DALLAS -- If you cover professional sports, you deal with lockouts and holdouts and failed drug tests and salary caps ("hard" and "soft") and mid-level exceptions and transfer fees and franchise shifts and two sets of trade deadlines.
That's why I love them. So much simpler than the college game.
Back in the '70s and '80s, when a series of strikes and work stoppages changed Major League Baseball forever, there was a popular saying that "The game always wins out." In other words, the fans would always dutifully return (or so said the theory) because the game itself was so good.
Well, I don't for a minute think that the fans of college football are going to turn their attention elsewhere. But the immensely popular college game has never faced challenges like those that permeate the landscape as we begin the 2011 season.
If you are among the majority who have railed against the BCS for the chaos it generates (some of you should know I'm not part of that group), well, how major college football chooses to conclude its season is nothing compared with what has transpired at the outset of this one.
Yes, I will be at Cowboys Stadium on Saturday night to see No. 3 LSU and No. 4 Oregon because it should be a great way to kick off the season. There might be one more game this entire regular season in which two teams ranked in the top five play.
Who knows? There might not be any.
And yet what we won't see Saturday night seems as significant as what we will. LSU quarterback Jordan Jefferson is suspended after his alleged involvement in a recent fight outside a Baton Rouge bar. Because one witness said Jefferson was kicking one of the victims in the face, police confiscated Jefferson's shoes to check for DNA.
Forty-nine pairs of shoes, in fact.
(Score one for the cynical side that thinks college athletes are already well paid).
Oregon quarterback Darron Thomas will play Saturday night because he was only a passenger in the car that suspended cornerback Cliff Harris, a consensus all-America pick, was driving and was clocked at 118 mph this summer.
(Score one, I suppose, for the handling of a Nissan Altima at frightening speeds).
The Tigers and Ducks share more than high rankings and suspended star players. They could rename this game the Will Lyles Bowl since both schools are among those being investigated for payments made to Lyles, who runs a "scouting service" in Texas. In fact, LSU receiver Russell Shepherd is also suspended for this game as part of an ongoing investigation.
Of course, the larger story that continues to unfold - badly or at least unfortunately in the eyes of most fans - involves Texas A&M bolting for imagined riches in the Southeastern Conference as the Big 12 tries to hang on after another summer of defection. The Aggies and Longhorns have taken their once-great rivalry on the field and dragged it into an unflattering backroom brawl over money.
Now Texas AD DeLoss Dodds contends that A&M had the chance to join it in the network that has created the latest round of Aggie angst. A&M AD Bill Byrne contends there were never any discussions regarding making the kind of money the Longhorns will now pocket in their deal with ESPN.
It's finger-pointing at its worst, and it will almost surely kill one of the game's great traditions.
The turmoil in college football is hardly limited to games played or conferences ripped apart or shady scouting services operating in the great state of Texas. Recent revelations about the University of Miami's escapades had some in the media calling for a repeat of the "death penalty" SMU received in 1987.
(Score one for really bad ideas. What Miami appears to have done is far beyond the boundaries of NCAA rules ... but no one touches SMU's "honoring the contracts" of players after being busted by the NCAA).
And so perhaps it is left to the only two teams ranked higher than Oregon and LSU to elevate the college game to a higher plane? That would be Alabama and Oklahoma ... not exactly strangers to NCAA investigators.
Ultimately, we will have a season filled with great plays, remarkable finishes and unexpected stars to move us out of this summer of discontent. With any luck at all, we will even have a Heisman Trophy race that is more about the individuals involved than whether the nation's finest player's father tried to sell his services for $180,000.
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