This Is The Last Weekend Of College Football As You Know It

The final week of college football’s regular season has arrived with no shortage of storylines. Ohio State-Michigan is maybe the biggest regular season game of the century. Florida State has to go on the road in a rivalry game with a back-up quarterback to keep its Playoff hopes alive. Oregon has to get past its in-state rival to set up a rematch with Washington for a likely Playoff spot.

But with Week 13 also arrives the end of not just one, but the last several eras of the sport. I think we’ll look back on 2023 many years from now as the last year college football looked at least mostly like what it’s looked like for the last few decades.

Sure, there have been incremental changes along the way, but none that have really fundamentally changed the sport at least since the advent of the BCS. The College Football Playoff was a welcome change that has yet to cheapen the product — more two-loss teams made the BCS title game than have made the CFP. Texas A&M and Missouri aren’t real SEC schools, but that didn’t really harm anybody. What’s happening next year, though, is a departure from everything college football has been about for a hundred years.

Michigan will host Big Ten linchpins USC and Oregon. We’ll soon lose SEC rivalries such as Georgia-Auburn and Tennessee-Florida to make room for Texas and Oklahoma to play full league schedules. College football has one final week as a sport filled with regional pride and tradition before it becomes a worse version of the NFL to line the pockets of ESPN and Fox executives.

I watched 4-6 South Carolina against 6-4 Kentucky last Saturday and it was the one of the best stadium atmospheres I saw all weekend. But we're getting rid of games like that in favor of ones like Ohio State-UCLA so casual football fans who wouldn't otherwise dare to watch college football and couldn't tell you a thing about it might stop flipping channels for five minutes because they know both of the brands.

And all of that is not to mention the 12-team Playoff, which despite what many dullards will tell you, is likely going to dramatically change the landscape of every season for the worse. Right now, there is a potential chaos scenario where we end up with an undefeated Big Ten champion, undefeated Florida State and then five 12-1 teams — plus 11-1 Ohio State or Michigan — fighting for four CFP spots. That's fun to talk about, which is why people have been doing so for weeks. Next year, every single one of those teams is in the Playoff no questions asked and none of this matters. The Ohio State-Michigan game goes from one of the most anticipated college football games of all-time to a game it would be nice to win to get a bye.

And if the argument in response to that is, "Well it creates bigger games for teams further down the rankings," then why stop at 12 teams? If it's reasonable to agree that it's better to have more teams involved in games that matter for CFP contention, let's have a 32-team Playoff. Hell, make it 64 by that logic.

But any complaining is moot now. It's too late. College football is going to look radically different a year from now than it has for most people's lifetimes. So enjoy this weekend.