Ten Things I Hate About College Football

A new college football season dawns in earnest this weekend, and I'm ready. I'm ready for the tailgates and the marching bands, the cheers and the chants, the heartfelt alma maters and mischievous mascots. I'm ready for the stink of summer to give way to a crisp fall air, ready for cherished traditions to be carried on for another year.

More than anything, though: I'm ready to get mad again.

Wait. I thought you liked college football?

Oh, don't get me wrong–I love college football.

That doesn't mean I can't spend the better part of the next four months absolutely furious at it. In fact, I might as well just go full Julia Stiles here, and tell you Ten Things I Hate About College Football.

1) Noon Kickoffs

There's nothing that takes the wind out of my sails more than finding out that a game I plan to attend has been assigned the dreaded 12pm kickoff time.

Admittedly, this is a stance influenced in no small part by the fact that I live a 90-minute drive away from the team I have season tickets for, but I'm pretty sure I'd feel the same way even if I still lived across the street. A noon kickoff is a tailgate-killer, a TV-fueled affront to the natural circadian rhythms of college football. I firmly believe that college football games should only be played at 3:30pm, except in Baton Rouge, where they should be played at night.

"But Scott, I like watching noon football games on TV!"

So do I, but that just means we're both complicit in a crime against nature.

2) Neutral Sites

During the recently-completed soccer World Cup, American social media users were treated to a steady stream of European fans gushing over the quality of this country's NFL stadiums. It's true–venues like Cowboys Stadium in Texas and Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta are architectural marvels, glittering air-conditioned palaces with gigantic high-definition video boards, cushy club seats and robust concessions offerings.

They're also fundamentally unsuited to college football, a sport that should be played in borderline-decrepit frankenstadiums intermittently assembled from mismatched parts over the course of a century or more. These stadiums should be difficult to get to, harder to leave and unpleasant to exist within. Saturday is a spiritual journey, one only deepened by a 3am traffic jam on a two-lane state road.

3) TV timeouts

You are at home, grabbing a beer from the fridge while a Cheez-Its ad plays for the fifteenth time today. I am sitting in my hard metal seat at a hundred-year-old stadium, staring at the sideline official holding a digital clock counting down the four minutes until play resumes.

We are both unhappy, but only one of us is plotting a crime in their head.

4) Conference realignment

My wife's family are all fans of the Purdue Boilermakers, and we try to attend one game in West Lafayette each season. This year, owing to schedule conflicts, we are down to choosing between the Washington game and the Maryland game.

Both of these are conference games, and when you map the route between the three schools, it zooms out to show the curvature of the Earth.

Big Ten football, baby!

5) Buyouts

The business of college sports can drive you mad if you pay too close attention, but perhaps no aspect of this perverted enterprise is more baffling than the practice of guaranteeing mediocre coaches' contracts with 'buy-outs'–that is, the significant financial penalties to be incurred should a contract be terminated early.

Now, I get it–if you're trying to hire a top-tier coach away from a cushy job, you have to sweeten the deal, right? But let's take a closer look at one completely-randomly-selected coaching deal from recent years.

Coach X, we'll call him, was on thin ice at Program A, where he had amassed a 25-24 record over four seasons. There was a decent chance that he would be fired in the next year, should this mediocrity continue. Even with this fact widely understood by most observers, Program B hired Coach X away from Program A, offering him a contract that was fully guaranteed through his first three seasons.

WHY? WHY DID YOU NEED TO DO THIS? HE WAS ABOUT TO BE FIRED AND WE ACTUALLY PAID A BUYOUT TO LOUISVI– I MEAN, "PROGRAM A" TO HIRE HIM AWAY?

Again, I selected this example at random.

6) Three-loss playoff teams

As a fan of a historically-less-advantaged program, I should theoretically relish the expanded access supposedly provided in the ever-growing playoff system, but I don't. Part of what has made college football great over the years is the precarity of any season; one loss should put your championship homes into severe doubt, if not destroy them entirely. The idea that a non-conference opponent could nuke your entire season in mid-September was a feature, not a bug.

7) The transfer portal/NIL

8) How I feel about those things

I am lumping these items together to try and ensure that I am not misunderstood.

I have long been a proponent of changes that would shift power and money toward the student-athlete. It was ludicrous that, for decades, a player would need to sit out a year for transferring schools when their coaches could change jobs with no such impediment. It was also ludicrous that coaches, schools and TV executives could rake in billions of dollars in revenue while keeping the people risking their bodies to generate that value from even getting a free cheeseburger or tattoo for their efforts. The fact that these things have changed is an absolute good, a correction of a historical injustice baked into the system.

They've also created a system of mercenary players in near-perpetual free agency, and it absolutely sucks as a fan trying to figure out who their quarterback is this year or where all the players they liked last year transferred to.

I hate that I hate it, but I do!

9) Your team

I also want to be clear here.

There are a number of college football teams that I bear specific animus toward, for a variety of reasons. They might be a current or former conference rival of my team (Pittsburgh, Louisville, West Virginia, Central Florida). They might be a historic non-conference opponent who's fleeing one of the longest-running rivalries in the sport's history because they're tired of losing to us (Miami-Ohio). They might just be teams that were good when I was a tween and the biggest dickhead kids at my middle school had Starter jackets representing them (Michigan, Notre Dame, Florida State).

Let's be clear, though: I also hate your team, because they're not my team, and who the hell do they think they are? Good things shouldn't happen to them, they should happen to us. They should happen to me.

In fact, there's only one thing I hate more than your team–

10) My team

Your team might make me mad once or twice this year; my team is going to keep me mad all season long. I will be mad when they lose games, because our coach is a dolt; I will be mad when they win games, because that increases the chance he'll get another season. I will be mad that we didn't get a power-mad booster to raise our profile in 1926, and I will be mad that despite marrying a prominent alumnus of our program, Taylor Swift hasn't yet decided to be that figure for us in 2026.

I will be mad every second of the season, and then I will absolutely, positively be furious when it's over.

Friends, it's Friday once again at The Action Cookbook Newsletter.

I am tumbling headlong into a three-day weekend, but not before doing my solemn duty to you as A Guy Who Suggests Fun Things in a Newsletter.

This week, I'm embracing no-thoughts-just-vibes aspects of summer cooking, exploring the best in music, books, movies and more, and–of course–sharing the ACBN Pets of the Week.

That's all after the jump–I'll see you down there.