The Five Most Commonly Believed Myths of College Football
Here, in no particular order, are five of the most popular lies people will try to tell you about college football:

1) The regular season is the playoff. Three things are true of any playoff: (1) all teams have an equal shot at winning it all, (2) teams are eliminated by losing as the playoff advances, and (3) in the end there is a playoff champion. Of course, none of these things are true about college football. If the regular season is a playoff, where is Marshall's 1999 national championship banner? Where is Auburn's 2004 trophy? If the regular season is a playoff, how did LSU lose twice in 2006 but still take home the championship? What kind of playoff is the regular season? Double elimination? Triple elimination? Now, what people really mean when they say that the regular season is the playoff is that for good teams, every regular season game is very important, which is true and great but not the same thing as a playoff.


2) This is the age of parity in college football. There can be no parity in a sport where anti-parity is written into the rules. Almost half of the teams in college football belong to conferences where it is significantly harder to play in a BCS game. As long as non BCS teams are treated differently in the actual rules of the game, it is silly to talk about parity. Teams from these conferences win only about 15% of the games they play against teams from the BCS conferences. That could not resemble parity by anyone's definition of the word. Now, what people really mean when they say that this is an age of parity in college football is that there is increasing parity within the BCS conferences. Whether or not even that is true is debatable.

3) That bad call didn't cost State the game. They should have scored more. This is a favorite of reporters, presumably because they get tired of fans complaining about bad calls. But, sad as it is, bad calls can cost teams the game. A call that gives a team 7 points or even 15 yards is a really big deal in football. Even a 5 yard infraction can significantly alter the course of a game. Any college football observer has seen dozens of games with outcomes determined by referees. What people really mean with this myth is that the horrible call wouldn't have mattered if only State had been so good that they could afford to spot the other team a couple of touchdowns. That, of course, is both true and silly.

4) I need to root for Tech because they are in my conference. This is a laughable trend among fans. The Mountain West Conference went 4-1 in bowl games this December. Oh baby! Now for sure at least 3-4 MWC teams will start next year in the top 25, right? Uh...right? Of course not. Teams pay their own way. The respect that Boise St earned by beating Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl had nothing to do with respect for the WAC. The respect that USC has earned in recent years has nothing to do with the Pac-10. The secret to respect? Win your football games.

5) Good coaches/teams create their own luck. Luck happens. "Time and chance happeneth to them all" (Ecclesiastes 9:11). Seems unfair, but sometimes a bad bounce costs a team the title. Sometimes an unlucky injury ruins a team's chance of making a bowl game. In a sport where there are only 12 games each season, luck plays an unusually large role. Now, what people really mean when they say this is that most teams that contend for championships usually have a few lucky breaks along the way, which seems to be true. Also true is the sad fact that in most seasons there are a number of teams excluded from glory just because of a few bad breaks. But to attribute the lucky bounces to a team's greatness is silly.