Why Do I Care?

College football is my favorite sport by a wide margin. Yet as a person who believes himself to be intensely logical it is ultimately disappointing. Even with the Gators winning a mythical national championship in 2006 I find my dissatisfaction with college football growing markedly. This postseason has seemed to add to my disillusionment. Why is this so?

To examine my quandary, I need to ask, “What is it I enjoy about this sport so much?”

In reflecting the season just passed, I find most enjoyable or – equally important – most agonizing moments to be those games against our long term rivals. I think it is“equally important” to look at joy and agony alike, as you cannot have one without the other – there is no joy in beating a team like Georgia unless you know keenly what losing to them feels like.

Were I to rank this season the games based on pure intensity of emotion involved, to either the positive or negative, it would look like this –

1. Agony of loss to Georgia
2. Agony of loss to Auburn
3. Joy of beating Tennessee
4. Satisfaction of beating Florida State
5. Pain of loss to LSU
6. Relief of beating Kentucky
7. Satisfaction of beating South Carolina
8. Exasperated relief in beating Mississippi
9. Annoyance in loss to Michigan
10. Equal indifference in beating WKU, Troy, Vanderbilt and FAU

Why does losing to a Georgia hurt so much, while my feelings at losing to Michigan is, “Err, oh well?”

Because Michigan didn’t matter.

Sure you might think it hurt recruiting at the margins, or put us one debit down in the never ending Big Ten – SEC debate, but on an emotional level I barely cared about the game an hour after it ended. While losing to Georgia effectively eliminated Florida from the SEC race, losing to Michigan made us what – a few places worse in a final poll no one will remember 2 days after it is issued?

Now were I to do a similar ranking in 2006 obviously the game against Ohio State would rank at the very top, win or lose. No matter how fake the national title is, something of great import and recognition was on the line. Yet in all honesty the win over LSU that year was nearly equal in joy, made only perhaps a bit less so because Florida was not expected to beat Ohio State (not to mention the arrogance of the Buckeye fans).

Goal wise I have a similar ranking system –

1. Win SEC Title
2. Win mythical “national” title
3. Beat Georgia
4. Beat Tennessee
5. Beat LSU
6. Beat FSU
7. Win any BCS bowl game (if applicable)
8. Beat South Carolina
9. Beat “other” SEC teams
10. Win “other” non-BCS bowl

I think that list is a pretty accurate representation of my feelings. Winning the SEC is paramount. The list of the teams is subject to change (and is my current feelings – FSU has been higher in the past). But I would rather beat UGA, UT, LSU and FSU and subsequently lose in a non-title BCS game to, say a team like Oklahoma, then lose to any one of those four rivals.

I guess what this ramble is getting at is why I don’t really care about bowl games that don’t have huge importance. Perhaps this is a symptom of success, as many teams are just happy to make a bowl game, and that game is a reward in itself. Personally I don’t give a damn if Florida ever plays in one of the Tampa/Orlando bowls again.

So why do I care? When so many seasons end with such a dissatisfying whimper do I keep coming back?

Because it is the season that matters, not the postseason and the bowls. Standing in Jacksonville on a late October day staring out at a stadium that is half orange & blue, and half black & red, is worth more in a moment than every non-BCS bowl the Gators have ever played in - combined.

SEC teams win or lose the championship that matters in early December. And since I don’t believe we aren’t going to much change the system, my season pretty much ends by then.

Perhaps there is no practical way the season "after the season" will ever matter that much to the majority of the fans. Or maybe its just me and a few cranky other folks. But unless and until games played in college football's post season have any real meaning, I'm pretty much going to keep on not caring.