TUPAVIEW: WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO COLLEGE FOOTBALL?
By Mike Tupa
Dec. 12, 2025
BARTLESVILLE AREA SPORTS REPORT
Come on.
Let’s do away with the College Football Playoff, the NIL and the open door transfer portal.
Let’s get the game back to when it was fun for the fans and the players.
No college athlete should be paid to play. The college football experience should revolve around traveling mercenaries.
A college program should be judged by its ability to develop players from freshmen through seniors, or junior college transfers. Let the emphasis be on a coaching staff’s ability to identify potential, recruit successfully and piece together the best mix.
Success shouldn’t be based on which schools have the deepest pockets.
There’s no honor in buying a championship. Honor starts on a level playing field in which intuition, loyalty, scouting, leadership, hard work, hustle, fairness and long-term commitment are the tools that build success.
I can’t believe how far college football has plunged from a game governed by integrity and loyalty to one where the money men have completely corrupted it.
Let me repeat — no one should be paid to play college sports. No one. That raises the tuition for other hard-working students from financially struggling families as well as diverts a significant percentage of economic resources into the pockets of a few athletes, rather into areas that could greatly benefit tens of millions of other people.
Coaches should not be paid millions of dollars and inflate the athletic budgets even higher.
And the playoff situation is the classic camel in the tent scenario. It started out as a small endeavor — four teams — which we were assured would end all national championship controversy.
That was a lie to get people to swallow it.
Now it’s up to 12 teams and there’s still major angst about the teams left out. The plan is to go up to 16.
That won’t be enough either.
It’s just another reach by the money men — by the makers and parasites of greed — to increase their profits.
The other lie about the playoffs was the “Now, it will be decided on the field,” rather than in the polls.
Hah!
What too many don’t realize is the real power is not in the playoff format but in the control of who gets to make the playoffs.
It’s still the same thing as before — only institutionalized. The choice of the playoff field is left to pre-determined prejudice about programs, maneuvering and which teams are going to help create the biggest profits.
If it was really fair, there would be no committee or no computer rankings — which also factors in program prejudice by how the data is inputted.
The true fair way would be for all conference champions and runner-ups — at least in the power or mid-power conferences — to get a spot in the playoffs. No at-large selections, no human bias in trying to weigh schedules or certain wins or losses.
Conference champions and runners-up. Period. That’s the fair way. That’s the American way.
But, then, college football no longer represents much of the American way — or the reality of the workplace and real life.
More than 95 percent of college football players will never see a NFL training camp. Why is the game being wrapped around the few that will?
It’s the money men. I can’t even hardly stand to watch a game anymore, especially when the announcers inform us that so-and-so transferred from Tech U. My question is, why isn’t he still at Tech U? Why is he making more as a college athlete than most of us will make in a lifetime?
My solution is simple — go back to a full bowl system. Go back to traditional conference rivalry matchups in the bowls.
Bring back the fun and the tradition.
Make the bowls fun for players and not heap a ton of pressure on 19 or 20 year old players to produce perfectly or cost their schools a chance at the playoffs and millions of dollars.
Send out 30-or-more sets of seniors as winners in their final college game rather than be haunted by guilt complexes all their lives that they blew the big one.
I don’t know how we’re going to get back to where we were.
But I believe in miracles.