One Horrible CFB Change Too Many

*You can create a 5th BCS bowl by stiffing any number of the good non BCS bowls and instead having a ridiculous 2 Fiesta Bowls this year, the 2nd of which serves at the national championship game and doesn't even have a name really.

*You can sell the TV rights for the BCS Bowls (except the Rose) to Fox Sports through 2010, ensuring that I have to put up with stupid robot graphics, unneccessary sound effects every 14 seconds, and a giant arrow superimposed on the field every play showing down, distance, and the direction the offense is going (if there is a single man, woman, or child who watches a football game and can't figure out which way the offense is trying to go when both teams are lined up then I would be stunned, yet Fox persists with the giant arrow anyways).

*You can change the rules of the game to cut out 10-12% of football as a reaction to the fact that game times became excessive due to added commercials, which of course were not limited.

*You can create a new replay system where every major play is reviewed, more than half rather needlessly and for way too long, which kills momentum for teams and fans at the stadium and irritates knowledgeable fans watching on TV.

*You can create a new "Coaches Challenge" rule for instant replay which approaches absolute zero on the intelligence scale by only allowing 1 per game and only if you have a timeout.

*You can slowly erode ESPN GameDay from great must see TV to barely better than shit, and cap it of with a fundamental change whereby they no longer go to the best game of the week but rather whatever game happens to be on their showcase network, resulting in them overly hyping USC-Nebraska last week, a game where SC was favored by 17 points, while passing on Auburn-LSU, Notre Dame-Michigan, Louisville-Miami or Tennessee-Florida, all of which were better games with more evenly matched good teams.

OK. None of these are anything approaching good, but I can turn the other cheek and tolerate them because my love of CFB is big enough that as much as you lessen it's greatness it is still pretty damn good.

But you cannot take our beloved Ron Franklin, the best CFB announcer out there, and remove him from the ESPN Saturday night feature game that he has been calling since I was a wee lad. This is just too damn much. It's unacceptable.

Ron Franklin is the best voice in CFB by a mile, and he certainly is the voice of the big Saturday night game on ESPN. My sis donned him "Uncle Ron" about 10 years ago because his voice is so great and comforting/comfortable that he sounds like your favorite uncle calling the game for you at a weekly family gathering. As damn near all things ESPN related have turned to complete and utter shite around him the last 15 years, he had remained one of the very few great things that remain at now-shittastic ESPN.


A Saturday night institution no more.

Franklin was pulled from the Sat. evening primetime game, which most weeks is one of the best games of the week, and has been moved to the late afternoon slot on ESPN2; he has been replaced by former ESPN NFL Sunday Night Football announcer Mike Patrick. So last week Ron was relegated to the utterly meaningless (sorry BON) Texas-Rice late afternoon game on ESPN2 while Mikey Patrick got the ESPN primetime matchup of FSU-Clemson.

Now Patrick is by no means horrible, he is actually pretty good, but this it is just wrong to have him doing this game instead of RF. It would be one thing if Franklin's contract expired and he moved to another network, but it hasn't and he hasn't. And it is not like Franklin has gotten so old that he has lost his sharpness a la Keith Jackson, who last year could not longer correctly tell if a field goal was good or not until Dan Fouts corrected his mistakes. Dude is as on top of his game as ever.

Another thing that makes this move terrible is that the Sat night primetime game on ESPN is usually a good SEC matchup or great ACC matchup, but almost always a big matchup involving football in the deep South. Franklin has a distinctly Southern voice (he is an Ole Miss grad) - not rednecky, but rather that of a Southern gentleman - which fits perfectly with a big night game atmosphere from Baton Rouge, Tuscaloosa, Auburn, Athens, Gainesville, Tallahassee, Clemson, Knoxville, Oxford, Fayetteville, Columbia, etc, etc. Mike Patrick's voice is distinctly NOT Southern - I don't know where he is from but my guess would be Northeast or Midwest. Either way, the distinct Yankee-ness of his voice is misfit and out of place for these games when compared to the perfect fit of Franklin's.

Of all the changes in college football this year, this one pisses me off the most, which is a pretty massive statement considering the other changes, especially the clock rule.

ESPN is evil - they might as well just go ahead and put me out of my misery by abandoning their horse racing talent and coverage, and replacing Andy Katz with Seth Davis, thereby destroying the only 2 good things remaining over there.