College Football Preseason Award Watchlists Are A (Dumb) Thing

For all the justifiable heat it draws as a bloated, corrupt mess of an institution, one of college football's very best qualities is its sustained effort to remind everyone how dumb it is.

Case in point: Preseason award watchlists. There is a made-up season devoted to this, the random aggregation of everyone in the same galactic orbit of contention for prizes that won't be decided for another six months, or formally awarded for nine. And it just so happens that today is that made-up season's Festivus.

Sports Information Directors throughout the country have breathlessly spammed their list-serves with fresh copies of the watchlists for the Maxwell and Bednarik Awards, given to the nation's best offensive and defensive players respectively. Normally, of course, there is some degree of hyperbole associated with the phrase "throughout the country." Not so much today, though, because together those two lists feature a whopping 164 names, culled from more than 80 FBS schools.

Having cast such a wide net, it's unclear what exactly the awards committee will be watching. Taken on face value, the only mandate those lists have issued is that it's wise to turn on any game, at any time, in which there is an above-average player competing at an offensive skill position or at any defensive position whatsoever. In some cases, it isn't even that defined; all three quarterbacks in Ohio State's hydra are on the Maxwell list, which reads something like, "Eh, we don't know who will get the job, either, but whoever it is probably won't suck." Which, fair, but also not necessarily instructive.

This is prognostication reimagined as rapid-fire Tinder swipes, which is to say it's less an exercise in discernment than crossing one's fingers and hoping a wide-enough candidate pool will eventually produce a match. Unsurprisingly, this fails as often as it succeeds; USC's Marqise Lee was initially left off the preseason watchlist for the Biletnikoff Award – given to the nation's best wide receiver – in 2012, only to smash Pac-12 records and win it in a landslide. The only thing more stupid than that is the fact that he was actually added to the watch list a day after it was released, because enough people wigged out about the idea of an arbitrary, meaningless exercise being rendered even more arbitrary and meaningless.

No one should be talking about any of this, in other words. It does not merit a single character on a fluorescent screen or a drop of ink spilled onto a printing press; it sure as hell does not warrant the inevitable deluge of #content that follows that initial list spamming. It is no coincidence, then, that this has gone down during the single least interesting time of year on the college football calendar, those hazy weeks between mid-June and mid-July.

And yet, here I am, vomiting more characters about it. I am, point in fact, talking about preseason award watchlists, the way so many other writers and fans are today. Perhaps the college football machine is smarter than we give it credit for. Either that, or we're all dumber than we'd hoped.