It’s a question I get asked. A lot. I get it from friends, family, acquaintances. I used to get it from co-workers. I’ve gotten it from people I interact with in various internet fora. And the core question, the key point which people seem to want to hammer on as if it’s the most relevant question in the world, is this:

Why would anyone want to watch those guys play. They’re nowhere near as competitive as BCS-level conferences.

Before I start ranting (and I’m going to rant, let’s be clear on this), I’ll let you stare at that sentence for a moment. Is it something you’ve thought yourself? Does it make sense to you? Do you find that to be a perfectly rational assessment of the importance of college athletics outside the Big Money cabal?

Well — and, truly, I mean no offense when I say this, and besides offending you would be sort of counter-productive — you’re wrong. Not only are you wrong, but you are illogical, and perhaps even hypocritical. It’s okay. It’s not your fault. Nobody’s pointed out the obvious flaw in the argument.

If we only watch, or care about, sports because of the quality of play or the level of athleticism or out of a desire to watch the best and the brightest, then there’s no reason on earth to ever watch a football game that isn’t played on Sunday (or Monday night). And there’s no reason to watch a basketball game that isn’t being contested by millionaire man-children.

Think about it. Every one of you who spends your fall Saturdays glued to the television devouring SEC football? You’re watching an inferior product. You’re not watching the greatest football players on earth; for that, you need to wait a day. When you fill out your 68-team bracket in mid-March and then settle in for four solid days of basketball and cinderella slippers and the dulcet tones of Jim Nantz (and the much more entertaining voice of Gus Johnson)… well, sorry, but that’s not the NBA, now is it? Hell, it’s not even Euroleague.

I can understand the argument that it’s different; after all, BCS level football is the “best” thing to watch on a fall Saturday. If they played it on Sunday, maybe you wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about the SEC either. Maybe if March Madness took place at the same time as the NBA finals, you wouldn’t bother with it. Maybe.

But I think you probably would anyway, because there’s a reason we love college sports which has not one damned thing to do with the quality of play. It’s because we love the tradition, because we feed on the rivalries, because these kids aren’t overgrown infants who can’t manage to survive on 12 million bucks a year. Well, mostly. We shake our heads and sigh over the antics of five-star recruits who are just marking time until draft day, don’t we? We all roll our eyes at the very concept of “amateurism” at the highest level of college athletics, knowing full well that the elite athletes in Division I are probably already managing to get more cash under the table than some of us make in a year.

Not really true once you get past the blue-chip athletes, though. If you have any love for the kid who plays because he loves the game… the guys the NCAA likes to point out will be turning pro in something other than athletics… well, how can you not care about Those Other Guys?

In the end, though, three things really do stick out for me, and in return for all the questions I get asked, I have three in return:

1] You got kids? They in high school? If not, you plan on it? Stop and think for a moment. Do you think for one minute that watching your kid play… hell, even Little League baseball isn’t going to be more important to you than whatever the hell Florida State’s up to this week? Yes, sure, it’s different because you’re emotionally invested.

Still doesn’t change the fact that Amherst would absolutely wipe the freakin’ grass with the blood and organs of your kid’s high school team. If you can find something (filial love) to make watching high school football enjoyable, there’s no reason you can’t find a reason to care about that little college 10 miles away that you’ve been ignoring for years.

2] Would you really rather watch something brutally embarrassing like your average BCS-conference bottom feeder game than watch Northwest Missouri State and Central Missouri smash into each other for the MIAA title? Sure, the last-place team in the ACC has better athletes, on the whole, than the best Division II team. But which of those two games do you honestly think is going to be a better football game?

3] Another argument I get hit with often is one of the most ludicrous piles of steaming dung I can even remotely begin to imagine. Here’s the thought process, the sort of comment one might make while operating under this ridiculous mindset: “Yeah, 1500 people showed up for the game, must not matter.” I’m just going to come right out and be offensive in response to that paradigm. If your worldview is such that you can’t be bothered with something unless 100,000 people are willing and able to buy tickets and another few hundred thousand will watch it on television… well, that says more about you than it does about any college football team. Don’t let me hear you making comments about the vacuous hivemind that allows Justin Bieber to become wealthy, because you’re no damned different.

Never mind that the reasons why Michigan State has a 75,000 seat stadium that they can sell out every Saturday while Albion racks up 5,000 warm bodies for a sellout have nothing whatsoever to do with the product on the football field, and everything to do with alumni base, endowments, and revenue. Michigan State is, was, and always has been a larger school than Albion.  The size of the Spartan alumni base (and the resulting familial ties from daddy teaching his kids to be Spartans) is, over time, exponentially outstripping Albion’s.  And with that, the gulf between financial contributions of the respective alumni bases becomes wider and wider.

But did you know that they were once in the same conference together? Albion even beat them 79-0 one year, and at no point could one claim that the Spartans “owned” the Scots.

Michigan State conveniently neglects to report that game in their official archives, by the way. It’s “missing”. This is the sort of thing I want y’all to know about, and to understand.

Anyway, the point is: feeling superior because your school’s bigger and has more money? Yeah, congratulations, champ. You probably also root for the New York Yankees, Manchester United, Los Angeles Lakers, Halliburton, Exxon, ESPN, bacteria, and the heat death of the universe.

(By the way, don’t you think that something ESPN summarily ignores is potentially worth your attention on general principle?)

/rantoff

I’m not trying to argue that “lower” division sports are “better”. To be sure, they have their superior points, but for every Northwest Missouri State-Central Missouri game, you’ve admittedly also got a colossal clusterfuck of a snoozefest somewhere between teams that can’t even manage to avoid losing nine games against Division III competition. Every level of competition has its haves and have-nots.  D-II, D-III, NAIA… they’re not “better” than BCS-level athletics.  They’re just different.  They’ve got different administrative rules, they’re designed to operate on a much smaller scale financially.  With D-III, they’re even designed to represent the “original” intention of collegiate athletics (that is, people who go to the school choosing to represent the school athletically, rather than people going to the school for the express purpose of representing the school athletically).

I’m also not trying to trumpet any superiority, moral or otherwise. I went to Kansas State, and I live and die by my evil BCS-conference team’s performance; if K-State’s playing, my TV isn’t sitting on a channel showing the rare Division II game. And that’s not what I’m asking of you, either. I have no problem with you having your team, and holding them and loving them and squeezing them and calling them George. I do the same thing.

No, if there’s one thing I can accomplish with this site, it will be to get people to respect the smaller programs. This isn’t the same battle as trying to get people to show some love to the Sun Belt or the MAC; a worthy goal, I’ll still insist, but largely beside the point. You can have bad football despite all your advantages… and you can have some damned good football despite never being able to get a whiff of a blue-chip prospect. If I can get just people to stop making comments like “man, Western Kentucky should move to Division III”*, I’ll call it a win… because that sort of comment is an insult to Division III (no offense to the Hilltoppers intended). It’s the sort of comment which belies an absolute and indisputable lack of understanding of… well, pretty much anything relevant to college athletics.

Lastly… look, it’s not sexy and it’s not always pretty, but it’s fun. Get to know these schools, and you expand your expertise. Maybe some guy gets hired out of Grand Valley State to be an assistant at your school, and you actually know something about him. Perhaps you’ll see a kid tearing up the Iowa Conference and realize that his brother is your team’s starting middle linebacker. You’ve got a local high school, maybe you follow them… and some of those kids aren’t going to be getting FBS scholarships. It’s worth knowing about. You don’t need to become an expert.

And after all the ranty vituperation above, I’ll turn around and give the Royal You some credit; I don’t think it’s really that you just don’t give a shit. As someone said to me the other day, “I just don’t know where to start.” That’s actually a completely valid thing. You follow the BCS conferences, you’ve only got 66 schools to keep track of. FBS, that’s 120. Well, there’s almost 250 football schools in Division III (and almost 450 basketball schools). It’s a lot.

That’s what I’m here for. To try and give you some basis for being able to follow the non-FBS schools without having to become an expert.

* – For reasons having nothing to do with budgetary issues, at any rate. Suggesting a financially-strapped athletic program downgrade to non-scholarship sports is perfectly acceptable; Birmingham-Southern, Centenary, and New Orleans have all done so in the last few years. Suggesting they do so because they suck, on the other hand, is not.