College Football Nerds expresses what most of us are thinking and know to be true...

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While I appreciate Kirby's comments, there aren't any good solutions.

Paying players to play bowls or tying NIL to a full season's participation is only valuable to players who weren't opting out anyway.

1st day players aren't risking $$$ for $

There's a bigger issue.

For a decade, there has been a huge push from sports media and a large portion of CFB fans to devalue anything but the playoffs.

Journalists, who are largely pro-sports focused, push for massive change with zero concern for unintended consequences.

Many of us warned this would happen, and the same people who laughed said it wouldn't are now telling us that it's a feature, not a bug.

But 1st round draft picks existed before the playoffs. And they played in their "meaningless" bowl games.

90% of the time someone compares college football to the men's college basketball tournament, I can guarantee you they've got an NFL banner on their Twitter profile. Or MLS, or CBB.

And they don't watch a minute of the NIT. They don't start watching CBB until April.

We didn't used to need "fixes" for players sitting out. They saw bowls as an opportunity to raise their stock, and often did.

But I don't blame players now. We've created a sport that has turned them all into guns for hire and told them for 10 years nothing matters but the CFP

The regular season is next. Super conferences and the 12 team playoff is going to drastically diminish the drama and fun of the regular season.

What used to be a sport that was a 4-month long celebration of all teams, with an isolated single game to determine a winner is now a diminished 4-months in exchange for 11 interesting games at the end of the year.

But what's sad about it all is the same teams are going to win.

Those of us old enough to remember football in the 80s and 90s remember how much better it was to be excited for a season-long celebration of the sport, not just a hyper-focus on who won it all.

We've taken a regional sport whose teams were beloved, not for the names on the back, but for the name on the front. Generations of fans tied to a school, not just a team...

And turned it into a national game, rapidly being stripped of all character and nuance in the name of money and some disingenuous ideal that ignores all context.

We've marginalized the concept of the student-athlete. We've told them implicitly their education has no value, and the only value they offer society is if they make it to the NFL.

And if they don't? We discard them. On to the next million dollar deal for the next 18 year old kid.

We've used a false narrative of oppressed players and oppressed schools to enable the wealthiest programs to buy their way to the top.

And after the grifters have extracted everything they can for themselves out of the sport, they'll leave the real fans with nothing and tell them it was their own fault.

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