Last year, in a bit of a creative vomiting, I wrote down a ton of ideas for a series of blog posts called "Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Football." While some of my ideas were interesting to say the least, there is something I find rather intriguing regarding my plans for "Earth-4000." In my typed notes, I sketched a rough timeline for playing NFL football in the fall and NCAA football beginning about a week after the Super Bowl. Now that I review my ideas again, I find them to have some merit, along with a number of terrifying drawbacks.
Should the universe align for this type of setup, the entire year becomes a staggeringly packed feast of pigskins and potato chips, dramatic football nearly every weekend. Spacing the schedule out would allow summer holidays to be adorned with the likes of Ohio State and Alabama, Memorial Day weekend hosting conference championships and the College Football Playoff finals moving six months from their current spot in January to the Fourth of July. The NFL starts up again in early August with the preseason, giving the United States of Football only a month of pigskin-less weekends each calendar year. NFL coaches could focus themselves by worrying only about their teams during the season, while saving the spring for scouting.
Of course, while this idea would be fun for a little while, the sports-loving world would get burnt-out on football by, say, 2025 or so. Even though football is fun, the nation would be unable to sustain a year-round Super Bowl party in perpetuity. I'm not so sure the NFL would be pleased by the idea either. Part of its success is based on offseason coverage of events like free agency, the combine, and the NFL Draft. Where would the media look if the NFL Draft was Thursday night but Auburn played Alabama on Saturday afternoon? It'd definitely be interesting, but if Alabama's defensive star gets drafted a mere 48 hours prior to facing Auburn, would he really give up millions to play in a rivalry game?
That brings us to perhaps the biggest drawback of them all: nostalgia. The Iron Bowl is always played on Thanksgiving weekend. Army and Navy square off each fall in one of the most traditional rivals in existence. And even if the Rose Bowl is swallowed by the College Football Playoff, can we really imagine it being played in the heat of June or July instead of early January? So while the idea I came up with here is an intriguing one, I think it's best to leave spring football to the USFL and XFL, professional leagues that entertain us, but are less traditional and do somewhat less business, giving them the elasticity to schedule during a conventionally non-football time of year. If nothing else, at least they let us explore the possibilities of spring football without fundamentally altering our (sports) world. College football in the spring just won't work. It's too much to destroy not only the fabric of the sport, but also the business models of some of the biggest, most successful leagues on the planet.
