are not perfect, of course, but as in the NBA, you do not win a national title at college football without a lot of elite players. And access to this talent is not even close to equality.
No college football team has won a title since the beginning of the BCS era without having signed more top-notch athletes than non-star athletes. This is always going to be a small group of teams, and you can guess them without looking at them. Alabama. State of Ohio. Georgia. USC. Clemson, these days.
Of course, that does not mean that these teams will win every game. And teams with courageous and under-recruited stars could disturb these teams from time to time. But at the end of the day, it's the team with a list of stars that wins, and tons of these are crammed into the same lists. Just like the NBA
This is not a new thing. College football has never had the same parity.
This is not the NFL, with severe salary caps and a draft and rules to help ensure competitive equilibrium. College football was certainly not balanced at the time of the sport's birth, while sports writers and Northeast administrators would ignore any team farther away than Ann Arbor as ignorant brutes unworthy of the sport. to be mentioned in the same tune as Princeton and Yale.
This was not true during the Second World War, when the liberalized transfer rules allowed schools to gather super teams. This was not true in the 50s and 60s, when a lack of scholarship limits allowed some schools to sign hundreds of courses, in part just to keep them away from other teams. This was not true in the late 1980s, when the deregulation of television money flooded the industry and created tectonic changes between the haves and the have-nots. And this was fundamentally never true for schools outside of major conferences, locked out of bowl games with real title challenges. Yes, BYU fans, I know about 1984. Okay, that was once.
Since the Chicago Maroons' biggest recruiting battles, the best players are preparing the biggest programs, the ones who are willing to spend the most money and who make the biggest investments, not the underdogs.
So we already know who will win. Is it bad for the sport? You tell me.
So, if you're a fan of over 100 FBS programs, you'll probably never win a title. We can predict with a high degree of certainty, without even really studying the lists, that the 2018 champion will come from one of the top 10 recruiting programs in the country.
But that does not mean that there is no reason to be interested in all the other games, and if you are a fan, you already know it. You know, there's weird, drunk Pac-12 football in the late evening. You will want to see the unique adjustments made by the teams to compensate for the lack of talent. You are interested in the pbadion, the groups, the pageantry and the funny football which is played elsewhere. You can watch and love Arizona, the Navy and the FAU, and plenty of other programs, even though national titles are not realistic goals.
If the parity on who could win the current title is the most important thing for you, hey, I'm not going to tell you how fan.
You would probably like the NHL or the NFL. And that's fine!
But if what Golden State does is unfair or bad at a deep level, do not look under the hood of college football.
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