Peak Seasons Define College Football

Any time college football hits on a successful formula, you can be sure they will ruin it.

I’ve been a college football fan since the age of 6, when the fall of 1988 brought the sport directly into my life. There hasn’t been an autumn since where I wasn’t obsessed. My dad is a Notre Dame alum, so the Irish winning the National Title that year is one of the first, distinct memories I have of watching sports on TV.

I vividly remember Miami vs Notre Dame, the now immortal “Catholics vs Convicts” game. At the time, I didn’t know all that. I only knew that it felt like the biggest sporting event that had ever been played based on my dad’s desire to watch that game, and all the talk and hype leading up to it. We lived about an hour outside of New York City and got the New York papers, so the sports sections that fall were full of Notre Dame stories for the Subway alum.

The second game I’ll always remember is the Fiesta Bowl where an undefeated Notre Dame took down undefeated West Virginia to win the still-mythical National Championship. It felt like college football was a perfect sport, unlike every other. The pageantry. The uniforms. The spectacle. The sheer number of games every Saturday. The beautiful bowl games on New Year’s Day. I was hooked.

I mention this because as a first grader, I didn’t understand that the sport of college football was only a handful of years removed from the landmark Supreme Court ruling that allowed more games to be aired on national television. It was the beginning of the greed that would come to define, improve, and maybe someday ruin, the sport.

Notre Dame’s Fiesta Bowl win was far more important than I could have imagined. That Fiesta Bowl was the first college football bowl game to be played directly against the Rose Bowl. For the first time in 36 years, NBC did not air the Rose Bowl. Instead, they balked at a fee increase and moved the Fiesta Bowl into the late-afternoon New Year’s Day slot.

The Fiesta Bowl trounced the Rose Bowl in the ratings, of course. With the Big Ten in decline in the late 1980’s, and independents like Miami, Penn…