Up Is Down, Black Is White, Poop Is Fried Chicken

If this is college football's New World Order, they forgot our goddamn fries.

The Bible teaches us that, in order for one to prosper, another must suffer. It's what keeps Americans in the finest, most brightly colored Crocs, and Sierra Leoneans in, I don't know, probably those hideous Uggs from three Christmases ago. The Word is just as inerrant in college football, where national powers have dominated at the expense of downtrodden, AIDS-infected poor-people programs for decades. Only now a seismic shift is taking place, with insurgent teams terrorizing highlights shows and opinion polls while once great empires crumble under the duress of the jock jihad.

Heartwarming human interest story, or threat to democracy? I be the judge¿

The Armageddon Conference

OLD EUROPE DIVISION

COLORADO: Like the French, it’s a marvel how this rentier-class program of (coke)spoonfed trustafarians ever achieved empire status. The anuses-up surrender of the program this season now makes the point moot. New Mascot: Raphael, the Bouffant Buffalo

FLORIDA STATE: You could once set your watch by the Seminoles’ perennial top-five finishes. You know who sets watches? Swiss. New Team Name: Switzernoles

GEORGIA: No one’s more overdue for a national championship. Though England seems to be doing just chippy without a major victory the last 200 years. New Mascot: British Bulldawg.

MIAMI: Once looked like college football’s world police winning five national championships. This year looked like a fusty superpower in decline trying to start a new war for attention against Florida International University. New Team Name: Project for the New American Century


AXIS OF EVIL DIVISION

RUTGERS: Went from one of college football’s two most Babylonian programs (birthed the first football game ever against Princeton in 1869) to one of its most wretched (birthed an 0¿11 mud snake in 1997), until madman-despot Greg Schiano made them a force in the Middle East¿ern part of New Jersey. New Team Name: Schiano’s Shiites.

WAKE FOREST: The Deacons have taken their holy war national, first outlasting border conflicts in the ACC and now holding college football hostage with the threat of weapons of mass reduction (in TV viewership). New Mascot: Nielson ratings box with a nail bomb strapped around its waist

BAYLOR: The fact that it’s November and these Wahhabi Muslims of American parochial Division I-A universities aren’t yet mathematically eliminated from winning the Big 12 South is a testament to our descent as a superpower. New Team Name: Burqa Bears

ARKANSAS STATE: Lost amid the media furor over programs like Rutgers and Wake Forest because the Sun Belt is doody times eight are the 5¿3 Indians, college football’s 102nd-ranked team since 1999. What’s it take to get some respect around here, a fucking nuke? New Team Mascot: Bad haircut

Now, I don't mean to suggest that Rutgers, Wake Forest and their recently resurgent brethren in the struggle are evil¿I mean to scream it implicitly. As heartening a story as these previously disenfranchised rankings refugees have become this season, they ultimately spell the impending end of college football as we’ve known it the last 70 years. And this is no desperate roar of alarmism from a washed-up columnist who was never washed-down to begin with. With the parity that gave rise to these programs firmly established, the very notion of an undefeated season will be a distant antiquity 10 to 15 years from now. After countless years without so much as a single undefeated team to distinguish an obvious pack leader, popular impetuousness will demand a playoff, destroying the most meaningful, most exhilarating regular season in all of organized sports, and finally giving basketball fans dressed in football jerseys the postseason they’ve earned through unrelenting whining the last decade. And thanks to scholarship limits, sending in more troops to reinforce programs like Miami and Alabama is not an option.

You gridiron Marxists can talk about what a triumph of the long oppressed this season has been, but will you be there when the Deacs take on the Scarlet Knights on New Year’s Day? Not bloody likely. Advance congratulations on getting your playoff, assholes. And all you had to do was kill capitalism, freedom and democracy to do it.