Alabama Football: You can’t make college football fair

Alabama football will always have an unfair advantage

We are once again experiencing life with Alabama football at the top of the world. After dominating all season, Alabama capped off a year for the ages with an emphatic win over the Ohio State Buckeyes.

Now that Alabama is back on top, the narrative has taken an unsurprising turn. Pundits are discussing how we can balance the powers in college football to make the sport fairer. They want parity in the sport, which sounds nice. Here’s the problem: you can’t make college football fair. It is unfair at its roots.

This doesn’t sound right at first. After all, there are ways to provide parity in other sports. all professional leagues give bad teams better draft picks. The NBA and NFL have salary caps to help small-market teams. The NFL gives teams with better records a tougher schedule in the following season, and all teams have the flexibility to pivot out of a bad situation with trades.

That works in pro sports, but you can’t do anything like that in college. No one bats an eye when the best player in the draft gets sent to the worst team because they are making millions of dollars. This doesn’t work when you are talking about a kid’s professional future and education. When all you give them is a scholarship and the potential to make money in the future, you can’t force someone to go to a bad team. They have to have the freedom to choose their own school, and changing scholarships would hurt that. If you force a student to pick Vanderbilt or Arkansas because Alabama football had too few scholarships, you are doing that person a disservice.

Also, every professional team is filled with professional players. When you only have 30 or 32 teams, a few changes can make all the difference in the world. Even if you look at the 65 Power 5 schools and exclude the AAC, you don’t have enough talent to distribute evenly. You can fix the New York Jets in just a few years with the right moves. Vanderbilt would need a decade of progress to even compare to the other schools in the SEC.

So, what else can you do? You could impact schedules, but that wouldn’t make a difference. Since the gap in talent is so wide, you can’t use the overall records to determine the best in the sport. The CFP selection committee has to use the eye test, so forcing tough teams to play each other might actually help them make the CFP.

The only other thing you can attack is spending. You could theoretically put a cap on spending for each team to keep donors from flooding to certain schools, but that wouldn’t have a major impact. Recruits would still choose to play for the Crimson Tide due to Nick Saban and the tradition of the program. If anything, you would have to gift weaker schools more money just to compete with what Alabama can do.

It might not be fair, but college sports will never be fair. If anything, Nick Saban’s success with Alabama football shows the blueprint for what a successful program should strive to do. The NCAA will never punish the Tide for dominating, and the narrative has no merit.