College football had some of the best non-conference games in one week to start 2017 – and none of them took place on a college campus.
For the second straight season, college football had an opening week slate of games that might be the best in the history of the sport. But FSU football didn’t take on Alabama in either Tallahassee or Tuscaloosa – just like Michigan and Florida didn’t face off in the “Big House” or the “Swamp”, West Virginia and Virginia Tech weren’t on either campus and so on.
Instead, places like Atlanta (twice), Washington D.C., New Orleans and Arlington, Texas got to enjoy the wonderful college football excitement that used to be reserved for home and home series between opponents. Now, it’s sexy to play one game at a neutral site and case a seven figure check as a result.
Florida State Seminoles Football
By the looks of it, you can expect this college football trend to continue for a long time.
Using Florida State has an example, it was a tradition to schedule series of games with opponents that included teams like USC, Notre Dame, LSU, Auburn, Pittsburgh and more. The last time the Seminoles had a home and home series with a powerhouse opponent other than Miami and Florida was Oklahoma, who hosted FSU in 2010 and traveled to Tallahassee the following year.
That series, however, was signed off on nearly a decade before – at a time when it was still sexy to do so. Once the traditional “preseason” classics that took place in New Jersey and California were phased out and the 12 game schedule came into play, college football neutral site games like the ones this past weekend became the norm.
It’s fun to see the Seminoles and Crimson Tide face off – or the Wolverines and Gators and even the Hokies and Mountaineers renewing their rivalry – but it would be even better to see it actually take place in front of 80,000+ inside Doak Campbell Stadium or 90,000 up at Bryant-Denny Stadium.
Why doesn’t that happen anymore? Well, I can give you about five million reasons why – that’s the estimated payout that both the Noles and Tide got for playing one time in Atlanta this weekend. You can imagine that Michigan, Florida, LSU, Virginia Tech and the rest didn’t get that much…but they got a seven figure payday for playing a one night only show.
I’m not stupid enough to say that these schools should turn down a quick payday, but there is something missing when watching these games taking place away from the home stadiums and atmosphere that make college football the best sport out there. It also takes something away from the bowl season if the biggest showcase moment on the schedule already took place.
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College football was USC traveling to Alabama, Miami hosting Penn State and Florida State battling Notre Dame on campus and inside the historic stadiums each team played in. It’s something that old school college football fans are nostalgic for – and something that made the sport better than the rest.