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By Bart Doan
Propaganda season in college football, some will say, never really ends. Sports fan delusional season never seems to take days off, either.
When Ohio State won the College Football Playoff (CFP) Championship – remember, kids, don’t call it a National Championship unless people aren’t voting on it, there’s nothing “national” about an opinion, we figured to at least get a year or two reprieve on the old conference chest thumping contest.
Luckily, or unluckily if that’s your lot, God gave the world Bret Bielema, who is basically the Fallout Boy of college football every year and keeps putting out stuff that makes you say, “is he serious or is this all a ruse?”
Bielema has been the SEC’s biggest bullhorn holding, tee shirt waving around his head like a helicopter (Petey Pablo reference!) fanboy since skipping Madison for Fayetteville, and part of it is with good reason. I mean, you want to make yourself seem like you’re hanging out with the elites because it benefits you. Any weak sauce politician began crafting this type of stuff in his or her teenage years.
Arkansas is a pretty terrible 2-14 in the SEC since his arrival but a respectable if not oddly spectacular by comparison 8-1 outside the conference. So you can see where he’s at least making this skullduggery up.
But, and maybe naively, it was thought that Ohio State’s championship might change the line of thinking in college football to that area closer to the truth, where unless teams really play, it’s impossible to judge them with any absolute statements about whether they do or do not deserve certain things.
The Buckeyes slipped into the last playoff spot at the angst of many (albeit in Texas rather than SEC country) from what was assumed to be one of the weaker Power 5 (odd to type such an oxymoron) conferences and then ran roughshod with a third string quarterback starting only his second game over the SEC champ and the Pac 12 champ, both being the conferences that were everyone’s 1-2 it seemed in some fashion.
Of course, what Bielema said should hardly be taken too seriously. That’s his schtick, like the guy that wants to drink with you and then can’t make it through a 6 pack without falling asleep on your couch. He was cajoling for the Big 10 in 2012 when he said the conference didn’t want to be like the SEC.
He walked it back by saying it was basically a shot at Urban Meyer, but it is what it is. He was telling the girl he was with what she wanted to hear, and once he was with a new one, the story changes.
No matter, though. If you take Bielema as some sort of deep thinker on the landscape of college football, you’d have to kind of be disappointed that OSU winning hasn’t made people rethink the old college conference measuring contest. We should know that the best team doesn’t come from the assumed “best conference” all the time, and we should know that we really never know what the “best conference” is when everyone spends so many tireless hours trying to find new ways to avoid figuring that out.
Bielema’s comments yesterday were nothing harmful, just more self-serving crud not rooted in fact about the 9 conference games while inviting other teams to play 8 SEC games and see what they think.
Of course, the SEC tried that experiment. They’re called Texas A&M and Missouri, both of which were historical also-rans once the Big 12 expanded. Mizzou, for it’s credit, has played for two SEC championships in three years in the conference, the same total as in 15 years in the Big 12.
For TAMU, they won 11 games their first year in the SEC for the first time since 1998 and with 28 wins in three seasons, that marks as the most in the same time frame for the program since 1991-93, which was pre-Big 12 era.
So Bielema’s hypothesis doesn’t quite hold weight in reality, not that reality is the point anymore in a world of perception being reality and reality being “spin.”
Either way, you can smell college football slowly wafting into your nostrils with every comment like this. Propaganda season has begun. We’re all 0-0. Until we’re not.
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