Pride in Defeat: The rallying points conferences create in the postseason

A rather valiant effort from the battalion out of Madison. They gave the boys from Columbus the sort of scare and pre-battle scenario that tested their mettle and forced backs against walls. Yes sir, the quest to dig deep inside and find a reserve of fortitude to persevere and build up both the physical wherewithal and mental strength for bigger battles on grander scales with much larger consequences loom. With their eyes on the prize, Ryan’s boys look to buck national competition. Oh what a day.

Forgive the Winchell drop. 

College football bursts with conference pride leading into the College Football Playoff. The silliness and outlandish chest-thumping, opposed to subtle chest-thumping, hit a fever pitch Saturday night after Ohio State beat Wisconsin in the Big Ten Championship. 

“If you can’t beat em, join em” is the new, “I like my team. No, I really like my team. Your team is a pitiful experiment of the forward pass.” Fans want their intuitiveness rewarded through the season’s end, and not their season’s end, though we know Jacksonville is its most lovely in December. It’s not enough to watch Ohio State pistol whip Northwestern so fast that witnesses miss the butt of the weapon. Fans want the misery of their own team to payoff in any sort of positive transaction. And to think, this was the sort of stuff just from the SEC. 

The conference and the fervor it engenders, a sect impersonating a Robin Williams appearance on late night television, so much fun, but so much work and calamity and catastrophe in the name of football excellence, led the charge as the “If it’s good for the conference then it’s good for my team,” mantra. Then the 2019 season happened. 

People seem much prouder of the teams that beat their team and want to align themselves with the best. Maybe it’s a matter of calling one’s shot, but everyone watched the best, knows the best and understands, on an innate level, the difference between the first best and the fourth best, all made easiest by slotting and ranking for the College Football Playoff. If only it were a collection of twitter handles muddling mascots and numbers and some catchphrase said as an afterthought by a head coach doing all the politicking. 

The loudest trumpeters are often the most tone deaf and, picking inopportune times to give the playoff selection committee a piece of their mind.

Not all broadcasters are guilty of parading the conference flag across television sets by way of cherry-picked stats, but two of the more glaring instances came on Championship Saturday. 

Gary Danielson, a dyed-in-the-wool SEC advocate who would not be more at home if he could wear a suit coat with sponsor patches of Zaxby’s, Belk, and Dr. Pepper adorning each arm, used his time in front of a national audience to clamor for LSU to earn the number one seed. 

Fast forward to Saturday night on the National Buckeye Sports Network. Joel Klatt, in between spare moments when Gus Johnson challenged the bass on the noise meter, told the selection committee that Ohio State deserved the top seed. Conference arguments are now soldered onto the logo of television networks.

Fox for the Big Ten, ESPN and CBS for the SEC, GOD TV for Liberty. The noise runs together like one long extended live cut of a Dave Matthews Band instrumental that somehow incorporated three Tibetan Throat Singers and a didgeridoo. We couldn’t escape pleading and urging when a silly little thing like a conference championship took place in front of our own eyes. 

But, and like the good proctologist said, there’s always a but, for all the regurgitated stats in both narrative and list form, Paul Finebaum’s ban from the Mormon Church, and the bickering and backbiting, it’s good for the sport. 

The stupidity of the arguments, from finding one team ranked in the top 25 in the coach’s poll to one in the AP Top 25 for the sake of an argument kept the conversation going. College football sustained itself on the jockeying for playoff position when it failed to matter outside of the final week of the regular season. 

But there’s value in the conversation, silly and arbitrary as it may be. People can decry the change in conversation in that it’s now solely about the playoff and secondarily about the bowl games themselves, but the talk is more passionate, people are more invested because they want to be right and vindicated by a final score either through the transitive property of their team losing to the national champion or their sharp-eyed scouting that called a particular conference foe the best team in the country two Saturday’s before you learned how to spell the head coach’s name. 

None of it mattered, but it was all good for the sport. Beauty and bounty in the blather.