ONE LAST NOTE ON BORING REGULATORY COMMITTEES

We know everyone outside of the USC fanbase wants to see USC get hammered by the NCAA. SImple animal psychology plays a part here. You want to see the big lobster--the one running around the tank bashing everyone around with its big lucky claws and getting all the fine lobsterette ass--have its moment of weakness when the other lobsters, hungry and angry, can creep in unafraid and triumphant from the corners when it sits stripped of all protection in the corners. We root for comeuppance not out of any sense of justice, but out of a natural instinct to see the successful ground into powder for our entertainment. 

It's monkey-psych (or lobster psych) 101, and we're passing with flying colors thanks to a lifelong disposition toward spite and the endorsement of mob violence. Dismissing this love of large things being destroyed, the issue of the NCAA's involvement in regulating college football remains something you have to explain not only to outsiders, but often to adherents of this fine church itself. 

We have no pope. For sports Catholics, there's MLB and the NFL. Major League Baseball is akin to the Catholic Church back when the Medici got syphilitic madmen appointed to the position, a corrupted and decrepit empire with frequent insane rulings handed down godlike from on high. The NFL is the Catholic Church under its best, most iron-fisted of popes, ever-mindful of the details right down to the color of the trim in ceremonies, and always infallible. The NBA is Hinduism, a shifting flash of multiple gods (West/Russell/Erving/Bird/Jordan/O'Neal/Bryant/Vishnu) on parade. 

The NCAA does not rule college football so much as occasionally come in with a general consensus on when and where the fatwa comes down. They remain only as powerful as their constituent schools let them be, and certainly no more. They hold no grand cards like they do in basketball with the tourney, and have no Pope or great Leviathan to lord over the sport. In terms of structure, fervor, and chaos, we work with a basic text that everyone rules a little differently. 

In short, we're Protestants, forever bickering over the interpretation of these things and nursing the kind of curious grudges only sectarians can nurse. When the ruling comes down, guess who's going to like it? By definition, no one, because that is the nature of group decisions. Everyone. Hates. Them.  

Still, fractious as it is, the loose arrangement does sort of kind of sometimes work. Large schools do get punished, and an uneasy built-in incentive to snitch keeps schools at each other's throats in the way that it big rivals in any situation should be positioned. We're still not totally sure what the NCAA actually does, but our old assertion that it actually does next to nothing is inaccurate. It does little, but that little may be enough to give college football a regulatory framework that contains activity that would otherwise be complete chaos.

(Besides, how American is it to have a king, anyway?)