It's time to rethink the spring game

The various formats for college football's spring showcase are broken and boring -- and there are better, more viable alternatives out there that connect the sport to its fundamental appeal

Say what you will about Hugh Freeze, a man who messaged a sexual assault survivor to vigorously defend a man who oversaw one of the largest rape scandals in college football history, allegedly made female students uncomfortable with his inappropriate behavior when he taught and coached at a Memphis-area high school, got Ole Miss slapped with a slew of recruiting and academic violations after trying to pin many of those misdeeds on his predecessor and, perhaps most famously, used a university-issued phone to contact an escort service.

But every now and then, he’s capable of raising a good point.

While speaking with reporters earlier this month, the now-Auburn head coach pitched a proposal while discussing the Tigers’ upcoming spring game.

"The solution is: allow us to scrimmage somebody on A-Day. Another team,” Freeze said. “I think everybody would get out of it exactly what they want. And let's adopt a charity to give all the proceeds to... Let Alabama play Troy and we play UAB or vice versa, I don't care. People will come see that….You're decreasing your injury possibilities by 50%. Coaches are smart enough to control (the physicality) -- we're not going to hit each other's quarterbacks. I just think it would be great for the sport. I think it would be awesome. NFL gets to scrimmage against each other, high schools get to scrimmage against each other, and for the life of me I don't understand why we haven't gotten to the point where we can pull that off."

Aside from the dubious math on injuries – though as a product of Kentucky public schools, I’m not sure I’m confident enough to dispute it – Freeze has what seems to be a desirable solution to an ongoing problem, albeit one that’s relatively small in the grand scheme of things that ail the world.

Even for some of the sport’s biggest sickos, college football spring games are a thoroughly underwhelming, uninspired exercise.

The stakes are non-existent. The formats can vary tremendously and none of them are especially enthralling. Some teams, for example, will swap players between teams over the course of the game while others have an offense-versus-defense model that winds up with a scoring model for one side that can be difficult for even ardent fans to grasp. The final scores can be comically low, like Florida’s (10-7) and Penn State’s (10-0) this year. Even the promise of a warm, sunny and idyllic spring day as the backdrop doesn’t always come to fruition, particularly in certain parts of the country.  

The reason for their existence is easy enough to understand – so many of us are starved for football with the start of the actual season still nearly five months away – but there’s little appeal to spring games beyond that. As we see with so many upstart spring leagues, not all football is good, worthwhile football. In many ways, spring games are like honeydew in a fruit salad – it’s sort of just there to take up otherwise empty space.

Granted, spring practices serve a vital role for programs. There’s a reason they’ve been occurring in some capacity since the 1880s. With an increasing number of transfers and early enrollees, it’s a valuable opportunity for coaches to work with new players and help returning ones develop while players can jump-start the team-building and bonding process while giving their coaches an early peek at what they might be able to provide next season.

For those who consume the sport, much of that work takes place in the proverbial shadows beyond carefully selected video clips and unimaginative, formulaic media coverage about how certain players are in the best shape of their life and how the team’s going to turn some heads next season (and believe me, I’ve been guilty of penning such pieces over the course of my career; spring ball does it to the best of us). The spring game is meant to be the grand finale, the unveiling that serves as a payoff for fans and players alike.

It so rarely is, though, to the point where it typically feels like a chore. Coaches don’t want to show their schematic hand too much with the season-opener still months away. Players don’t want to run the risk of a silly and unnecessary injury. Both parties are completely justified feeling the way they do.

But in one of the country’s most popular sports, shouldn’t we strive for more? If something is so obviously broken, shouldn’t there be a devoted search for fixes? The NFL has excelled in recent years by making what was once a fall and early winter sport a year-round obsession by turning events as drab as the scouting combine and schedule release into fixtures that become appointment viewing for their fans. Spring football, and spring games specifically, could be that for the college game.

Some might argue that these games have inherent value and they generate sufficient interest as they are. Over the past two weeks, Ohio State (75,422 fans), Penn State (63,000), Tennessee (58,473), Georgia (54,458) and South Carolina (51,000) have all attracted crowds of more than 50,000 for their spring game. Colorado’s spring game Saturday has been sold out for weeks, with more than 50,000 fans slated to attend a game with $10 tickets after just 1,950 showed up last year, when there was no charge.

However, excluding the Buffs, many of those schools are only filling up a fraction of their palatial stadiums that are almost always packed for games of consequence. Perhaps if there was a more compelling reason to go to these exhibitions, those empty seats and bleachers would be occupied.

All of this brings us back to Freeze’s suggestion, which seems like the most viable and straightforward scenario for an improved spring football product.

Turning these events from intrasquad scrimmages into matchups between programs sharing the same state or region would add previously non-existent intrigue. It could revive dormant series, with a larger state school competing against a smaller neighbor in a game that could, for one day, divide families, friend groups and households. It would provide the bigger program with the chance to be a good neighbor, it would give the Group of Five or FCS opponent a bigger stage than it would otherwise get outside of the regular season and, most of all, it would give those in the state a reason to care – much more than a nameless, faceless foe or, especially, a team playing against itself would.

For a second, imagine some of the pairings we could see. Alabama and UAB, separated by only about 50 miles, could square off. Ohio State could play one of any handful of MAC schools that reside in the Buckeye State or, in a potentially fun twist, play Division III powerhouse Mount Union. LSU and Tulane, former SEC rivals, could reignite something that was lost long ago.

Naturally, putting all of these arrangements together isn’t so simple.

For one, many of these schools haven’t played against one another for decades, with the more prominent local power often tossing out an avalanche of flimsy reasons for why such a game could never happen. Alabama hasn’t played an in-state school other than Auburn since Oct. 1944 and Auburn, the theoretical laboratory for Freeze’s idea, has played UAB only once while never lining up against Troy or South Alabama. Georgia has never played Georgia State. LSU hasn’t met up with Tulane or Louisiana since 2009. Florida State has never played Florida International or Florida Atlantic and has only gone against Central Florida once, back in 1995. Texas hasn’t played Houston since 2002 or SMU since 1995, though the former will soon be changing, albeit temporarily, with both programs in the Big 12 for the 2023 season.

For the metaphorical Davids in these meetings with Goliath, there has to be enough of an enticement, as well. Being paid to go on the road and play these teams like they would during a regular season buy game would be a start. But for programs that have been itching to play the state’s flagship school for years, if not generations, why should they settle for a glorified scrimmage? Perhaps a clause could be built into these deals that would add a future regular-season game or, better yet, a multi-game series.

NCAA rules presently don’t allow FBS teams to play one another in the spring, but as we’ve seen in recent years with college sports’ governing body, existing rules and norms are hardly etched in stone. In January, the NCAA permitted Division II schools to scrimmage in the spring, with certain provisions attached.

The most unavoidable anxiety for many of these exhibitions – the fear of injury, especially to a prominent player – could be mitigated by having the quarterbacks wear red jerseys like they do in practice to indicate they can’t be touched. It’s possible starters could only appear in the first half, before backups get their chance and earn some live, potentially valuable reps in the rare game-like situation in the spring. Unseemly as it would be to some that college athletes who aren’t employees risk harm to their bodies in a game that doesn’t even matter, maybe name, image and likeness opportunities could be built into it, from sponsorships to autograph sessions after the matchup.

It’s an imperfect solution to an imperfect setup that comes from a particularly imperfect messenger. But if a captivating, unapologetically regional sport doesn’t have an equally captivating, unapologetically regional spring showcase, shouldn’t there at least be some effort and imagination to change that?