Changes To College Football - College Football News

Changes To College Football
By Dan The Man Leach
Posted: 4:30 am PDT 2006-07-19

It is never too early to start thinking about college football, the pageantry, the passion, the brilliance. Over the next couple of months I will countdown the top 10 stories of the college football offseason and look ahead to the season. Today, we will take a look at the biggest offseason rules changes as well as changes in traditions.

ABC SATURDAY NIGHT SERIES: For the first time in college football, there will be a weekly prime-time network TV series. You would think in this day and age that this would have happened years ago. The series kicks off Saturday, Sept. 2, when preseason top 10 team Notre Dame visits Atlanta to play Georgia Tech. Other top matchups is Ohio State visiting defending national champion Texas on Sept. 9. That game is the second part of a home-and-home series that began last year in Columbus in one of the best games of the year. On Sept. 30, ABC will have Michigan visiting Minnesota looking for revenge after a heart-breaking loss to the Golden Gophers last year in Ann Arbor. The lead announcing team will have Brent Musburger with one of the most underrated analysts in college football in former Notre Dame coach Bob Davie and ESPN's popular Kirk Herbstreit.

INSTANT REPLAY: Last season, while replay was used in all but one of the major Division I-A conferences, many of those conferences used variations in regards to format, rules, ability for coaches to challenge, etc. That is all over this year as all of Division I will not only be using instant replay, but will implement an NFL-style challenge system, giving head coaches a chance to have the official take a closer look at any pivotal play during the course of a game. Each coach will be able to use one replay challenge per game provided that they have at least one remaining timeout. All other plays not challenged will continue to be reviewed by replay officials as they were last year, with the ultimate decision coming from the on-field referee.

FIFTH BCS GAME: We are still light years away from having a playoff system in Division I, but at least we are finally moving in the right direction as a fifth BCS game is added this postseason. It will finally give a chance to mid-major teams to have a shot at a BCS bowl, which they should have had in the past, but thanks to a flawed system were always left out in the cold to one, two, and even three loss teams from the power conferences. Now all we need is a team like Miami of Ohio or TCU to make a run at the national title game. Then a playoff system could be counted on by 2050 instead of by stardate 3276.6. Basically what that means is that we will likely have flying cars before we have a process that actually makes sense to decide a national college football champion. Could you imagine if the winner of the entire World Cup was decided by rankings based on which teams had the sexiest players voted on by women from Texas, El Salvador, Lichtenstein and North Korea? That actually would be less absurd than the way we choose a college football national champ.

NEW NAME FOR THE GEORGIA-FLORIDA GAME: It was only a matter of time that would happen in this day an age of everything down to the referee's whistle having some type of corporate sponsorship. The commissioner of the SEC pressed CBS, which has the rights to the game, to no longer refer to the Georgia-Florida showdown as The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party because the wrong message is being sent to students. I think this is brilliant because the drinking problems around college campuses are definitely directly correlated to the fact the one football game a year has a nickname that contains the word cocktail in it. This could make a major difference as we saw two years ago when a similar situation arose when the United States Flower and Gardening Association forced the Rose Bowl to drop its name because too many boys were buying their sweethearts roses for New Year's.

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