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Why good teams stay on top
Those of us who cover college football for Sports Illustrated are beginning to discuss our plans for the 2001 season. As spring ball concluded, my editor asked me to assemble a Top 25 for next fall. Folly, perhaps, because every team out there has a month of practice awaiting it before the season opens on the last weekend of August. With every passing year, the difficulty of trying to rank teams several months before the season begins only seems to increase. The margins between great and good, good and average, average and poor have tightened. A matter of a play here and a play there made Alabama 10-3 in 1999. Many of the same players went 3-8 last season. That said, the names are always roughly the same. Florida State, Florida and Miami will be up there. So, too, will Michigan and Tennessee and Texas and Washington. These schools may vanish from contention for a season or two, but eventually they return to the top. That is a point that my colleagues who cover college basketball made during March, when they noted how the NCAA selection process amounts to a cartel of the top teams squeezing out the mid-size and smaller schools. The same is true in college football, which is why the major conferences control the Bowl Championship Series. It's easier for the more powerful schools if they run the show. Rules allow for teams from Conference USA and the Mountain West to reach the BCS bowls, but only under conditions so onerous that the teams may find it easier to bypass the BCS and move directly into the XFL (you know, it might be fun to see a culture clash between BYU and Vince McMahon ). Bring up this subject and SEC commissioner Roy Kramer just gives you one of his squinty-eyed grins. I had a conversation with him a few months ago about how many Division I-AA teams are spending the money to move up to I-A. In recent years, teams such as Middle Tennessee State and Montana have made the leap. This fall, Troy State, in the backyard of Auburn and Alabama, will do the same. Rather than secure the doors to I-A, Kramer thinks they should be taken off their hinges. No more distinctions, he says. Let's just let everybody be I-A, or I, or, for all he cares, Division Tutti-Frutti. When his comment caused one of my eyebrows to rise, Kramer explained his logic: You can't legislate tradition. "Who were the best teams 30 years ago?" he asked. "Tennessee, Alabama, Michigan, Texas. Who are the best teams now?" Through all the rules changes on and off the field, the same schools are still at the top, Kramer said, because of tradition. It is important to those universities to be good, so they are going to do whatever is necessary to maintain success. Which brings me back to the Top 25: Of course I can name 15 or so teams off the top of my head that will be in it. (News flash: Sports Illustrated will rank Florida State in the Top 25!) Figuring out the last 10 will take some work. Figuring out what order to put them in will take more work. I'll have my nose in the mounds of of preseason prospecti that Frank the Mailman cheerfully delivers to my door, and you may find me poking through some Web sites over the next few days. Tracing the origins of an intriguing drillSpeaking of how there's very little new in college football: I spent a recent Saturday watching a spring workout at Northwestern. About two-thirds of the way through practice, coach Randy Walker whistled the entire team together near one end zone and placed several long two-by-fours on the field about five yards apart. At each board's midpoint, two players faced each other, straddling the board. When a whistle blew, they tried to block each other backward while remaining in a straddle. The drill makes players confront one of the basic tenets of football -- you can't play well without winning your share of collisions. I marvelled at the simplicity of it. I've seen my share of practices and I had never seen that drill. The other day I was reading a 40-year-old book titled Darrell Royal Talks Football, which the former Texas coach wrote with the help of sportswriting legend Blackie Sherrod. Royal talked about how he used "board drills" to instill toughness in his players. Royal wrote that he got the drill from Bear Bryant. Sports Illustrated senior writer Ivan Maisel covers the college football beat for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com.
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