I've said it before, but I never thought about Purdue competing for the absolute biggest prize (at least in football). We were always a "hamburger" school, not a filet mignon school. It never bothered me.
I found joy in the uniqueness that is college football. The history, the traditions. The fact that until the BCS, the MNC was just a popularity contest after all the bowls were over, but every team in the country was angling for the best bowl situation each year. For Purdue, maybe going to the Rose was almost a once-per-generation event, but getting a top-tier or even NYD bowl was a reward for a good season. Even a hamburger bowl meant you were playing in December and your team got extra practices to prep for the next season. Sometimes that hamburger was pretty tasty.
But the 12-team playoff will suck the oxygen out of the room entirely. The hamburger bowls still exist, but they've been left out on the counter half-eaten for a day and a half and are moldy because they weren't cared for. History and tradition? USC and UCLA and Oregon and Washington are in the goddamn Big Ten! The 18-team Big Ten. NIL, the transfer portal, the CCG, and going to divisionless CCG entry criteria, all make the rich richer. And that leaves the moldy half-eaten hamburger for the rest of us and you expect we, as fans, are going to be happy and find joy in it?
The chase that EVERYTHING has to be about the championship has sucked the joy out of a sport that the fans of irrelevant programs loved specifically because it wasn't always about the national championship race. Now it's CFP or f**k off.
I'll never ever understand fans liking NFL over college football.
The sheer volume of/and diversity of college makes it so amazing.
And Florida has basically stunk for 10 years now, but I watch every game intensely.
The lack of an actual leader has allowed college football to run off the rails. And the "progress" of officially allowing a seat at the table for the little guy has been done in a way to guarantee that little guy CANNOT win. The great big, fat lie about 60 or 80 or 133 teams being in the same classification and thus, technically, all able to win the NC has been replaced with a placation and an immovable object: the 12 team playoff = 4 straight games against legit programs.
College football also has/had the 4-year cycle, where you are a fan of the program and individuals come and go. What do we have now? 50% or more of a team transferring in and out and that natural 4-year turnover turning into a bastardized annual turnover.
When you let the mechanism evolve on its own, you get a wild jungle. We could have molded it, planned it out, and mapped it for the benefit of the SPORT and not the individual program or upper rung of programs.
They've let $$$$ > health of the sport, and that's not a great plan.
Take Purdue. Mediocre program, sure, but that huge upset of OSU! Drew Brees! A Rose Bowl! Mike Alstott! Tons of great WRs! Tons of great DEs! The hard-hat mascot! The big drum!
I have no tie to Purdue or anything, but I love that it exists. Purdue matters. Even if it doesn't "matter," it still matters!
It may not, in the near future. This unplanned, untethered evolution of the game is garbage.