Less than a decade ago, Alabama was an SEC afterthought, as sanctions had slowly worn down the proud program. Now they are defending national champions, remain loaded, and will be ranked No. 1 until someone takes down the champs.
Meanwhile, my alma mater finds itself in another stage in the cycle of life. USC sits at AP No. 14, and it is telling that upon learning that, I wondered why we were ranked so high.
Relax — this isn't a homer article about how USC got screwed with the NCAA punishment leaving them out 10 scholarships a year for three years and bowl-less for two.
But it is an article about the realities of college football from a fan perspective. During my four-year college tenure, I attended 24 home games without seeing a loss. USC lost four games total. I don't get to complain about how all of this went down considering how fun the last seven years have been. And again, look at Alabama. Teams come back from these things, especially programs that have the kind of cache of USC or Alabama.
The truly universal realities of college football are that: 1) college football is still, more or less, an amateur affair that generates a ton of money, and 2) to fans, they are about winning, and winning in the present. Teams are playing for high stakes.
TCU has turned a few great seasons into a forthcoming major stadium upgrade and increased stature. In the same metropolitan area, SMU is still trying to recover from being a joke of a program after its death penalty ... one issued over two decades ago. Once-average SEC team LSU has been one of the 10 or so biggest monster programs in the country over the last decade. One-time powerhouse Michigan is a punchline. Boise State is a national brand. Colorado and Kansas State had become Big Eight/12 giants as we started the century, and now both languish. And those swings are generally accompanied by a shifting of massive stacks of money among athletic programs.
But that's nothing compared to the money flying around the NFL. And after USC was hammered largely for a wannabe agent (looking for a cut of said money) handing Reggie Bush and his family improper benefits, North Carolina came under fire, as well. Dez Bryant's suspension is also still fresh in our minds. Stories of agents flying players down to parties in Miami surfaced. And the idea that this started with USC and Bush is pretty laughable, considering Yahoo!, not the NCAA, broke the Bush story, and that it possibly never would have been broken if Bush and said wannabe agent didn't have a falling out over the money. This is not a difficult thing to keep under wraps.
I've said in the past that dealing with agents is a large part of the problem. And the NCAA can't really touch those. But the NCAA is actually starting to deal with the problem a bit more aggressively, and more importantly, often dealing with the players directly rather than merely putting it on the tab of their babysitter — I mean institutions. Will they ever clean the sport completely? No. But they can make progress by being smarter, more aggressive, and heavy-handed with punishments.
But again, this is a fan site and an article from a fan perspective. So while everyone tries to sort this out, what is the USC, the early-decade Alabama fan supposed to do? USC fans care more about the future (scholarships lost/bowl bans, for example) than any vanquished wins. Fill your team's name in the blank, and except for the fact that USC has been caught/punished; the rest of the fan mentality generally rings true. I was at the 2005 Orange Bowl. I know what happened, and the NCAA can't try to explain that it didn't happen, or that Bush's family's rent being paid by an agent after he was already at USC helped the Trojans dismantle Oklahoma. Your fan base wouldn't react much differently to the same circumstances.
Personally, I'm going to kind of enjoy going in as a relative underdog. I even wish the Trojans had been ranked lower; with injuries, scholarship depletions, transfers, last year's four-loss season, and Pete Carroll's departure, you could make quite an argument. Not many fans of favorites admit this, but there is something to be said for the euphoria of winning a game you aren't just supposed to. When you are supposed to win 10 or so games decisively each year and are still favored in the other two, you kind of lose something from the thrill of victory.
In other words, enjoy, Alabama fans. You're first loss will be a heart-wrenching disappointment. Heaven help you if you lose twice; we'll have suicide watch on speed-dial. And enjoy being universally hated through the entire process. So there.
Oh, who am I kidding? Not a fan in the country wouldn't prefer the chance to play for a national title. Like most USC fans, I'm going to keep rooting hard for my team, hope for the best this season, and yes, even try to enjoy the fact that we might actually win a game or two we aren't supposed to, and even finish higher than expected.
You might have noticed how my article on NCAA governance and sanctions turned into an article about winning and losing, glory and despair, jealousy and schadenfreude. Believe it or not, I didn't accidentally forget about basic principles of article cohesion; it was on purpose. In the end, winning is what the fans really care about, and we tend to live in the present (except Notre Dame fans, and in fairness, we understand why they live in the past). At our core, most of us believe in doing the right thing and winning the right way. And we should care how our teams win as much as whether they win. And this isn't an article about USC.
But in reality, USC fans, while we'll take our medicine from an imperfect punishment within an imperfect system, aren't going to forget that we had one of the best runs in recent history. We know what happened, and we gleefully went along for the ride. As it is for any other program that has ever been punished. USC fans didn't willfully ignore Bush's finances or associates. We just rooted for the team wearing our colors. Why should we turn in our enjoyment of those seasons, how much those moments meant to us at the time in the same way the athletic department chose to return the copy of Bush's Heisman that had been sitting in Heritage Hall?
Hopefully, the NCAA can figure out how to run this mess better, so that shady dealings aren't synonymous with college football. Of course, with the stakes where they are, surely there will be other ways blood-suckers will try to get a share of the pie. Whatever happens, though, fans will just do what they always do, really all they can do: live and die by how many games their team can win. Because there isn't much else a fan can do.
In other words, thank goodness games start next week and we can start talking about actual football.
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