Why the NFL is better than College - #1 The Sight

Watching football is better than hearing football

Yesterday my good friend Matt shared his first argument for why he believes College Football is better than the NFL (if you haven’t read that yet, you can check it out here). The first reason he gave is The Sound.

And you know what? I can’t argue with him. The Sound of College Football is amazing. I’ll even admit that it’s better than the sounds of the NFL. And he didn’t even mention the bands!

But he made one mistake. Probably his biggest mistake since Senior year when he told me to speed by in my convertible and he would dive into the back seat. That did not end well for him and neither will this.

See, he ended by sharing his favorite NFL sound, which is Scott Hansen announcing the start of The Witching Hour. And where does Scott Hansen do that? On NFL RedZone, which airs every Sunday afternoon game from 1pm to 7pm ET. That means you can see a majority of NFL games all on just one channel.

Which brings me to reason number one that the NFL is better than College Football: The Sight.

As in, you can actually see it. Anybody try to watch a Hawaii game over the last few years? If you did, you weren’t successful unless you were in Hawaii, because it has been literally impossible to watch a Hawaii football game from the mainland. I would have even paid for it, be it PPV or a streaming service, but even those weren’t available.

And don’t get me started on the Pac12. Pretty sure the only way to watch that is on the little TVs at the gas station. So, pull up your lawn chair, buy a Slurpee and a Slim Jim and get comfy, because it’s going to be a late night.

When you contrast the number of NFL games available on RedZone alone against how hard it can be to see some College Football games, it’s not even close. As the Big Tuna says, “The best ability is availability” and the NFL dominates College Football here.

And then we get to the actual product that you see on the field. There are 134 D1, FBS college football teams. They each have 100+ players on their roster. Meanwhile, there are only 32 NFL teams, with a maximum roster size of 53. That means that the NFL is less than 1/8th the size of college football. There are other factors that we don’t need to get into here (career length, D2 & D3 players getting drafted, etc.) that mean even less college players will play in the pros. The NCAA itself says that less than 2% of college football players go to the NFL.

That means that the NFL separates the wheat from the chaff. It’s like that trick your weird aunt probably does where you put canned food upside-down in the fridge so that the fat floats to the top (bottom) and hardens, so when you open it and pour out the food, the gross, nasty fat stays in the can and you get delicious, lean, amazing soup.

People will try to tell you that College Football is better because there are more big plays, but you know what I hear when you say that? Bad defense. Missed tackles. Blown assignments. If I wanted to watch people be bad at sports, I’d get the Single Leg Parlay boys together for a pick-up game.

It’s like seeing someone pitch a perfect game in baseball and then complaining there wasn’t enough action. Or the stereotype of the ugly American who hates soccer because they don’t score enough. (This is my favorite take on soccer being too low scoring)

Don’t get me wrong. Not all college football players are bad. There’s not a college football player on the planet that couldn’t body me (well, maybe a kicker somewhere), but the NFL takes the best of the best of the best and gives us a superior product. College Football is full of young players who work very hard and put their bodies on the line to entertain us, and even though they’re allowed to get paid now, most of them are still grossly undercompensated. But College football also gives us things like this:

When you combine the greater availability to watch NFL, with the superior product on the field, the Sights of the NFL beat out the Sounds of College Football.

But I’m still going to watch them both.