College Football 2023 Recap

Overshadowing Michigan’s victory over Washington to claim the 2023 national title, Nick Saban called it quits at Alabama, retiring after 17 years and 6 national titles at the school. Literally, Alabamans consider him to be the greatest human being who ever existed, Jesus Christ running a distant second. Some Alabamans, though, confused retirement with death, and they made the pilgrimage to Saban’s shrine on the Alabama campus and paid their respects with the dearly departed coach’s favorite snacks, namely Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies and Coca-Cola.

Alabama yesterday hired Saban’s replacement, poaching Washington’s coach Kalen DeBoer. This pick surprised a lot of people, myself included, as I believed Lane Kiffin would almost certainly take that job. I read that the Alabama faithful didn’t like Kiffin’s bachelorhood, and apparently he chases a lot of tail behind the scenes. That actually sounds about right to me.

Georgia defeated Florida State 63-3 in the Orange Bowl, the game that showed everybody that college football, as used to be, is over. No Florida State player could justify playing in that game because, I assume, it was rendered pointless by the move to the playoff system. I read somewhere that 26 Florida State players sat out of that game. With the move to a 12-team playoff next year, the bowl games are vestigial. I wonder how much longer those games will run on fumes before they shudder them.

Quinshon Judkins, the much balleyhooed Ole Miss halfback who had 1000-yard seasons the past two years, entered the transfer portal and moved to the greener NIL pastures at Ohio State. The scholarly community at Oxford is going to miss this student-athlete quite a lot, I bet. His scholarship was only eclipsed by his blocking ability.

All of it adds up to, again, big-time college football is now an obviously full-blown NFL minor league, and it is past time to spin off these football programs from the universities, to sever the connection. Keep the branding, but cut the financial connection, and stop forcing these players to enroll in school. They are not students by any reasonable definition of the term. They are professional athletes, and they ought to be recognized and treated as such. Drop the pretenses. Let’s be honest for once.