NFL vs. NCAA
Mike Leitao ~ 09/2/2024
With college football wrapping up its first official week and the NFL starting their regular season this upcoming Thursday, you can smell football in the air. Office coworkers and friends' fantasy drafts are all wrapping up. Guys, Saturdays and Sundays are now reserved for endless hours on the couch watching football. Weekdays get a dose of excitement on multiple week days. Sports betting books are hitting their stride with millions being bet each week. As it does every year when these two sports start back up, people make their pitches as to which of the two sports is better or more enjoyable to watch. For the longest time I was an NFL supporter and never really followed college ball. But over the last three years I’ve switched my stance and am ready to make the pitch on why from a weekly enjoyment level college football beats the NFL.
The case for the NFL:
Listen, I’m not gonna sit here and pretend the NFL doesn’t have some good things going for it. The NFL has players who I can get behind and remember and plant connections with. I know it’s possible to do in college, but in reality you are looking at roughly 3 years of potential connections to build versus the NFL where the players can easily play for over a decade which gives you more time to build a connection to a player. Additionally, in college the next step is to make it to the NFL meaning that even the players you follow in college will more than likely make it to the NFL and then at that rate you start following them through the NFL meaning no matter which side you lean, the NFL will most likely always be the end destination which gives the NFL the edge.
More Exciting Plays:
Highlight reel plays are undoubtedly one of the greatest parts of sports. There is nothing better than watching an incredible feat of agility, athleticism, and raw talent. When it comes to which league produces more highlights, college football takes the cake. Now yes, on a weekly comparison college football has like 50 games to the NFLs 16 which of course implies that college football should and will have more highlight reel plays. But unlike the championship percentage from above, highlight reel plays are independent from league size. People want highlight reel plays since they are exciting, no one cares about highlight reel plays per game percentage. Think of it like this, if each league puts out the same percentage of highlight reel plays, for this example let’s just say each league produces a 25% chance at a highlight each game. Based on the above numbers, you would expect 4 highlight reel plays a week in the NFL and 12-13 in college football. A 3x increase on a weekly basis over the course of a season would equate to around 100 more highlight plays a season coming from college football than the NFL
This is important since at the end of the day when you think back on previous seasons, you normally don’t remember “that time we watched a solid 7 yard run” but instead think “man remember the Odell catch”. Just this past week in college football, we saw arguably one of the greatest interceptions of all time during the Robert Morris vs Utah State game, and Robert Morris is a FCS school which isn’t even the highest division you can be in college football! Although the game differential helps college football, the rules help too. In college football there are 2 major rules that lead to more offense and more highlight potential. The first is only needing to keep one foot inbound on catches as opposed to the NFLs 2, which always allows players to make more amazing sideline catches in college. The other is the hash marks being wider in college compared to the NFL. Although it seems like an irrelevant topic, the wider field space actually provides an advantage for the offense and more offense usually leads to more highlights.
Upsets Galore & Bangers:
Although as I mentioned above the NFL has more parity when it comes to winning the championship compared to college, college football will always take the cake when it comes to weekly upsets. Although, yes, we will see upsets throughout the NFL season, they are rarer and less exciting overall especially since sometimes all it does is ruin a teams draft standing so they don’t get as high a pick. In college though, upsets happen on a weekly basis and sometimes those upsets can inspire new, talented, high school players to sign with these underdog teams which is great for the sport. The very first week of college football there was a huge upset as unranked Georgia Tech beat top 10 ranked Florida State in an absolute banger of a game. Although it is less of an upset as above, this past week saw number 23 ranked USC beat number 13 ranked LSU who were favorites coming into the season in a great game. Over upsets include Coastal Carolina being 3.5 point underdogs on the road to Jacksonville State and then beating them by 28 points, Vanderbilt being 13.5 point underdogs against Virginia Tech and beating them in OT in another fun game, and Sam Houston State being 9 point underdogs on the road to Rice before beating them by 20 points. That is also just a few of the upsets that happened this week, the unpredictability of college football always makes the games exciting since it really feels like for a lot of games the underdogs have a chance to cause some havoc.
In addition to the weekly upsets, it also feels like college football routinely puts on multiple bangers while although it’s a safe bet to assume there will be a NFL game or maybe two a week that are really good, college football cranks them out. Just this last week, we saw great games including LSU vs USC, North Carolina vs Minnesota, TCU vs Stanford, Virginia Tech vs Vanderbilt, Old Dominion vs South Carolina, Nevada vs Troy, Abilene Christian vs Texas Tech, and UCLA vs Hawaii. Then you also have a potential game of the year contender in North Dakota State vs Colorado, and similarly to the interception mentioned above, North Dakota State is an FCS school! I guarantee this upcoming week of the NFL season will not have anywhere close to as many tight bangers as college did this week, and other than LSU vs USC none of these teams are ranked which means there is a chance the good games get even better in the coming weeks. The NFL can still produce game of the year level games and might produce the best game of the season, but on a week by week basis you are gonna have more luck finding bangers on a Saturday than a Sunday.
Both leagues have their ups and downs and both are great in their own ways. I love football and although I don’t commit my entire weekend to watching these games, I do normally read catch up articles on games I missed and if a game seems worth it, I will go back and watch. But with a gun to my head you had to make me decide which of the two leagues I’d rather spend my time watching. I'm sorry NFL, you might be the final destination but watching the journey of college football will take the cake for me.
