We're going to get really wacky — I mean off-the-wall, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs style — and pretend that college sports have nothing to do with money.
I know this is like Tim Allen in a fat suit telling Judge Reinhold there's no such thing as Santa Claus, but bear with me. For the sake of argument, just imagine that there are no boosters, no betting, no extravagant television contracts driving the whole thing.
What would everyone be talking about this week? What game would have been deemed an "instant classic" five minutes before the final whistle?
No offense to the powerhouses out there, but I don't think this week's "must-see game" would have come from either Los Angeles or South Bend, but rather from Alliance, Ohio, where Division III Ohio Northern knocked off Mount Union, 21-14.
I know there are ad and TV executives whose heads explode at the prospect of televising or even caring about any pairing of the word "division" with any number not named "one," but something really big happened when Mount Union lost to the Polar Bears.
Not only did the Purple Raiders lose the game, but the defeat snapped a 110-game regular season winning streak that extended back to 1994.
According to our game of pretend, Saturday would have been a hugely historic day across the sports nation. The hallways would be abuzz with talk of what happened, passed along by bandwagon-jumping fans sporting "Purple Raiders" hats and sweatshirts.
Sports pages everywhere would be rife with lame headlines like "End of an era," and "Mount Union dominance frozen by Polar Bears." Talking heads on ESPN would be tripping all over themselves to either second-guess Mount Union or praise the incredible winning streak that had just ended.
In reality, however, most people don't even know that Mount Union exists, and that's because in reality, money drives everything in college football.
Television only pays to air games that garner big ratings because advertisers only pay big money for games that people are going to watch. People are more likely to watch games that are played well (and are worth betting on), and those games are usually played by schools that get lots of TV money.
This self-perpetuating cycle means that Division III programs remain invisible. Only when a Division III team does something "noteworthy" — and Mount Union's feat was only deemed as such when it finally came to an end — is it mentioned by the Big Media, and even then it is treated more like a quirky freak show exhibit than a real news event. "Come look at the bearded lady, the three-headed man-dog and a Division III athletic program that did something worth interrupting Chris Berman to report!"
The sad thing is, Mount Union did something truly great. People will scoff that they did it against a powderpuff DIII schedule, but even so. The team hadn't lost a regular-season game for 11 years, winning seven national championships during that stretch.
You can't buy greatness like that.
This article was published in The Marquette Tribune on October 25, 2005.