FBS (i.e., D-1) has 4 times the number of teams than the NFL.  Starters turn over every couple years and entire teams turn over every 4-5 years.  Most teams have been playing football > 100 years, whereas teams in the NFL have varying tenures, but most are < 1/2 that of a typical FBS school.

That all serves to makes the world of what there is to know about college football a thousand times bigger than pro football.  Most big NFL guys can name the starting QB of every team in the NFL.  I can’t even name the starting QB for every team in the Big 12 (who is the QB at ISU??)  The NFL is know-able; college football is not.  To know the NFL is like having read every Harry Potter book.  To know college football is like having read all of Wikipedia.

I watch every College Gameday, listen to several podcasts, read several pre-season mags, read every article on college football in the DMN, Houston Chronicle and Austin-American Statesman and most articles on ESPN.com.  I read books about the history of college football.  But the more I learn the more I realize I don’t know.  It isn’t know-able.  Every conversation I have on the subject has the potential to be enlightnening.

This sheer size of college football is reason #5 I love it.  It is the same reason I love shows with big ensemble casts and numerous story arcs (LOST and The Wire come to mind.)  I suppose that it is also a reason I love poker.  No matter how many hands I play, shows I watch or books I read, the only thing I ever become more confident that I know is that there is a lot more out there to know.

That may not have been a reason you anticipated me giving, but that’s it.

Are you ready for some football???

I like Fantasy Football.

I think insurance is a good idea to protect your assets.

I never thought I would see fantasy football insurance.

I am mad I didn’t think of it.

Reason #4 I love college football: I am a snob.

I went to a Cowboys game last season, and I noticed some significant difference between the NFL crowd and a typical NCAA crowd. There was significantly more tattoos, obesity, mullets, obscenity, cigarettes and general idiocracy than I see at college games. The reason is obvious: anybody can root for a pro team, but the people that attend college games overwhelmingly went to college. That serves as a bit of a filter for the riff raff.

Did I mention I am a snob?

I am very uncomfortable spending time with the dumber 95% of America. I can never make conversation, and I find myself obsessed with trying to count their teeth. Since the teeth are so rare, counting would be easy, but the tobacco stains can make one seem to disappear.

The whole experience caters to the light on the brains, easy to entertain crowd. There are no fight songs are clever cheers. It is just “Here we go, Steelers, here we go.” and “D – FENCE; D – FENCE” and of course lots of flashing lights on the scoreboard.

Everything about the game day experience at a university is catered to a more sophisticated audience. That isn’t to say that you are an idiot if you like the NFL. On the contrary. Tens of thousands of people at DKR-TMS are also fans of the Cowboys or Texans. But they make up a minority of the fans of those teams.

So there you have it. I am a snob, and I like hanging out with people of a certain calibre, even if it is at an event where we guzzle beer, eat dead animals that have been cooked by fire and scream at young men to knock each other’s brains out.

This hand isn’t all that interesting (it is your standard draw-out followed by a re-draw-out), but it serves as an excellent example of a bad poker habit.  Here is the hand:

Seat 2: phreaux (2183 in chips)
Seat 3: newsimi1 (3835 in chips)
Seat 4: skipp108 (1720 in chips)
Seat 5: StephenFP (730 in chips)
Seat 7: Mogsa2009 (2302 in chips)
Seat 8: KathiHH (2285 in chips)
Seat 9: skylover2 (1945 in chips)

phreaux: posts the ante 15
newsimi1: posts the ante 15
skipp108: posts the ante 15
StephenFP: posts the ante 15
Mogsa2009: posts the ante 15
KathiHH: posts the ante 15
skylover2: posts the ante 15
StephenFP: posts small blind 75
Mogsa2009: posts big blind 150

*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to phreaux [Ad Ks]
KathiHH: calls 150
skylover2: folds
phreaux: calls 150
newsimi1: folds
skipp108: folds
StephenFP: folds
Mogsa2009: checks

*** FLOP *** [4h Ah Jd]
Mogsa2009: checks
KathiHH: checks
phreaux: bets 280
Mogsa2009: calls 280
KathiHH: folds

*** TURN *** [4h Ah Jd] [Kh]
Mogsa2009: checks
phreaux: checks

*** RIVER *** [4h Ah Jd Kh] [Kd]
Mogsa2009: bets 1857 and is all-in
phreaux: calls 1738 and is all-in
Uncalled bet (119) returned to Mogsa2009

*** SHOW DOWN ***
Mogsa2009: shows [7h 5h] (a flush, Ace high)
phreaux: shows [Ad Ks] (a full house, Kings full of Aces)
phreaux collected 4666 from pot

—————————————————————–
Mogsa2009 made a terrible mistake, one that we all make from time to time. In short, he made a bet that would only get calls hands that beat him and folds from those that don’t.

Any boat would call. A lower flush or worse would fold. That leaves higher flushes. A higher flush is probably 50/50 on call/fold, but that misses a very important point: It is unfathomable to me that a higher flush would have bet the flop and checked the turn.

His hand was too weak and his bet too big to call this a value bet. His all-in bet on the river should only be done to get a fold from a better hand, which it won’t do.

But his thought process was probably, “I’ve got a flush. Flushes are good. I should bet.”

I think we all make this mistake from time to time (I do.) Win or lose, I like to do post-mortems on hands in my mind. I’d say that about once every session I realize that I made the same mistake Mogsa did here (fortunatly, when it results in getting a fold from a hand I beat, it doesn’t cost anything). I observe other players – good players – do it all the time, too. Certain poker mistakes draw ridicule (drawing without proper odds comes to mind), but this one rarely does. I think it should.

Here is reason number two I love college football: the lack of an annual clear-cut champion.

I expect people to disagree with me here.

Most sports in America have a clear-cut, single national champion at the end of the season. Individual sports in America do not always work this way. For instance, golf could have four guys win each of the four majors. A fifth guy could be the money leader. Sports outside of America also do not always have a single champion. For instance, in England, you can have a league champion, a national cup champion, a league cup champion be three different teams. You could have two other teams in your league win the two European cups: EUFA and Champion’s League. In theory, five teams could end the season with bragging rights. Of course, not all five accomplishments are equally impressive. It’s nuanced. I like nuance; most people don’t.

Such nuance has two advantages: 1) it keeps a team from being labeled the undisputed champion when it didn’t perform well enough to deserve it and 2) it makes rare the years when a team leaves no doubt in anybody’s mind who the best team was. I like the fact that there is an asterisk in people’s minds on LSU and USC in 2003. Neither went undefeated, so I would not like for them to be put on an equal pedestal as, say, the 1992 Crimson Tide or the 1995 Cornhuskers. The system doesn’t force us to believe that they deserve to be on that pedestal, and I like that.  It cheapens LSU’s and USC’s accomplishment (appropriately so) and, more importantly, it doesn’t cheapen Nebraska’s or Alabama’s.

And reason number three that I love college football is big non-conference games.

The current system rewards teams for scheduling tough out of conference games…as long as you win them. Since teams are afraid of losing them, they tend to shy away from them. So we don’t get that many good ones. Which is why I like them! That is, they are rare, which makes them a real treat when they happen. UT-Ohio State in 2005 and 2006 were gems. Remember FSU-Notre Dame in 1993? What about UCLA-Miami in 1998? In some sports, these things happen too often (damn inter-league play!) and in others (NCAA basketball), you get some goodies on paper but since losing rarely has much of any impact on your national championship chances, the games just aren’t as compelling. But in college football, the big game against teams from different leagues 1) is rare* and 2) contains high stakes. And that is another reason I love college football.

*Many rivalries such as OU-UT and FSU-Miami were annually non-conference big games that only ceased to be so because they joined the same conference. We still get the games, the teams just no longer get credit for having the balls to schedule a tough non-conference opponent.

I love college football.  I really, really love college football.  I am absolutely giddy every August, and I go into a terrible funk every January. 

It’s August.

There are many reasons I love college football, most of which are shared by other college football enthusiasts.  I like college football for some other reasons shared by few, including what I wanted to write about today: parity and the lack thereof.

College football lacks much of anything resembling what is commonly referred to as “parity”, and I love that.  People often assert that parity is good for a sport in a way that suggests it is just an inarguable fact.  I will argue with that assertion because I believe it is not a fact. 

There is a belief that parity makes a sport more popular since “anything can happen” (on “any given Sunday” for one league).  This ignores, as most American sports myths do, the fact that the most popular sport on the planet, soccer, is the antithesis of parity.  Man U and Real Madrid and Arsenal have advantages over teams such as Aberdeen FC and Wigan Athletic that you simply can’t imagine.  Compare that to baseeball, a sport with more parity than soccer (but of course quite a bit less than NFL).  The Tampa Bay Devil Rays made a run at the World Series while the Yankees stayed home.  That’s rare in baseball and makes for an interesting story, but it is unheard of in soccer.  A chump soccer team may pull off an upset here or there, but a chump soccer team never pulls off enough upsets to seriously contend for the league or a major cup.  No parity in soccer, but boy howdy is soccer popular (that is, in every country but this one).  So, phooey to the “fact” that parity is good for a sport.

Why isn’t parity good for a sport?  I think there are two reasons. 

First of all, parity (in the common usage of the word) taken to the extreme would mean equality (that is, all teams are entirely of equal caliber.) In such a league, all games and all championships would be won entirely by luck.  Imagine a poker tournament in which there were 6,494 clones of Phil Ivey playing each other.  The winner would be determined entirely by luck.  Of course this is an abstract that is absurd, but it proves a point: the closer you move toward equality, the less skill determines (and the more luck determines) the winner.  Nobody wants that.  We want to believe that our winners are the beneficiaries of their superior talent and hard work, not that they just won more coin tosses than the next guy.  When you see Florida walk off the field after hanging an obscene score on Citadel, you might think it is unsportsmanlike and silly, but you never for a second wonder if Citadel was really the better team.  We like to have just enough parity to promise that the outcome of a game is not predetermined, but not much more.  We want to know who is the best and who is the rest.  And honestly, it is healthy for the sport.  You might think that supporters of the rest would lose interest facing such bleak prospects of ever being the best.  But this doesn’t bear out.  If it did, Texas Tech and South Carolina would stop selling tickets.  They sell out their games, and their fans cheer their asses off.

The second reason that I prefer a lack of parity is that an upset really means something when there is little parity.  When the New York Football Giants beat New England in the Super Bowl, it was considered a very big upset by NFL standards.  Really?  The Giants?  I recall you could win something like 3 to 1 on your money.  Not that big of an upset compared to college football standards.  Appalachian State over Michigan?  Arizona State over Nebraska (96)?  Now those are upsets.  I doubt Vegas offered odds on those games, but it would have been well over 10 to 1 if they did.  So just as you don’t want to much parity so as to render then competition just a game of luck, you don’t want there to be so little parity that there are no upsets.  The upset is one of the most exciting things in sport, but if it happens to often, it gets cheapened.  I think it does not happen so often in college football that it has been cheapened

Keep in mind that even in college football, you can rise from the have-nots to the haves.  Take Kansas State who had the worst record in all of D-1 for a decade only to become one of the best teams in college football (and one that might have won a championship if not for A&M pulling off…..an upset!)  So it isn’t as if the lack of parity leads to no hope on the part of the have-nots.  Look at the enthusiasm in Lubbock last year after they beat UT and Oklahoma State.  They had hope.  Hope is an essential part of being a fan.  You have hope in college football.  The fact that the hope is slim isn’t important, just as long as there is hope.

The myth that parity is good for fan interest and therefore good for business persists due to a common yet bad comparison: that of MLB to NFL.  Correlation is not causation.  It’s like pointing out that Junell is fat and I am skinny and then asserting that this is proof positive that being fat causes you to smooth call with bad hands more often than being skinny does.  There is a long list of reasons the NFL does better than MLB, but parity is not one of them.  Parity is bad for fans.  You want teams to have a chance, but sports are most interesting when each team’s chances are vastly different.

As we move closer to the season, I’ll offer a few other thoughts on why I love college football (I have five), but I wanted to start with this one because I don’t think it is one (like, say, the BCS) for which people have such strong preconceived notions that nothing I could write will ever alter their thinking.

Hook em.