Since 1919

The Prairie News

Since 1919

The Prairie News

Since 1919

The Prairie News

Pick on someone your size

The Prairie.
The Prairie.

There is a new fad diet among the elite teams in college football: cupcakes. No, these cupcakes are not the frosting-covered morsels of fat and sugar wrapped in wax paper that mom made. These cupcakes are actually obviously out-matched teams taking on a Top 25 team on the Division I gridiron.

I love football. I love high school football, college and the NFL. If they play with a pigskin and helmets, I can’t get enough of it. I know I’m not the only one who enjoys America’s most popular sport. I, like so many other Americans love football when it is competitive, otherwise it’s just flat boring.

Good, competitive football usually happens when the talent on both sidelines is about the same. This happens the most in the NFL (probably why it’s the most popular professional sport) but not so much in Division I college football. There are two different divisions of Division I because the size of the schools is significantly different from the top level to the bottom. This leads to a drop off in talent from the upper tier to the lower one.

Savannah State, who is in the Football Championship Series, the lower division, didn’t score a point in the first two weeks of the season. Their opponents over the last two weeks, No. 19 Oklahoma State and No. 6 Florida State, who are in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the upper level, scored 139 combined points against the Tigers. Both OSU and FSU played Savannah as “warm-up” games before getting into their conference schedules.

While playing this warm-up game can be good for smaller schools, with all the attention and notoriety, it hurts the sport at the upper level. There is no benefit of two schools with the average enrollment of over 28,000 playing a school that is one-seventh the size.

Playing cupcakes is unnecessary. If a school wants to prove they are a football power, then they should play another football power.

This isn’t just a problem with Florida State and Oklahoma State; this diet is affecting all of college football. In the first two weeks of the season, there were only three games between Top 25 teams.

If teams want to play a warm up game as an exhibition match, fine. Just don’t waste my Saturday with terrible match-ups that will make me find out how good my recliner is for napping.

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