If you’re a college football fan, this is the greatest time of year. For the next four weeks, your sport will offer a slate of 33 different consolation games, all disguised as significant NCAA showdowns, thanks to corporate sponsors and one catchy word: Bowl. Who isn’t looking forward to seeing Marshall face Ohio in the Little Caesars Bowl? Or how about Bowling Green vs. Idaho in the Roady’s Humanitarian Bowl?

In short, the joke that is college football is funniest this time of year. In the NFL, playoff races are heating up. The league is boiling down to 12 teams who will all enter the mid-January tournament with a legitimate shot at a title. In college, of course, there is no tournament. But, in addition to the championship, there are four particular bowl games that we’re told to care about. They’re known as the BCS bowls. On the line in the Sugar Bowl between Florida and Cincinnati is….(drum roll)….second place! (Or third or fourth place, depending on how voters vote after the BCS title game.)

And speaking of that BCS title game, isn’t it great that both Alabama and Texas will have more than a month to prepare? Entire playbooks can be re-written in that amount of time. Momentum becomes irrelevant. So do a lot of injuries that are supposed to be a natural part of the game.

I live in Boise, a low-minor league sports Mecca in Idaho that believes itself to be a true college football town. Whenever someone I meet finds out that I write about football for a living, they tell me they don’t much follow the pro game, but they really like college. (By the way, if all these Boiseans were speaking the truth, No. 6-ranked Boise State wouldn’t have trouble selling out Bronco Stadium on a weekly basis. But I digress…)

Inevitably, these college football lovers will explain to me how their game is great because the athletes aren’t getting paid. The athletes, apparently, play only for the love of the game. I always smirk when I hear this. Most college football players are on scholarship. It’s not the same as multimillion-dollar contract, I know, but do you think the typical college star would be willing to play as a walk-on? Or, do you believe the really good ones aren’t thinking about helping their NFL draft stock? A football player’s performance in 2009 will get him paid in 2010. First-round NFL rookies earn far more than most NFL veterans. Thus, a lot of the college players that people really care about – the stars – are actually playing for more money than the pros.

Why criticize NFL players for making good money, anyway? Name one other line of work – besides Wall Street investor – that gets condemned for making good money. Do people label lawyers or doctors as spoiled, overpaid jerks? Do they harbor more respect for law school students or med students because they’re, after all, not getting paid and therefore practicing their craft purely for the love of it? Top Hollywood actors have more zeroes at the end of their paychecks than do top NFL athletes. So do big-time musicians. But we never hear any complaints about of them.

The assumption that pro athletes are spoiled while college players are wholesome young men who play for the love of the game is embarrassingly naïve. Ever seen the way football players are treated on a college campus? They’re royalty. And, being 18-21 years old, they know it. Often, the confined world of campus life only augments the outrageous egos of college players.

Sadly, I’ve learned over the years that defending NFL players’ salaries and attitudes in an argument with a college football fan is fruitless. Ninety nine percent of college football fans are not multimillionaires and therefore refuse to consider a pro athlete’s perspective.

Fine. There are plenty of other reasons college football stinks. Take the length of a game. A football game lasts a long time. A college football game lasts forever. The clock stops on seemingly every imaginable occasion. Defenders of these rules love to say that it allows for a team to make a comeback. It would, if the scheduling process were fair. But, often, the clock stoppage just allows a powerhouse school to run the score up on a cupcake school that agreed to humiliate its players for an early-season appearance fee.

If the clock stoppage isn’t bad enough, how about wide hash marks that disrupt offensive formations and unjustly force defenses to cover an extra wide side of a field? Or how about a player who only has to get one foot in bounds to make a catch? That flawed rule could accurately read as follows: If one foot is out of bounds, it’s a catch. Ridiculous.

Or how about a roster that has more players than jersey numbers allotted? Good luck following your favorite college team in-depth. By the time you learn all 100 members, a fourth of them graduate and a new fourth comes in. No one learns all 100 members of a team anyway because, often times, only about 35 of the member consistently get on the field. And of those 35, only a small handful are good enough to continue playing after they graduate.

And herein lies my number one beef with college football: lack of talent. I was at NFL Films in October. Some of the broadcasters there were talking about how one of their colleagues had grown frustrated with having to watch so much college film. That colleague explained his frustration perfectly: “In college,” he said “there just aren’t very many good players.”