Why the Rutgers-UCLA Series Is Good News for College Football

Rutgers and UCLA have agreed to a home-and-home series starting in 2016. You, the typical college football fan, don't give a rat's bonkus.

To you, Rutgers is a one-hit wonder from a couple years ago, lucky it can still get bookings at state fairs. After this it's county fairs, then it's back to the day job at Home Depot. UCLA, on the other hand, is like a recently divorced middle-aged guy at a college bar. He can't figure out why, if he could make time with the coeds 25 years ago, they're just not that interested in him now.

You might be right about where each of these programs stand in the summer of 2009. But you're dead wrong about the insignificance of this deal. This is one of the best things to happen to college football in quite a while.

These two schools deserve more credit than they're getting. They deserve praise because this game isn't an automatic victory for either school. Let's face it, non-conference scheduling has become a joke. Teams which aspire to the BCS games routinely refuse to play anybody with a pulse unless tradition forces them to. Instead, the month of September is filled with the likes of David at Goliath, Fire Hydrant at Large Dog, and Movable Object at Irresistible Force.

On the one hand, you can understand why the 400-pound gorillas don't schedule any real competition. There isn't a BCS conference that qualifies as "easy to win." The BCS formula hasn't directly considered strength of schedule and quality wins since 2003. The human polls have considerable inertia as well, and that inertia gets more pronounced as the season goes on. There's little incentive to play a game you might not win and lots of incentive to get Mr. Steven's Barber College on the schedule. Twice, if possible.

On the other hand, that swindles the fans twice over. Once, because we're deprived of seeing the best teams play each other, and once again because it leads to, shall we say, statistical inaccuracies.

Let me explain. Every year, there's at least one team that runs out to something like a 6-0 or 5-1 start and crawls into the top 25, even though anybody who has seen them play knows that they've been gorging on so many cupcakes they might as well be on Man vs. Food instead of Sports Center. Reality catches up with them and they wind up 7-5 or 6-6, but they still get a bowl bid while a more deserving team from a lesser conference gets left out. There are a lot of undefeated teams on the first of October. About half of them are fraudulent.

Likewise, it's easy to get dazzled by offenses and players who put up video game numbers. Two hundred twenty-five yards rushing! He threw for eight touchdowns with no interceptions! Yes, but it was against a branch campus so small that the library, gymnasium, and dorm are all in the same building.

Look, fan, you're in this for one reason and one reason only: entertainment. If you're not playing or coaching, that's all college football is good for, as far as you're concerned. Maybe you're entertained by a game that's 56-0 at halftime. If you are, please do me one favor: Go dip yourself in honey, then roll around on a hill of fire ants until you change your mind.

The rest of us want to see a game that actually catches and holds our attention. Kudos to Rutgers and UCLA for agreeing to provide games whose outcomes aren't foregone conclusions. (No need to bring up Appalachian State. I've heard of that game.)

Of course, I probably won't get to see it. I live in Big Ten country, so I'm sure that, instead of Rutgers-UCLA, I'll have to watch Wisconsin-Florida Elliptic.