The Old Days. Kinda miss it

#1
ptcarter

ptcarter

Boomshanka! (Google that)
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#1
A Sunday morning 2nd cup of coffee daydream, offseason thingy.

I know this'll bring some heat. There are those that want to keep adding teams to the SEC. NIL has changed the landscape and I get it. It'll never morph back to what it was.
It was kinda sweet to wake up on New years Day, suffer through the Rose Bowl parade and get the kickoff for the big bowl games, Cotton, Rose, Orange, Sugar and the others, and wake up on Jan 2 with the season over. Who remembers the 10 team SEC? I'm 68, so dang - seems like yesterday and a hundred years ago at the same time. Oh, and stay off my lawn - don't disturb me as I watch Ed Sullivan reruns.

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#6
#6
While I rather detest some of the SEC expansions (Missouri lol)-I have to admit, I do kinda like the "extended" college season.

Any day I wake up with a CFB game on that night is a good day for me at this point.
 
#7
#7
volfanbill said:
Man I miss that intense rivalry with Sewanee University of the South. What a rivalry that was
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Is it true Georgia Tech was SEC football champion more than the combined number of Kentucky, Vandy, USC, Missouri, and Mississippi State? With the endless merry-go-round of conferences, could you ever see the day the SEC invited them back in if the conference went to 22 or 24 colleges?
 
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#9
#9
HeavenUniversity said:
Is it true Georgia Tech was SEC football champion more than the combined number of Kentucky, Vandy, USC, Missouri, and Mississippi State? With the endless merry-go-round of conferences, could you ever see the day the SEC invited them back in if the conference went to 22 or 24 colleges?
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Tulane has 3 and GT has 5.

Kentucky has 2 and Mississippi State has 1. Vandy, Arky, USCe, Mizzou, aTm, and obviously Texas and OU have goose eggs. But obviously minus Vandy, those 0-fer schools are not long time members and have conference championships elsewhere
 
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#10
#10
volfanbill said:
Tulane has 3 and GT has 5.

Kentucky has 2 and Mississippi State has 1. Vandy, Arky, USCe, Mizzou, aTm, and obviously Texas and OU have goose eggs. But obviously minus Vandy, those 0-fer schools are not long time members and have conference championships elsewhere
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One of my complaints about adding even more teams to the SEC is conference championships (obviously) are harder to win. It's been a minute since we suited up in Atlanta for the SEC championship game. It'd be nice to do that again.

Edit: Will Nashville ever host the SECCG? I haven't followed that thread if one exists. I'm still living in 1972.
 
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#13
#13
ptcarter said:
One of my complaints about adding even more teams to the SEC is conference championships (obviously) are harder to win. It's been a minute since we suited up in Atlanta for the SEC championship game. It'd be nice to do that again.

Edit: Will Nashville ever host the SECCG? I haven't followed that thread if one exists. I'm still living in 1972.
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the contract with ATL goes through '31
 
#14
#14
Nah, I feel ya. I'm partial to either the 10 or 12 team SEC era, in particular the 1980s and 1990s. Those were the best years. The sport was fairly popular, and the Supreme Court let them broadcast games on TV, but it hadn't yet become over-commercialized crap, controlled by giant media corporations (read - ESPN, etc). It was becoming accessible but wasn't a completely whored out corporate product like it is now.

And the games just felt more like shared experiences back then. People weren't all glued to phones doing whatever they wanted. Everyone was in the stadium together, cut off from the outside world, brought together solely to experience the game and everything about it. Not every game needed TV timeouts or stupid men in red hats - in fact most didn't. Kickoffs weren't all determined by global media. Everyone in the stadium hung on every scoreboard update for other big SEC games - hearing the murmers and shouts ripple across crowds as other games scores "progressed" during Tennessee's games was really something else. Bobby Denton saying "Here is a score of interest" and everyone would stop and listen. Oh sure you had guys with the fancy headsets and radios, and they were listening to John Ward (and later Kesling, for a while), but for the most part it was purer and more genuine.

And you're right about New Year's Day. That used to be THE day. Like a second Christmas every year. What a day it was. But like everything else, the sports media conglomerates want to wring every dollar out of the thing. So no more of that.

Once corporations sink their fangs into something, and buy their way into owning it - once the goal becomes slapping a sales receipt on every interaction and every minute of the experience - grassroots local things like college football are hollowed out. Buying up people's relationships with something special, changing them, manipulating them, and selling what's left back to fans, piece by piece. Which brings us back to 16 team conferences and whatever idiotic things they do next. Complete with the flapping heads in sports media gushing about how "it's making the sport better." Which of course they'll say, because they want their paychecks too.
 
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#15
#15
HeavenUniversity said:
Is it true Georgia Tech was SEC football champion more than the combined number of Kentucky, Vandy, USC, Missouri, and Mississippi State? With the endless merry-go-round of conferences, could you ever see the day the SEC invited them back in if the conference went to 22 or 24 colleges?
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Will never happen-for a litany of reasons.

Purely for football reasons-Georgia would block it. They like their fairly easy win 9 UT of 10 years and do not want Tech to get any more than the bare minimum of oxygen

Long standing issues between Tech and Bama

Then you get into the bigger reasons that Tech no longer wants to be a football school
 
#18
#18
As much complaining as we do about college football these days, the numbers would suggest 1) that is a minority position or 2) even if it isn't people are watching anyway.

By virtually every measure, the sport has never been more popular and drawn more interest and engagement.
 
#20
#20
Voltopia said:
Nah, I feel ya. I'm partial to either the 10 or 12 team SEC era, in particular the 1980s and 1990s. Those were the best years. The sport was fairly popular, and the Supreme Court let them broadcast games on TV, but it hadn't yet become over-commercialized crap, controlled by giant media corporations (read - ESPN, etc). It was becoming accessible but wasn't a completely whored out corporate product like it is now.

And the games just felt more like shared experiences back then. People weren't all glued to phones doing whatever they wanted. Everyone was in the stadium together, cut off from the outside world, brought together solely to experience the game and everything about it. Not every game needed TV timeouts or stupid men in red hats - in fact most didn't. Kickoffs weren't all determined by global media. Everyone in the stadium hung on every scoreboard update for other big SEC games - hearing the murmers and shouts ripple across crowds as other games scores "progressed" during Tennessee's games was really something else. Bobby Denton saying "Here is a score of interest" and everyone would stop and listen. Oh sure you had guys with the fancy headsets and radios, and they were listening to John Ward (and later Kesling, for a while), but for the most part it was purer and more genuine.

And you're right about New Year's Day. That used to be THE day. Like a second Christmas every year. What a day it was. But like everything else, the sports media conglomerates want to wring every dollar out of the thing. So no more of that.

Once corporations sink their fangs into something, and buy their way into owning it - once the goal becomes slapping a sales receipt on every interaction and every minute of the experience - grassroots local things like college football are hollowed out. Buying up people's relationships with something special, changing them, manipulating them, and selling what's left back to fans, piece by piece. Which brings us back to 16 team conferences and whatever idiotic things they do next. Complete with the flapping heads in sports media gushing about how "it's making the sport better." Which of course they'll say, because they want their paychecks too.
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Cannot agree with this enough. No one gets this but the pinnacle of college football was actually before the BCS. No computers, no god forsaken committees, no expanded playoffs, no replay. The game was rife with AMBIGUITY, which is what made it so interesting. Perhaps even poetic. Every single regular game was a playoff game, and every single game on new years day mattered . . . sometimes you went to bed that night and you knew who the champion was, sometimes you didn't, and then you'd open the newspaper the following day and there the final polls would be. It was absolutely freaking nuts but it was also oddly amazing. It was so dramatic. The thing that younger folks cannot imagine today is how consequential like a september regular season game was. Those fla/ tn games in the 90's felt like the center of the universe. Like the world was standing still for them. We had these INSANE teams back then, and their shot at the title was effectively dashed in September. It was so painful when you lost but also sort of beautiful as a piece in the larger story of a team's season. . . . The overall CFB product was just way better back then. It's still good, viewership at all time highs, and I'm always gonna watch. But no doubt, it was better back then, and I'd say really because it was sort of flawed. And I think less regular season games was part of it too. But everyone is right . . . ain't ever goin back to that model.
 
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#21
#21
ptcarter said:
A Sunday morning 2nd cup of coffee daydream, offseason thingy.

I know this'll bring some heat. There are those that want to keep adding teams to the SEC. NIL has changed the landscape and I get it. It'll never morph back to what it was.
It was kinda sweet to wake up on New years Day, suffer through the Rose Bowl parade and get the kickoff for the big bowl games, Cotton, Rose, Orange, Sugar and the others, and wake up on Jan 2 with the season over. Who remembers the 10 team SEC? I'm 68, so dang - seems like yesterday and a hundred years ago at the same time. Oh, and stay off my lawn - don't disturb me as I watch Ed Sullivan reruns.

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You just defined life. Yet another example of how sports parallel life in general. In fact, there’s a scene in a movie that I recorded just days ago that speaks to this very thing.

The movie is the modern version of All Quiet on the Western Front. The scene is where the two leadingest actors are taking a crap (and you don’t know that’s the deal until the end of the scene), whitest reading one of their loved ones’ letters to them. In that letter that was being read by one soldier to the other, the other officerlearned he had a son who perished.

It ate him for a minute. He stuffed the pain down down. Then he went on to talk about the reality that life had changed. Going back to what was will never happen for them. Nor did it.

So, the point is, could be worse. Nostalgia is a bitch.

Feeling better about that expansion?

😂😂😂
 
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#23
#23
the realist said:
Cannot agree with this enough. No one gets this but the pinnacle of college football was actually before the BCS. No computers, no god forsaken committees, no expanded playoffs, no replay. The game was rife with AMBIGUITY, which is what made it so interesting. Perhaps even poetic. Every single regular game was a playoff game, and every single game on new years day mattered . . . sometimes you went to bed that night and you knew who the champion was, sometimes you didn't, and then you'd open the newspaper the following day and there the final polls would be. It was absolutely freaking nuts but it was also oddly amazing. It was so dramatic. The thing that younger folks cannot imagine today is how consequential like a september regular season game was. Those fla/ tn games in the 90's felt like the center of the universe. Like the world was standing still for them. We had these INSANE teams back then, and their shot at the title was effectively dashed in September. It was so painful when you lost but also sort of beautiful as a piece in the larger story of a team's season. . . . The overall CFB product was just way better back then. It's still good, viewership at all time highs, and I'm always gonna watch. But no doubt, it was better back then, and I'd say really because it was sort of flawed. And I think less regular season games was part of it too. But everyone is right . . . ain't ever goin back to that model.
Click to expand...
I know this is all subjective, but there's just no way in the world that the pre-BCS world was better. It was crazy (and not in a "this is so entertaining" way, but in a "this is silly" way) to have the most popular college sport determine its national champion by whoever the media thought the best team was after all the games were played. And until the 1970s, the final poll came out before the bowl games! And we think they are meaningless now...

Ambiguity does make things more interesting...to a point. People eventually got frustrated with that, and rightly so, over time. Even with the CFP, college football is still the sport (college or pro) that has by far the most meaningful regular season. It does make games played by a team(s) with a locked-up playoff spot less meaningful, but it makes games played by teams on or near the bubble more meaningful.
 
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