The Texas Longhorns and head coach Steve Sarkisian are entering the college football season with national title aspirations, and if senior quarterback Arch Manning can live up to the hype, the Longhorns have a legitimate shot at bringing home the title.
However, that doesn’t mean Sarkisian is happy about the state of college football writ large.
“I try my best to not get consumed with how bad it is,” Steve Sarkisian told USA Today of the current college football landscape. ‘It just wears you out.”
Sarkisian made sure to note the different standards that some schools have when it comes to academics.
“At Texas, we will only take 50% of a player’s academic credit hours,” he said. “You may be a semester from graduating, but you’re going all the way back to 50% if you play here and want a degree. But at Ole Miss, they can take you. All you have to do is take basket weaving, and you can get an Ole Miss degree.”
“It’s like we’ve forgotten about academics, yet less than 5% of these guys will play in the NFL,” Sarkisian said.
He also shared some ire toward the college football playoff committee and the increasingly likely expansion to a 24-team playoff.
“The committee doesn’t have the bandwidth to watch that many games,” Sarkisian said. “They see the media and coaches polls, and they copy them. You’ve got a 12-team playoff, and that means there are at least 30 teams that impact it. Now all of a sudden, you want to go to 24? Now the polls become an even greater factor, because now you’re asking (the committee) to watch 40 teams a week — if not 50.”
Sarkisian summed up the state of things in one sentence: “We all signed up to be part of the NCAA, and then we all allegedly make the rules.”
Hopefully, something is done before college sports become unrecognizable altogether.
About Qwame Skinner
Qwame Skinner has loved both writing and sports his entire life. In addition to his sports coverage at Comeback Media, Qwame writes novels, and his debut; The First Casualty, an adult fantasy, is out now.