College football fans deserve spring games. And especially fans of programs that tanked the end of their season like the Miami Hurricanes.
College football coaches are probably the most paranoid individuals on the face of the Earth. Coaches cover their mouths when making play calls, have dummy signalers on the sidelines, and lie on the injury report more than Tony Montana did on his tax forms.
Mario Cristobal is probably the perfect mixture of a Frankenstein’s monster of the cast of King of the Hill. He has the authoritarian traits of Hank Hill, side talks his way through injury details like Boomhauer, is living off glory days like a William Fontaine de La Tour Dauterive, and shares the paranoia of the media ala Dale Gribble.
Cristobal would rather play out his spring scrimmages from Mars than allow them to be televised. With the TV networks controlling college football, however, I wonder how much longer coaches will have the ability to dictate the spring game schedule. If CFB moves to the NFL model of an event every month coaches might lose this ability to decline to play a spring game with TV contracts taking over the sport.
I personally think spring games should be both public events and televised. If Nebraska coach Matt Rhule thinks he’s hiding info about potential portal prospects from his roster he’s lying to himself. Players already record and send around practice tape let alone a scrimmage tape via their phones. Not allowing other coaches to “see it on TV” doesn’t stop street agents from relaying messages and tape of their athletes they ‘represent.’
Keeping spring games off of TV and closed down to a small number of selected fans does allow Rhule, Cristobal, and other coaches to control the narrative of the spring game. Miami’s spring game, for instance, will be held on campus at Cobb Stadium in front of around 5,000 hand picked audience members. While 2024’s spring game was live on TV on the ACC Network, it hasn’t been announced if that will continue for 2025.
Cam Ward and the offense took the reigns of the ‘24 version and got us all very hyped, but with Caron Beck recovering from an elbow injury and a new defense being installed Cristobal may look to keep this one off of TV.
The spring game should be on TV. Coaches know their opponents aren’t picking up a single thing from a spring scrimmage that they don’t already have from prior film. What coaches don’t want is for potential spring transfer portal prospects to see a horrible game and decide against transferring at all, or at last to certain destinations. And while I get that, I don’t think it’s a viable reason to not have a major spring football game.
I’m a believer that fans deserve content. After a poor showing to end the 2024 season for Nebraska and Miami the head coaches that are making millions of dollars to lose to unranked teams should have their product put in front of the fans they expect to fund NIL pools, buy merchandise, and purchase season tickets. Scrutiny be damned.
Needless to say, two of the top programs in the country will have their spring games on TV in Notre Dame and Oregon. Michigan, the 2023 national champion, has also announced their TV time and day on the BTN. And Notre Dame played the longest season in college football history along with Ohio State.
What does a long season have to do with a spring game? ND’s athletes haven’t had the time to rest, recover, and develop in the off-season program like Miami has where they ‘Canes have been in the off-season program since the strawberry frosted Pop-Tart’s resurrection.
The spring games are a great hype moment for the sport of college football that programs can and should use to keep interest going through a long off-season and the doldrums of summer college football podcasts pontificating about games that won’t be played until we’re scouring Amazon for the perfect last minute holiday gift.
So college football coaches I ask that you keep spring games both live, and on TV.