Dumping Them Out: College Football BIG 10-SEC Challenge

10/05/2025 7:06 PM

Welcome back to another episode of Dumping Them Out. Happy Harold Fannin Jr. first touchdown in the NFL day to all Bowling Green Falcon fans out there #FalconsInTheNFL (good hashtag guys).

He's the first Bowling Green Falcon to score a touchdown in the NFL since… well I guess not that long ago. Apparently Scottie Miller (shoutout Scottie Miller) scored a couple TD's with the Steelers last year. But it means more when it's Harold Fannin. He's the first Bowling Green Falcon whose NFL career I've truly been excited about in my entire life. He's about to have an elite 10-15 year career as the hometown-ish kid (shoutout Canton) TE for the Cleveland Browns. An exceptional career where he never really gets a chance to play in any meaningful games, because it's the Browns, but is super reliable and whenever people talk about best TE's around the league, they'll say things like, "Harold Fannin is actually up there too", and "Yeah Fannin is good" and "Oh right I forgot about Harold Fannin."

I had a thought yesterday while watching college football, and following along with college football Twitter, and consuming all my favorite college football content. This thought applies to all sports, but it's most prevalent in college football. How long have we covered college football from the standpoint of… I'm gonna have a hard time putting this into words… but from the standpoint of "everybody is competing to be right."

The way everybody covers sports nowadays is that they give a take, then sit down and root for their take to be right. And if their take is wrong, they have to come up with a spin zone, or go online and eat crow. The people who's takes are wrong are then accused of the worst sin of them all - NOT KNOWING BALL

Maybe that comes with gambling being legalized. People want to have the best picks. Everybody now looks to "experts" who are supposed to know what's going to happen, so they can place bets based on their advice and make money. But you can know sports without knowing who's going to win a game. Nobody knows who's going to win a game, or cover a spread. That's the beauty of sports. It's been bothering me how so much of the college football content out there features people puffing their chest about what they were right about last week, what they KNOW is going to happen this week, which teams are 100% definitively GOOD or BAD, etc. It's nothing but people fighting to try and be the first one to predict how a team's season will end up (i.e. "ALABAMA IS DEAD" - sorry Brandon Walker), so at the end of the season they can brag that they knew it first. And by doing so, they "know ball" better than everyone else. There's obviously a place for all that, but nowadays it seems like that's the only thing people do. There's no nuance in college football discussion anymore. There are more ways to prove that you "know ball" by doing things other than predicting the future.

I would love for college football to carve out a week late in the season to do a "Big 10-SEC Challenge" week. I think that could help solve a lot of problems. Every year we spend all season arguing over who the best conference is. The Big 10 or the SEC. We can have a pretty good idea of how good the best teams are, but when we get down to the nitty gritty and start comparing wins, and debate which conference is tougher top to bottom, it just turns into one big war of hypotheticals. That's when you get people using the transitive property of who beat who to prove that Georgia would actually lose to San Jose State by 30.

But if we could have just one more weekend of data to work with, we could settle a lot of debates. The college football playoffs are inevitably going to come down to an argument between something like a 2-loss Indiana and a 3-loss Alabama. I say in Week 14, we take a look at the playoff picture and matchup whatever teams we think will answer the most questions. We could throw in teams from other conferences too and make it a whole "Bracket Busters Week" like they do in college basketball. Or do a separate Big 12-ACC Challenge. It would be so great if at the end of the season when we have all these questions and ideas about who teams really are, if we had the ability in real-time set up one week of games to help answer some of them.

Even the games between teams that aren't in playoff contention would be interesting and help settle some debates. I'm very interested in a matchup between Iowa and Auburn. Or Nebraska and Vanderbilt. If we're doomed to have this pissing match over "Should the Big 10 or SEC get more playoffs bids?" at the end of every season, the least we could do is force the conferences to play each other in meaningful games. It has to be late in the season too. Because by the end of the year, what happened in the first couple of weeks barely even matters. Ohio State could beat Texas by 100 points to open the season, but if by Week 14 Archie Manning is throwing for 400 yards a game and Texas looks unstoppable, that Week 1 result might as well not exist in the minds of fans (and probably voters).