I miss great teams to hate. I miss creaky characters to love. I miss familiar fight songs and enduring stadiums and Bevo.

This college football season, I really miss college football.

And I’m not alone.

“Parity in college football is great for the coaches and players, but you have to look at the reality of it,” said Bob Davie, former Notre Dame coach and current ESPN broadcaster. “From a television and fan perspective, you need the traditional powers to be strong.”

College football needs USC and Notre Dame to be good like baseball needs the New York Yankees to be good.

College football needs Alabama and Penn State to be strong like basketball needs the Lakers to be strong.

Does college football really need third-ranked Boston College to play for a national title after a schedule that includes Army, Massachusetts and Bowling Green?

Does college football really need Steve Spurrier throwing down his visor for a school known as the Gamecocks?

And can’t college football just ship eighth-ranked Kentucky to Dick Vitale?

“The new kids on the block are nice, but they will always be fighting credibility,” Davie said. “They will always be met with high doses of skepticism.”

College football needs Goliaths, it needs George Gipps — it doesn’t need teams that make us feel like we’ve been gypped.

You know you’ve got a loser of an argument when your main quotes for support are Bob Davie and Beano Cook.

Why not just hand the fucking BCS trophy to whatever powerful team happens to come out of the SEC or Pac-10, regardless of how many losses they have? Again, there has been really nothing better than this complete clusterfuck that all the upsets have caused this year. It only fuels the annual debate that is college football, where if you have more than one loss, you’re not winning the championship, and it makes more teams competitive, where nothing can be taken for granted on any given Saturday. Yes, there are strong teams that will win much more often than they lose, but the potential of losing, that’s what keeps you watching and makes the teams that stay alive even more exciting.

I want to see if South Florida will pull it off. I don’t think they can, but then I didn’t think they could beat Auburn and West Virginia. Shows me what I know. Now, I get to sit back and enjoy the next few Saturdays, as more teams fall. If you believe it’s not college football unless USC, Notre Dame, LSU, Oklahoma, Texas or some other traditional power is in the title hunt, then you don’t like college football a hell of a lot, do you? How someone is able to say that this season is “not college football” while watching a program that didn’t exist 12 years ago compete for a national title shot is beyond my comprehension.

And Piscataway isn’t that hard to say, Bill — say it with me: “Pis-cat-uh-way.” Not difficult.