FOOTBALL!

Hey y’all

If you’ve been reading this blog or have had to listen to me ramble on about my exchange before, you’ll know that football is one of the key reasons I chose America, Ole Miss and the Fall semester for my exchange. I’m so incredibly excited to experience college football because I find it so fascinating and wonderfully over-the-top. However, the college football system is also super confusing for non-Americans, and so in an effort to try and help myself and any interested readers understand the system, today’s post is going to be a piece on the college football system with a specific focus on the SEC and Ole Miss.

Warning: this is a long and content-heavy post, so apologies if you get confused (I did many times whilst writing this post lol) and boredom beware if you’re not that interested in football.

The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) is the governing body of college sports and sporting teams from over 1,000 American universities. The NCAA divides all of these schools into three divisions – Division I, Division II and Division III. Division I schools are the major athletic schools that have huge budgets, extensive sporting facilities and well established programs, and are allowed to offer athletic scholarships to students. Ole Miss is a Division I school. Division II schools are similar to Division I except they are slightly smaller and of a more intermediate level, however they are still able to offer athletic scholarships to students. Division III schools are mostly smaller private institutions with less-established and smaller sporting programs and hence do not offer any sporting scholarships to students.

For football, Division I is also divided into 2 sub-divisions: the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS), where the FBS is the higher of the two and includes the principal football schools. The main difference between the two is that FBS schools are able to offer full scholarships to a maximum of 85 players per year, whilst FCS schools can offer aid to a maximum of 85 players as well but the funding only amounts to 65 full scholarships (some schools will therefore offer part scholarships to some players, but generally they just offer 65 full scholarships). The FBS has 10 ‘conferences’ whilst the FCS has 13, where ‘conferences’ are groups of schools that are generally in similar geographic locations (i.e. from states that neighbour each other). Both subdivisions also have independent teams.

(Above: the geographical representation the states in whichthe members of FBS conferences are situated).

Furthermore, the FBS is grouped into two groups of 5 known as the “Power Five” and “Group of Five”. In short, the “Power Five” conferences are the ‘better’/more elite conferences due to privileges they previously and/or currently have in regard to scheduling and championship qualification. The “Power Five” conferences are: Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten Conference, Big 12 Conference, Pacific-12 Conference and Southeastern Conference.

Here’s where it gets a little more complicated: Unlike the AFL where there are 18 teams who all compete against each other throughout the season, scheduling is far different with college football since it’s not as straightforward as teams in each conference playing only each other during the season. Not only does each conference have different rules about scheduling and who their teams play, but teams regularly play other teams that are not in their conference. For example, the SEC (Ole Miss’ conference) mandates that, of the 12 games played each season, 8 must be in-conference. 6 of the in-conference games are played against the other members of the school’s division within the SEC (Ole Miss is in the SEC’s West Division, and therefore plays Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, Louisiana State, Mississippi State and Texas A&M every year), 1 game against a member of the other SEC division every year (this is Vanderbilt for Ole Miss) and 1 of the remaining 6 from the other division on a rotating basis (this year it’s Missouri for Ole Miss). Of the 4 remaining games, at least 1 must be a member of one of the other Power Five conferences or an Independent. This year Ole Miss plays a member of the Pac-12 conference (University of California – Berkley) and an Independent (New Mexico State). Their other two rostered games are (I’m assuming) randomly assigned most likely based on scheduling availabilities and workability, and this year this means Ole Miss plays against the University of Memphis (a member of a Group of Five conference in Division I FBS) and Southeastern Louisiana (who compete in Division II).

(2019 season schedule for Ole Miss).

Many schools have recognised rivalries, usually against teams they regularly play. In fact, the NCAA formally recognises around 200 popular rivalries, many of which have special names and trophies awarded to the winning team each year. Ole Miss has recognised rivalries with Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn and Vanderbilt (all of whom they play every year), Tulane (who they haven’t played since 2012), Memphis (known as the Mid-South Rivalry), LSU (known as the Magnolia Bowl, winner receives the Magnolia Bowl Trophy) and, of course, Mississippi State (known as the Egg Bowl, winner receives the Golden Egg Trophy). The Magnolia Bowl occurs whenever LSU and Ole Miss are scheduled to play each other (it does not have a set date or week in which it occurs every year), but the Egg Bowl is held on Thanksgiving Day and is each team’s final game of the regular season. Ole Miss currently leads the overall tally over Mississippi State, Memphis, Tulane and Vanderbilt, and is reigning champion over Arkansas, Memphis and Tulane. Ole Miss plays 6 out of these 7 rivalries this season.

(The Magnolia Bowl's Magnolia Bowl Trophy).

(The Egg Bowl's Golden Egg Trophy).

Now we move onto post-season games (championships etc.), and we’ll start with the championship that the SEC holds. The SEC Championship game has been played since 1992 and it pits the regular season champion from the West Division against the regular season champion of the East Division (i.e. the team on top of each division’s ‘ladder’). It’s most often played on the first Saturday in December (the week immediately after the last round of the regular season) and has been held in Atlanta, Georgia every year since 1994. Currently the West Division holds the overall tally 15-12, and Alabama currently has the most wins (8), 6 of which were won in the last 10 years, including being the current reigning champion. Ole Miss is yet to compete in the SEC Championship, along with Texas A&M, Vanderbilt and Kentucky.

(The SEC Championship Trophy).

The more significant post-season games are known as Bowl Championship games. These games are primarily played by Division I FBS schools over 3-4 weeks during December and January. Bowl games were established over the years as a replacement for there not being any official playoffs that determine a national champion, as this title was typically voted on by sports writers and other non-players. The first ever bowl game was the 1902 Tournament East-West Football Game which was played between Michigan and Stanford, and became an annual sponsored competition from 1916 onwards. In 1923, the game was played in the newly built Rose Bowl stadium in California, and thus became known as the Rose Bowl game.

(The inaugural Rose Bowl game, 1923).

As other cities began to recognise the value of developing such games in their own cities for tourism and economic booms, more tournaments were established and all used the word ‘Bowl’ to align them with the Rose Bowl tournament despite not being held in bowl-shaped stadiums (which is why the Rose Bowl stadium is so named). Prior to 1971, there were only 10 bowl games. As of 2015, there are 40. In the past, bowl championships were not much more than annual festivals or exhibitions run to attract tourism and a chance for the players to compete in extra games. Statistics attained in these games were not even seen as significant enough to be included in players’ official career statistics. These days the bowl tournaments are an integral part of the college football season and competing in one is a great honour and opportunity for national recognition. Additionally, teams receive payment for their participation in bowl championships which is split between all members of the conference they belong to.

To be bowl-eligible, teams must have a season record of at least 6-6 (however, given the present number of bowl games, some teams who only win 5 games may qualify if there are not enough 6-6 or better teams or there are openings). Teams that are bowl eligible are generally chosen to play in a bowl tournament that their conference is affiliated with or tied-in with, and the remainder who are not chosen this way are placed in a pool and selected/allocated to one of the remaining positions in another bowl championship. There are several other criteria for bowl eligibility, but it gets pretty complicated.

The SEC are tied-in with 11 bowls (Belk Bowl, Birmingham Bowl, Citrus Bowl, Gator Bowl, Independence Bowl, Liberty Bowl, Music City Bowl, Orange Bowl, Outback Bowl, Sugar Bowl and the Texas Bowl) and also frequent the Cotton Bowl Classic. Specifically, the Sugar Bowl and the Liberty Bowl see an SEC team almost every year since the Sugar Bowl was unofficially exclusively SEC-only until 1975 and was the bowl’s only official tie-in until 2015, and the Liberty Bowl’s current format pits the #4 pick from the Big 12 Conference against an SEC pool pick each year. Ole Miss has competed in 37 bowl games since 1935, having won 24 of those including their most recent appearance at the 2015/2016 Sugar Bowl where they beat Oklahoma State 48-20. In the three years since, they have only won 5 or 6 games in each regular season and were therefore not selected for any bowl games. Hopefully that changes this year!

Alabama currently holds the highest number of bowl appearances (64) and the most bowl victories (37). Virginia Tech holds the current longest consecutive appearance streak, having competed in a bowl championship every season for the past 25 years.

Finally, the College Football Playoff is a post-season knockout invitational tournament that determines a national champion of the Division I FBS that was established in 2014. 4 teams are selected to compete in the tournament by a 13-member committee (which is comprised of an athletic director from each of the Power Five conferences, a retired member of the media, and the remaining 7 are former coaches, players and athletic directors). The 4 teams compete in two semi-finals, and the winner of each game proceeds to the championship game. The semi-final games rotate each year between the 6 major bowl games (known as the New Year’s Six), being the Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Fiesta Bowl and the Peach Bowl. The venue of the championship game is determined by a bidding and selection process. This season the semi-finals will be the Fiesta Bowl and Peach Bowl, and the championship game will be played in New Orleans on January 13th 2020 (I will have just touched down in Australia while this is being played). The reigning champion is Clemson University.

And there we have it – a (probably too long) summary of the college football system. I thoroughly enjoyed reading up on this, and now I’ll be able to better understand the system and why Ole Miss are playing certain teams and why they do or don’t qualify for post-season tournaments. I hope some of you found all of this as interesting as I did! T-minus 54 days until football season starts!

Thanks for reading, I’ll be back next week. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive email notification of when I post!

- Emily xx