It's Time for Us To Trade The Pitch For The Gridiron Because This Is What We Do In America

On next pitch I’m ready for the chunk play by a quarterback, preferably one wearing orange and blue in Gainesville

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By Buddy Martin

GatorBaitMedia.com

OK, it’s time to get off the pitch and on the grass. Fall belongs to football season, not to that round ball everybody insists on calling it “the beautiful game” — beautiful being a stretch when the final score is 1-0 and half the stadium leaves not knowing whether to cheer or file a missing person’s report.

We already have The Beautiful Game here in America!

I’ll confess we got a little punch-drunk on World Cup fever there for a few weeks or minutes, same as everybody who suddenly became an expert on offside rules. And it left me wondering, out loud, in mixed company, whether college football ought to steal a page from soccer’s playbook. Maybe just consider this.

I still say bring back ties. I know, I know — somewhere a talk-radio host just choked on his coffee. But there’s real strategy in playing for a draw down the stretch of a rivalry game instead of stacking overtime after overtime until your third-string quarterback is throwing jump balls into the end zone at 1 a.m. 

It worked in the World Cup, nobody’s grandma had a heart attack over it, and it might spare us a few more late-November disasters that end with a kicker weeping into his helmet. Plus a little less wear and tear on bodies in this prolonged season.

Now the red-card idea for targeting — that one’s got a real pulse and the NCAA already flinched toward it without quite having the nerve to call it that. This season, a first-time targeting ejection no longer costs the guy the start of his next game — he’s right back out there the following week like nothing happened. Second offense costs him a half, third costs him a game. 

Although I think that’s fairer, the red-card crowd — gone for good, no grace period, no lawyer on retainer — still has a case to make.

Targeting is about somebody’s brain, not a style point, and if the sport wants to get serious about it, half-measures aren’t going to cut it. For now I’ll take it, however, after learning first-hand from a team physician the heightened level of technology now being used to monitor bodily functions in play.

So what else needs fixing before kickoff? Start with the playoff, because we always do, and because the people in charge spent all winter arguing about it like it was the Treaty of Versailles before landing exactly where common sense told them to land months ago: Still 12 teams, because the Big Ten and SEC couldn’t agree on 16 versus 24 and both went home mad. Every Power Four champ now gets an automatic bid, the top Group of Six champ tags along, and Notre Dame gets its usual golden-ticket treatment if it cracks the top 12 (NCAA.com). 

Twelve is probably the right number. Sixteen just means more 8-4 teams from leagues nobody can spell getting a participation trophy flight to a bowl site.

And speaking of teams that won’t be sweating a playoff bid — hello, Gators. Florida shoved Billy Napier out the door mid-season, handed the keys to Jon Sumrall fresh off a CFP trip with Tulane and is now bravely marketing a schedule that mercifully skips Alabama, LSU, Tennessee and Texas A&M, as if avoiding four bullies makes the rest of the SEC gentle. I mean, it just looks time-warped without seeing a Tennessee or an LSU on the schedule this season, although we gladly welcome  Auburn back. 

Coming off a 4-8 season, the smart money has Florida somewhere between 6-6 and 7-5, which in Gainesville currently qualifies as a laser show and a parade. More optimistic Gators see an 8-4 eight in their Way Too Early prognostications. Nobody in Vegas is booking Gators playoff futures, and nobody in the Swamp should be either — but hey, stranger things have happened, and Sumrall’s never had a losing debut season yet. That’s not a playoff case. That’s a Hail Mary with a nice résumé attached. What we all want to see at UF is a program on an upward trajectory that immediately lands us on a pathway back. And it feels like Sumrall is rapidly changing things in that direction.

Flaws and all, bring on college football — the great American game. It kicks off for real on Thursday, August 27, with the rest of the country piling on the following weekend, and Week 1 already looks like appointment television — Lane Kiffin’s Tiger Stadium premiere against Clemson, a triple-header out of Alabama and Atlanta, and Ohio State-Texas roasting in the Austin heat not long after. 

Soccer had its month in the sun. Now,  get off my TV — football’s back.