WATCH GRID: Make CFB's standings even worse

Big conferences need divisions? Nah!!

I’ve spent most of this college football season annoyed by the conference races in 2024’s newly bloated leagues. With so few conference contenders even appearing on each other’s schedules, and with almost every league now lacking divisions, paying attention to the standings has felt useless.

Look at this shit:

With one weekend to go, most of the Big 12’s 16 teams still have chances to reach the conference title game. Because the four teams currently tied at the top haven’t played each other at all (other than Arizona State’s win over BYU), you’d need a spreadsheet to keep track of the fluctuating wormholes that might or might not come into play.

And not just in the Big 12. Last week, it took the Big Ten three days to realize Oregon had already clinched a spot in Indianapolis. ACC leaders SMU, Clemson, and Miami haven’t played each other. The SEC’s standings would’ve been a mess if not for roughly the entire conference losing last week. At least the Pac-12 makes sense for now.

Divisions went away because conferences want to ensure only their best CFP candidates compete in league title games, and there’s no Business-Brained argument I can raise as a counter to that. Saying things like “it’s less fun when we feel like we have to ask a dungeon master whether our team’s win means anything, and these teams don’t actually feel like they’re in the same conference, and I liked things better how they were when I was 15, and you should do the pods thing we spent the mid-2010s posting about” isn’t going to change anything.

But if we’re stuck with conferences being interplanetary entities that include 43.6 teams who’ve never heard of each other (we are stuck with this), we can only make peace with it. So I’m remembering this:

College football is supposed to be a confounding mess. History reveals this to be true.

No matter how many times people have tried to organize the absolute basics — such as little things like how to decide which team is the best — the sport has spent a century and a half resisting every kind of order. To avoid going crazy, it’s best to just embrace the disarray and learn to adore the errors.

And now that we’ve taken that national confusion and made it regional (and Big Ten) as well, let’s lean into it, I guess. Each conference should have secret minigames scattered throughout its tiebreaker document, like a Daily Double or treasure chest that eats you. Who cares, nothing matters, let 4-8 UCF win the Big 12, everything matters.

And now, the Thanksgiving weekend Watch Grid, after some brief information.

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1. If you buy a copy of my (frankly well-reviewed) book before December 7, and send jasonkirkbook at gmail.com your new receipt and your address, we’ll send you an autograph sticker that will turn your copy into an author-signed copy — along with other stickers, while supplies last. (U.S. only.) We’ll send in time for Christmas, so you can give these copies as gifts. 😉

2. Holiday travel note: That same book is available for free as an author-narrated audiobook via Audible credits, Spotify Premium, a Libro trial, and/or your library. If that last part isn’t true, tell them it should be.

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