The Day The Music Died, Again
By Buddy Martin
The music of college football officially died this week.
Here we go again, killing me softly.
The first Day the Music Died came on February 3, 1959. That night a small airplane crashed in a cornfield near Clear Lake, Iowa, killing everyone on board:
Buddy Holly, age 22
Ritchie Valens, age 17
J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, age 28
Roger Peterson, age 21, the pilot
They were touring the frozen Midwest on the "Winter Dance Party" tour and chartered the flight to escape an unheated bus. Not long after takeoff, in lousy weather, the pilot lost the plane. The tragedy was immortalized by Don McLean in his 1971 classic, "American Pie."
And here it is again, 67 years later. For those of us who love college football — and music — this has been a traumatic experience. Some of us are having a full-on attack of PTSD.
The College Football Playoff and ESPN have agreed on a five-year, nearly $1.7 billion deal that will expand the field to 24 teams in 2027 with ESPN as its continued broadcast partner — a so-called "seismic move" that also eliminates the lucrative Power 4 conference championship games.
Congratulations! College football has officially eaten its young.
Imagine if Major League Baseball had killed its pennant races.
Are the four majors in golf still the same, or did the British Open and the PGA fold into LIV?
At least when the NFL did away with its conference championship structure, it gave us the Super Bowl. What made the NFL was the fierce rivalry that brought about the AFL-NFL merger and Joe Namath.
The NFL had a vision and a great commissioner in Pete Rozelle. Say what you want about Pete — I knew him a little — the man could see around corners.
I'm not sure college football has a clue about its future. When you completely wipe out an event that was supreme for 35 years and raised the level of play everywhere, how could anybody with a functioning brainstem construe that as healthy for the game?
The dinosaurs are gone now, and college football isn't feeling so good itself.
A shortcut to oblivion?
"I'm just going to find a woman who hates me and buy her a house!"
— Lewis Grizzard, on shortcut solutions
Some people are so sad they can't talk about it. This is where the truth sometimes comes out on Twitter X, when people have a complete meltdown and lower the boom with their words.
Ding dong! The king is dead!
The Twitter X meltdown — pick one
@gridiron_grim
College football's NASCAR moment. Fans made their voices heard that they didn't want this, TV ratings went down in anticipation of it, and the suits decided to move forward anyway.
@rules_analyst
It remains one of the most ridiculous things in sports that the company holding a broadcast deal with a conference also gets to create the playoff format and pick and choose the teams it wants in that format.
@cutthe_cord
ESPN has built a monopoly of epic proportions. All those communities large and small that hosted bowl games and conference championships lose the added revenue and the excitement. Regular-season games mean less. ESPN gets the whole bag. Monopolies only benefit the entity that monopolizes.
@buddymartinshow — me
For 35 years the gem of all of college football, now smashed to smithereens with only the poopy dust left as a remnant. Take a bow, ESPN! You blood-sucking parasite. And demonic Unabomber.
Thirty-five years. Atlanta in December. The Georgia Dome and then Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The SEC Championship Game was the one weekend a year the conference stood up on its hind legs and settled it on the field — the game that gave us Tebow, and the Tebow Speech, and the 2011 rematch, and a hundred afternoons that mattered more in December than most games matter in November.
Now it's gone, because a suit in Bristol decided December television inventory was redundant.
Sometimes I hate Twitter X. Today I love you, Twitter X. Bring it!
Somebody ought to tell Bristol, Connecticut.
So who will be the first 4 loss team to get in the playoff next year?