Believing in the sport of college football anymore is rather like believing in Santa Claus, given what a big-time business the games have become.
Top-division football is the only official NCAA sport for which college sports' national governing body doesn't hold a championship.
WSJ: BCS, College Football: Goodbye, 'BCS'; Hello, 'College Football Playoff'
Bowling is now one of the fastest growing high school sports and is rapidly gaining as a college sport.
However, rugby is no longer a college sport played only by casual athletes looking for a little sports competition and a lot of beer.
It occurred to me that in sports in general these days, parity - or equality among the teams - is the watchword in almost every sport, in college football and pro-football and pro-basketball.
According to video game tracking firm The NPD Group, 2K Sports sold 200, 000 copies of its game for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360 in the U.S. and decided to abandon the college sport completely the next year.
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Unlike virtually every other major college sport, the Football Bowl Subdivision postseason is run by its member conferences and independent member universities, not the NCAA. The agreement with ESPN is subject to "definitive documentation and all necessary approvals, " the release said.
The least parity in any major sport bar none is college football.
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"There's no other sport that you have college programs competing at the highest level of college baseball that are not necessarily in a major conference, " O'Connor said Thursday.
In order to help you better, I consulted with Dr. Steve Fleck, chair of the Sport Science Department at Colorado College and a member of the International Society of Sports Nutrition.
It probably has more to do with the academic drive of college basketball players (most of whom think they will be making their living playing their sport professionally here or abroad) versus college football players (most of whom know they will not), and institutional failures to educate big name athletes (who colleges fear will bolt if academic standards are too high).
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However, college basketball is a sport with a lot more parity, but still not balanced.
FORBES: How Does Parity Compare Among Major U.S. Sports Leagues?
Indiana, Virginia and Maryland have dominated the College Cup, the sport's final four, in past years and Connecticut, UCLA and Louisville are in the hunt this year.
"The gods of the NBA have decided that they want stars to be stars, but defense makes the college game more of a team sport, " says Dave Odom, who coached Duncan at Wake Forest.
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College football is a historically parochial sport, with the Big Ten and Pac-12 Conferences clinging to the lucrative and beloved Rose Bowl on New Year's Day and the recently dominant SEC pushing for a playoff to showcase more of its powerful teams.
Many of my British colleagues through the years have told me that they're not used to having the kind of attention shown on so-called "university" sport as the U.S. places on college basketball.
In other words, today's college culture has turned hooking up into a sport that all the "cool" kids are playing -- or at least talking about -- even if they secretly hate it.
The Collegiate Bass Anglers Association was founded two years ago by two former college baseball coaches hoping to reaffirm fishing as a sport for the young.
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Stony Brook and Kent State each finished the 2012 college baseball season among the elite teams in a sport long dominated by programs in the South and West.
College football is a business, like any other sport.
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Retirement money has been used to pay for college tuition, honeymoons, debt consolidation, fully loaded sport utility vehicles (SUV) and tummy tucks.
He stopped playing competitive tennis and enrolled in college at 23, abandoning the top level of the sport for six years before recently attempting a comeback.
The BCS made college football more valuable as a brand by organizing and nationalizing a sport whose following and marketing had been largely regional.
WSJ: BCS, College Football: Goodbye, 'BCS'; Hello, 'College Football Playoff'
The most life-changing college course I ever took was philosophy and I know football is the only true sport.
But over the last five years, college baseball has become the incubator for a new approach that has some of the sport's many traditionalists fired up.
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After it becomes clear to a child that athletic skill maximizes his chance of being admitted to the college of his choice, that child will understandably focus on getting better at a sport.
The following season, the College Football Playoff will launch the first-ever four-team playoff for the sport's top division, which is made up of 10 conferences and four independent teams, the most prominent of them Notre Dame.
WSJ: BCS, College Football: Goodbye, 'BCS'; Hello, 'College Football Playoff'
"The sport died in the '80s, " said Lou Marinoff, a philosophy professor at the City College of New York, and a Toronto Classic entrant.
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The postseason for major-college football is controlled by conferences, not the NCAA, a quirk that evolved from the sport's century-old bowl system.
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As the analytics revolution is building momentum on college campuses across the country, Major League Baseball needs to harness the vast amounts of data overwhelming the sport by effectively utilizing human capital.
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