NCAA football can’t compare to FIFA’s double standards that now benefits the USA
Every coach in the Big 12 and the ACC, and every conference not named TheBigSEC10, has a mate for life in Tony Popovic, the manager of the Australian national men’s football team.
Popovic may know less than zero about college football, or American football, but he knows everything about it even if he’s never watched North Carolina at Clemson, TCU at Kansas State. He can relate to Sonny Dykes, Dave Aranda, Kenny Dillingham, Jeff Brohm or any other head coach from those leagues.
They all live the same journey that can feel like a stroll up the Mississippi River without a canoe, raft, boat or oars.
It’s all football. Call it FIFA football, or the College Football Playoff, and it’s all the same. Never has that been more apparent than during this FIFA World Cup. The equipment and rules are different, but the politics, and friends, that run the respective sports are twins.
However corrupt, and unfair, we think the CFP selection committee is, it can’t keep pace with FIFA.
FIFA’s latest corrupt move
On Sunday afternoon, FIFA announced that the red card given to U.S. men’s team striker Folarin Balogun in the team’s knockout stage win on July 1 against Bosnia-Herzegovina has been “suspended.” As a result, he will be allowed to play in the round of 16 match on Monday night against Belgium.
The original decision to hand Baloguin a red card was, at best, terrible. In slow motion replays it did not look like what Baloguin did should result in what amounts to an ejection for that game, and the next.
FIFA’s decision to effectively reverse the suspension came down to this — it can.
It released the following statement: “In line with article 27 of the FIFA disciplinary code, the implementation of the match suspension is suspended for a probationary period of one year.
“If Folarin Balogun commits another infringement of a similar nature and gravity during the probationary period, the suspension shall be revoked, and the sanction enforced without prejudice to any additional sanction imposed for the new infringement.”
Think of it as deferred adjudication lite, without the cash payment.
The Belgian football federation is justifiably furious, and said in a statement, “The decision is in direct contradiction with the provisions of the FIFA World Cup 2026 Competition Regulations, as set out in Article 10.5.”
This is done. Balogun is playing.
According to SpoTrac, two of the 189 red cards have been handed out in the history of the World Cup have ever been rescinded. The first was to Brazil’s Garrincha, in 1962. The other is for Balogun.
FIFA is doing this because of circumstances, and most likely someone made a phone call, perhaps from the White House.
Had this been a defender from Ghana? A midfielder from Belgium? Or a forward from Australia?
Australia, the Big 12 & the ACC aren’t in ‘the club’
Popovic’s team was eliminated on July 3 in Arlington on penalty kicks by Egypt, and he was almost immediately philosophical about Australia’s progress that sounds so familiar to American sports fans who follow college football.
“Unfortunately, until you achieve certain things, this respect is always less. You can even talk about the media when the other nations are playing,” he said. “So that’s just part of human nature, and part of football, Australia is that country that’s ‘trying’ to play football, and all of our opponents that we play so far are ‘elite’ at football. The perception is that way.
“The only way we can change that is by competing with the elite more often in major tournaments (and) by our performances that should already take a major step, but we’ll have to keep doing that to gain the necessary respect, whether that’s in this room, whether that’s people in general, whether that’s officials, whether that’s opponents, it could be a range of different areas. We’re on a path to achieving that, and knowing that we will have to own that.”
Former TCU football coach Gary Patterson used to utter nearly the exact same sentences about his team when it was trying to crack the top tier of the sport that is run by a select few.
Texas Tech could say the same words now. So could SMU, Arizona State, Louisville, BYU, Kansas State, Virginia Tech, and the rest of the teams that are not in the Big 10 or SEC.
They play the same game as Oregon, Michigan, Alabama, Texas and Alabama, and technically they have access to the same “tournaments,” but college football has tiers; this is not a democracy.
And neither is the most popular game in the world.
Whether it’s FIFA, or the College Football Playoff, “perception” ranks high on the scouting report, and sometimes is as undefeated as a phone call from the White House.
