College Football 2014-15

I honestly find college football more interesting than pro, just for the variety of different styles. I'm very unlikely to watch too many pro games that don't involve the team I directly root for, but I'll watch a lot of college football games where I have no rooting interest, just because they are so interesting.

Sounds like you will be seeing a lot of Pac 12 and Big 12 football, so for example watching a game between Oregon(high-flying up-tempo spread offense) vs Stanford(traditional, power football with a defensive focus) is a lot of fun. In the NFL, everyone runs pretty similar styles. Sure there are different basic schemes, but nothing as drastic as watching a college team that lines up and runs 99% of the time, only passing a couple times a game(Navy, Georgia Tech, Air Force) vs a team that does the exact opposite, throwing 50+ times a game(Wash St, Texas Tech, Fresno, etc) . Just absolutely opposite ways to play football, and both can work just fine.

Seeing college teams that have glaringly obvious weaknesses, and then trying to work around that to succeed, really brings an extra level of fun to a game. There's college teams out there with QBs that can't hardly throw a forward pass, so they just run their QB like an extra running back most of the time. Or there are college teams that are small and undersized so they try to rely on their speed when they are drastically overmatched in the strength and size dept. Everything in the NFL is fairly vanilla by comparison because everyone is great at what they do. The difference in skill level between the best and worst NFL team is only a small fraction of the difference between the best and worst college teams.

Gravy_sl said:

As long as you arealways against anyKansas Univ. team, it's all good.

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also, always this. And you also never capitalize the word "kansas" because it is nothing even remotely resembling a proper place(noun).

The other fun part of college football is the roster turnover. Does your team have an all-world QB that can do everything? Well, you only got him for a couple years, tops. The fortunes of teams can drastically shift in short periods of time. This always gives bad teams hope, that they are 1 or 2 key recruits away from turning it all around.

The total mystery and sometimes randomness of new recruits is interesting too. Nobody really knows anything about most kids coming into college as Freshmen, only the really top-end recruits have much research done on them that is available to the public. So a college team is much more likely than an NFL team to have a guy seemingly come out of nowhere to be an incredible player. Also, a persons maturity and physical development changes much more drastically between the ages of 17-22 or so than they ever do at any point after that. If you have a team that you actually start to follow, seeing 17 year old puny recruits come in as Freshmen, and then put on 50lbs of muscle and grow a couple more inches by the time they are seniors is cool to see. Personally, I met Aldon Smith(pro-bowl DE for the 49ers now, former DE for the Missouri Tigers) when he was a 17 year old kid, his senior year in high school. Met him at a Mizzou recruiting event. He was a 6'2" beanpole, looked like a basketball player or WR he was so skinny, but had HUGE hands and long arms, so you knew he wasn't done growing. I bet he didn't weigh more than 210 lbs at that point. Fast forward 3 years and he's a stud player who is a top 10 NFL draft pick, doesn't even look like the same guy anymore once he got into a big time college weight and nutrition program for a couple years.

An NFL team might have 6 or 7 draft picks each year, 7 new guys out of a roster of 50+, but a college team is generally turning over 20-25% of their roster every single year.