Football players could pay price for end to ‘cream puff’ games

This Saturday is a rest stop for some major college football programs — a breather, a chance to field freshmen and a time for starters to exhale from the grind of the season. The top players can go to the sidelines for the fourth quarter of a lopsided win for a break just before the last two weeks of the season. Fans who are season ticket holders and not much interested in watching Charleston Southern vs. Georgia, Western Carolina vs. Alabama, Samford vs. Auburn or South Alabama vs. South Carolina will likely give their tickets away to friends, colleagues or family.

But if the caretakers of college football — the television executives, conference officials, College Football Playoff advisers and Division I football coaches — have their way, then these “gimme” or “cream puff” games will be scaled back. This is the first season of the College Football Playoff, and there is already considerable debate over strength of schedule and how schools need to prove themselves with tougher schedules to be selected for the new four-team playoffs. The committee that picks the final four for the postseason (and ranks the top 25 for the lucrative New Year’s Day bowls) has said that it will look favorably on schools that play competitive nonconference games.

But how many tough games can major college football players, 18 to 22 years old, handle? If easy games are replaced by tough games, there might be a physical price to play for young athletes.

“If you were to bring a Florida State or Ohio State in there on top of the SEC conference schedule, that’s a little ridiculous,” said Patrick DiMarco, a fullback for the Atlanta Falcons who played at the University of South Carolina from 2007 to 2010. “You would be physically beat up. What if we started the season with a Mississippi State, then a Georgia and then a team from another big conference? That’s too much. It’s almost like playing an NFL schedule.

“Players in college don’t have the resources, like these cold tubs, to recover from physical games like we do in the NFL.”

The college game has become a game of bigger and faster players hitting each other in the open field with the advent of the spread offense. Conferences have started the season earlier and scheduled in two bye weeks for some of their teams to allow players to recover physically. Yet there is still a grind from 14 weeks of football when players practice or play six days a week and also go to class full time. 

“One of the hugest parts of my job and responsibility is player safety. And when you play the type of schedule we play and because we’re not professional athletes and have a maximum 20 hours workweek, we can’t prepare our guys to play at the level of intensity that maybe the NFL can afford to do,” said the Arkansas coach Bret Bielema. “[Safety] does become real. At my old place [Wisconsin], we knocked off No. 1 Ohio State and went on the road and beat Iowa, which I believe was a top 10 team. And the next week we had a bye week. If we had had to play a game that bye week, we would have had as many as 12 starters down.”

Before the season, ESPN polled Division I college football coaches from the Power 5 — the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12 Conference, Big Ten Conference, Pac-12 Conference and Southeastern Conference — about playing only a Power 5 schedule. The top 65 schools against the top 65. Thirty coaches were in favor of schedules in which the big schools only played one another and did not play schools in the Football Championship Series or smaller Division I conferences called Group of 5.

Alabama coach Nick Saban has said several times that the fans need to be rewarded for their support with as many competitive high-major games as possible. Saban wants big against big.

There are like-minded coaches, such as Texas’ Charlie Strong, who said, “I don’t think the players are concerned about who they are playing. They just want to make sure they go out and compete.”

Michael Bennett, a senior receiver at Georgia, said the SEC, which is regarded as the most physical conference in college football because of its run-first style of play, should play nine conference games, not eight.

“We’ve all gotten accustomed to the tough schedule,” he said. “I wish I could have played in every single SEC stadium. I wish I could have played in Alabama’s stadium. I wish I could have played in LSU’s stadium or Texas A&M. We like the challenge.”

Greg Pyke, a sophomore offensive guard for Georgia, had to think a moment about a ninth SEC game. “Whew!” he said. “I don’t know. I’m in the training room a lot getting rehab and just trying to keep my body together. As an offensive lineman, you are in the trenches taking those hits, and you have to do it every week. You just have to manage your body until you get to the offseason and can fully heal, because you can’t get 100 percent during the season. If we added another Power 5 before the SEC schedule, you would have to really take care of your body.”

Prince Shembo, an Atlanta Falcons rookie linebacker who played at Notre Dame from 2010 to 2013, said adding more big-time opponents to the already tough schedule for the Fighting Irish would be a challenge, but he said it’s nothing like what basketball players have to endure.

“Think about them and playing two games on the road during the week and what the travel does to you,” he said. “So another tougher game is no excuse. A game is a game. You have to prepare. You have to do rehab even if it wasn’t a physical game. It’s football.”

Levine Toilolo, the Falcons’ tight end, played for Stanford from 2009 to 2010. He said college football needs occasional one-sided games so starters can exit the game early. The games against smaller schools early in the season build chemistry and restore timing lost with the offseason and allow younger players to get playing time.

James Stone, the starting center for the Atlanta Falcons in the NFL, played at the University of Tennessee on the offensive line from 2010 to 2013. He earned his degree in communications in four years while starting 39 games. He said the grind of college football should not be ignored by the schedulers.

“It’s already a pretty strenuous schedule for any player in a Power 5 conference. You have tests for class, then practice, then games,” he said. “I’m sure guys would learn to adapt to it. You learn a work ethic with football, but it would definitely be a challenge. Injuries, maybe little things, become more and more serious because you can never fully recover. That’s how it goes.”

Stone said major schools should not cheat players from smaller schools out of the chance to play on a big stage against an SEC school. “For one thing, you better not go to sleep on the smaller schools, because they play hard,” he said. “For another thing, they have good players who want to play in a big stadium and play on TV. They want to show what they got.”

He considered playing a Power 5 team from another major conference in September before the gauntlet of Florida, Alabama, Georgia and the rest.

“If you start with a major school like a Southern Cal or Nebraska instead of playing a small in-state school, then the SEC, that would be a hard season,” he said. “No way to sugar-coat it.”