College Football Championship

More than anything, I watch English Premier League soccer. I have a huge AT&T Uverse package to watch as much European soccer as I can. Along with all the other activities I have going on, I have little time for much other tv watching. But I do my best to watch LSU football. And since the LSU Tigers are facing the Clemson Tigers in the college football championship tomorrow, I could take some time to contemplate sports writing.

Since the championship match-up has been set, I've been checking in on what writers have to say about it. I've looked at South Carolina newspapers, with little of the biased coverage that I expected. I've checked in on Baton Rouge and New Orleans writing, with all of the bias to LSU that I expect. I go to ESPN every day to read about something, and mostly I'm underwhelmed with what I find there. But today I read a lengthy and detailed analysis that is worth sharing.

College football championship--LSU-Clemson analysis, prediction, and more from Bill Connelly from ESPN provided more substantial writing than I have yet to encounter on the topic. Maybe that's what's been most disappointing. I feel like I've been hit with more analytical writing on the wild card match-ups in the NFL than in the actual college football championship.

I feel like Bill Connelly produced one of those detail-oriented, statistics-heavy, jargon-rich lengthy pieces that we used to get from Bill Simmons, and which I loved so much. I can remember, as a college freshman in 1999, tearing out Bill Simmons' articles from the actual ESPN The Magazine, to post on my dorm room wall. I love Bill Simmons' writing so much, and while I don't encounter the same voice here, Connelly does have some of the pieces that left me satisfied after having read for multiple sittings.

I've checked fivethirtyeight.com (Nate Silver) and theringer.com (Bill Simmons) and have been significantly underwhelmed. Fivethirtyeight is focused on politics and the NFL right now, and The Ringer is full on with NFL and NBA coverage. Both of those focal points should be assumptions, given who is driving the car, but I guess I would just like to see more substantial coverage of college football. Is that too much to ask?

At the end of the day, more than wanting a good football game, I want LSU to win. I'm highly biased. I'm highly invested. I can't justify it, but I could say that I need an LSU win. That wouldn't be true, but it would feel true. And that's a bit of a problem, right? When I feel like I need a time to win a game to be happy, I've got problems. I have even more problems when I'm complaining about the media coverage of said game and team.