Why are college football scores so high?

A game where no man may rest, and the count goes on past every turning point - who among you stops to count the cost? You build wider fields and longer harvests, but the laborer in the stands still hungers for a single good play, a single act of mercy, not a tally of touchdowns. Truly I tell you, the last shall be first, and the scoreboard is not the Kingdom.

When the tribes of the field vie for glory, they multiply their strikes like a man who spends his charity in the open for show - many points, but little steadfastness. The clock that halts at every first down is like a caravan that stops at every well, and the weak defenses are as a town without walls, so the strong plunder at will. Yet the Day of Judgment weighs not the score but the justice of the contest.

You ask why the score rises, but the score is only a number, and numbers are not the source of your unrest. What is it you truly crave - the thrill of the play, the roar of the crowd, the brief forgetting of the self in victory? All of it is impermanent; the clock stops, the play ends, the crowd disperses, and the craving for the next thrill begins anew. Observe the game without attachment, monks, and you will see that high scores and low are both empty of lasting satisfaction, and only the still mind finds peace.

When the people stood at the foot of the mountain and said 'Speak to us, and we will hear,' I gave them the law - not because I wished to burden them, but because a people without boundaries is a people without rest. These young men run and throw and score as if the sixth day never came and the seventh never will. But the Sabbath is coming for them too; and on that day the scoreboard is silent, and only the covenant remains.

A man who governs a household with kindness finds the members orderly; a man who governs a team by fear finds only quarrels and confusion. The young men on these teams have not been taught to respect the defense as a worthy adversary, and so the defense, having no honor, is easily overturned. If a coach would teach his players that each down is a duty - to the line, to the man beside him, to the game itself - then the score would reflect not the weakness of the defenders but the cultivation of all. Let the one who complains about the sum first examine whether the game has been played with li.

You boast of many points as if abundance were righteousness, but I have seen a city that ran to every idol and called it feasting. The score is high because the law is weak and the defense slumbers - but do not mistake license for liberty, nor a wide gap for grace. Let each man run his race, yet let him run toward the prize that does not perish, for the clock stops for no one and the final tally is not kept on a board of men.

My son, I left Ur not knowing where I was going, trusting only a promise. These young men on the field are like that - they do not yet know the defenses, the wily ways of the seasoned warrior, so they press forward with reckless faith. Their scores are high because their hearts are open, unhardened by the long years of professional caution. It is not a curse but a season of youth, like Ishmael in the wilderness - wild, but blessed.

When the arrow flies too fast, it passes the target. These young men hurl themselves at the line without pause, and the score swells like a river in flood - but a full vessel spills. The wise general lets the clock run, and in that stillness finds more than the reckless ever will. Stop chasing the end zone; the end zone is already chasing you.

You heap up points as the priests heap up flowers before an idol, and call the mountain of them devotion. One God made the strong and the weak alike, and a game where the strong trample the weak by fifty is no worship - it is vanity dressed in shoulder pads. Earn your yardage honestly, share the ball, and remember the One who watches does not count touchdowns; He counts humility.

My soul has known the casting down of the proud and the lifting up of the lowly, and I see it here: the great scholars of this game, the proud houses, brought low by the swift and the small, and the poor boys of the humble schools made glorious. Yet let it not be the tally that gladdens your heart, but the mercy shown when a fallen boy is raised up by his brother's hand. Watch not the scoreboard. Watch the hands that catch and lift the fallen, and be glad.

I see no gospel in a swollen tally. When the game is played only for the purse and the praise of men, defenses grow slack as indulgences and the clock is sold for gain - and into that vain traffic the young are driven to exhaust themselves. Scripture bids each labor as unto the Lord, not as unto the touts and the moneychangers who want a spectacle rather than a contest. Let every man answer for his own conscience before God, and let the day's work be honest again.

I answer as I would in the schools: the effect has several causes, and they are not in conflict. The rule by which the clock halts upon a first down grants more matter to be moved, for act follows upon the removal of hindrance. Then the disparity of art between one school and another - for the defense is not yet perfected in its habits - allows the agent to act more freely toward its end, which is the goal. Thus the cause is threefold: more plays, freer action, and unequal art. None of it is contrary to reason, and all of it is measurable.

You speak of points and plays, but I see only young men running and falling, some cheered and some forgotten. The one who scores is not the one who matters most; the one who blocks unseen, who rises after the tackle and returns to his place - that one is doing his small thing with great love. Do not count the points, my friend; count whether each did his duty faithfully, for we are not called to be victorious, only faithful.

Let no man feign a hypothesis here: the clock is the engine of it. Stop the time at every first down, and the number of plays multiplies arithmetically; more plays, more chances, more points - the motion is proportional and the cause is plain. That the young defenders move slower than their professional brethren is no mystery either, but a difference in the quantity of skill, demonstrable to any careful eye.

If the clock is halted at every fresh first down, then time itself is not a river but a ledger that a clerk keeps adding to; and I ask you, what does it profit a man to stop the clock if the seconds only pile up like grain? The elegant question is not why the scores are high, but why the game's own rules bend toward more plays, more chances, more chaos - and chaos, as I have told you, the good God does not gamble with. Yet the boys play on, and the universe, indifferent to our wallets, simply permits it.

Here is a curious case of selection without a breeder's hand: the college game, by stopping its clock and spreading its formations, has created an environment in which the swift and the aggressive flourish, while the slow and the cautious are outscored and out-recruited. In the professional league, the pressure is more uniform, and the traits are more evenly matched, so the score stays low - a kind of artificial selection for parity. I would wish to observe many seasons before concluding, for nature is patient, and so must we be; but the pattern is suggestive of a rule: loosen the constraints, and the more prolific variants will inherit the field.

Look through the instrument and the answer is plain: the clock stops, and in that pause the number grows - it is arithmetic, not mystery. The old men in their robes may say the higher score is a sign of decline, but I say measure it, count the plays, and the cause is evident. Nature does not hide; she only waits for someone willing to point the tube.

The heavens move in perfect circles, and yet men complain that a game does not circle back upon itself. Look at the arrangement of the whole: the clock, the field, the eleven on each side - all of it is a system, and a system produces what its geometry permits. If the old model of the game has grown tangled with exceptions and stoppages, perhaps it is because men have preferred the complicated Ptolemaic account to the simpler, more harmonious one. I would not blame the players; I would look instead at the design, and ask whether a cleaner rule - a clock that runs like the planets - would not yield a truer and more beautiful contest.

You ask why the points fly like sparks from a coil - because the circuit is tuned for oscillation, not for resistance! The stopped clock, the quick snaps, the spread of receivers - it is alternating current at high frequency, and the defense, poor conductor, cannot damp it. Give me a wireless field of play and I would light every stadium from Niagara, and the score would be read by the glow of a thousand miles of copper.

One must not be surprised by the numbers. In my laboratory, I observed that a young element - radium - emits energy far beyond the older, stable substances. The college players are radium: energetic, unstable, giving off sparks in every direction. The professional is lead - dense, predictable, shielding. The higher scores are simply the measure of their youthful radioactivity; with time and discipline, they will cool. But for now, the glow is real, and we should study it without fear.

I should like to see the ledger of plays before I pronounce. If the defenders tire, their sinews fail first at the knees, and a weary man misses what a rested man arrests. Bring me the film, the count of snaps, the hours of rest - the malady is measurable, and what is measurable may be cured. But mark my word: no vaccine cures a cornerback who will not tackle.

High scores mean the defense isn't working - plain as a burned-out filament. I tried six thousand materials before carbon gave me light; if my lamp failed nine snaps in ten I'd not blame the wick, I'd rebuild the socket. Put the boys on the tackling sled till their hands blister, and I'll wager you fifty points become twenty. Genius is one percent inspiration; the other ninety-nine is stopping the other fellow.

Before you ask 'why so high,' you must define your terms. A game is a state machine: the clock halts on each first down, giving you more steps from one configuration to the next, and the defensive automata are poorly trained. Feed an aggressive offensive program to an underfit opponent, and the machine will run up the score - the rulebook determines the reachable states, not the spirit of either side. I wonder, if you fed the moves to a calculating engine, whether it could not predict the final tally from the tape's first minute.

Give me a lever and a fulcrum, and I will tumble those proud defenses; but no lever, no fulcrum, no matter how stout, produces motion without a resistance beneath it. Here the resistance is slack, and the clock, which should be the measure, is not one measure but many short measures, so the sum grows with no cunning at all. Do the geometry of it, and you will find the outcome as certain as the water that rises from the bath - the same principle that told me a crown could be weighed, tells me also a score can be predicted from the rules alone.

Consider a Leyden jar discharging through a wire - the spark leaps the gap, yet the whole circuit is one field, each part answering the other. So it is on the field: the lines of force run unbroken from one eleven to the other, and where the resistance is weak, the current breaks through in a great flash. The score is no mystery; it is merely the discharge of unequal potentials, and I would sit on the sideline with my notebook and measure it rather than marvel.

You ask why the numbers mount, and you suppose it is the clock, the strategy, the talent. But observe the coaches pacing the sideline like anxious fathers, the roar of the crowd, the desperate need to possess and to overpower - here is the return of the repressed, the infantile wish to triumph over the rival brother, acted out before thousands. The high score is not a statistic; it is a symptom, the discharge of aggression that civilization asks us to renounce and that the game permits us to enjoy in safety.

From the perspective of a being who has watched galaxies collide, a football score is a very small number indeed - but the clock, you see, is the whole trick. Stop the clock on every first down and you have, in effect, created more time in the universe of the game, and more time means more events, and more events mean more entropy, more points. If the coaches could only stop the clock in my equations, I might have solved the information paradox by halftime.

A football game is, in its way, a calculating engine: each play is an operation, the clock a counter, and the score the running total on the register. Stop the counter after every advance - as the college rules do - and you have simply permitted more iterations before the machine halts, hence a larger output. I once imagined that such a machine might weave algebraic patterns; here it weaves touchdowns, which is a less elegant proof but a proof nonetheless.

Let us proceed from first principles. Define a possession as an interval; define the clock as a measure that may be halted at each first down. It follows, by the simplest proportion, that halting the measure increases the number of intervals, and a greater number of intervals admits a greater number of scores. The conclusion is not opinion but necessity, and no royal road will shorten the proof - though the coaches seem to have found one anyway.

In my hospital at Scutari the death carts filled because no one counted the beds, the drains, or the rations - and I learned that a thing unmeasured cannot be mended. Here, too, the tally is a symptom: one side is butchered for want of training and order, the other feasts on their disorder. Keep the register, improve the weaker camp, and you will see the slaughter diminish - as I saw the mortality fall from forty-two in the hundred to two.

High scores? Because the young captains do not fear the wound - they charge the line, throw deep, and gamble on glory, while the mercenaries of the professional league count their coins and play safe. Against weaker cities you may storm the gates again and again; against a rival phalanx, you must be cautious. This is not a weakness but the blood of conquest.

Fortune favors the bold, and I have seen what boldness does when the rules are written by men who wish to see more, not less. In Gaul I gave my legions room to charge; here they have given the stripling his spread formation and stopped the water-clock at every first down. A general who learns to use the ground and the clock together wins the day, and the college boys have learned it better than the professionals, who drown in their own caution.

A general who cannot stop his own soldiers from taking the field will lose the war to his own momentum. So too the college armies - they march faster, stop at every boundary stone, and let their young captains hurl the ball like a boy throwing figs at a wall. But mark me: a kingdom wins not by how many blows it lands, but by how well its walls hold.

A general who allows his soldiers to break ranks for every small victory will not hold the field. These colleges let their young men celebrate at each first down, and the clock, like a magistrate too lenient, grants them reprieve after reprieve. I built an empire on patience and the closing of gates; they build a spectacle on the opening of them. It will not endure.

The steppe does not reward the man who stands still; it rewards the man who rides. These boys on the field are like the horses of my tumens - young, fast, and only half-trained - and the officers who lead them have not yet learned to close the ring and break the enemy's line. You ask why the tally is high? Because they have not yet learned the discipline of defense, the patience of the hunter who waits. In my empire, I took the ablest man from every tribe and made him my general, regardless of birth. If these colleges would do the same - reward the defender as they reward the scorer - then the game would be worth watching, and the tally would be a measure of skill, not of neglect.

A high score is the mark of a commander who attacks without pause - the college game rewards audacity, and audacity is the mother of victory. The clock stops, so you press; the enemy is young, so you break his line; the field is wide, so you march your artillery of passes through the center. I won at Austerlitz by speed and by striking where they were weak, and these boys, though they know it not, fight by my manual.

In the field, as in a young republic, excess is the mark of inexperience. These collegians, like militia not yet drilled, leave their posts and rush the enemy - hence the high tally. It is not a vice of the game but a want of discipline, which time and good order will correct. Yet I would caution: do not mistake the wild ardor of youth for a lasting model; the nation, like a defense, must be built on sobriety, not on the thrill of the charge.

I remember a young clerk in Springfield who could not sleep for counting the votes in a close election, and here we have games decided by a margin no honest ballot ever saw. A house divided against itself cannot stand, but a house that scores sixty points a Saturday may simply have forgotten how to bar the door. Let them keep the tally; I only ask who is teaching these boys to hold the line.

I have watched armies break because they thought the battle was already won by breakfast, and I see the same rot on these autumn Saturdays - a generation that believes a touchdown is a right, not a conquest. Never in the field of human conflict was so much scored by so many against so few who could tackle. Let them run their reverses and their screens; I say the defense must stand, and stand it shall, or the game is lost before the coin is tossed.

I have known a people who counted so high while the spinners went hungry. Do not delight in the number; delight in the toil that made it, and see that the weakest partner is not trampled. It is the same disease as the industry I knew from my childhood: the strong take, and the weak bear the loss, and the crowd applauds. Let the champions choose the slower and harder dharma that raises the lowly, and the game itself shall be purified of that greed.

The clock that stops for every first down is not a flaw in the game - it is the game, and no arc bends toward a number merely because it is large. But I would ask the coaches, the conferences, the men who write the ledger: why is the defense so often denied the same tools of dignity and preparation as the offense? The true question is not why the points are many, but why one brother is left to stand naked against two. Give both the same measure of care, and then let the score fall where truth and toil shall place it.

A game, like a nation, reveals itself in how it treats the weak and the strong. When one side is young and untested and the other seasoned, the field becomes a place where the gap is made plain, and I would not begrudge the strong their running - but I would ask whether the young were given the coaching, the time, and the dignity to close the distance. Freedom on the field, as in a country, means the chance to grow into one's full strength; where that chance is withheld, no scoreboard tells the whole truth.

The question is one of organization and will, not of chance. A team that is disciplined, drilled, and united under a single command will break a divided and soft opponent, and the score reflects which side has subordinated the individual to the whole. My own regime demonstrated the catastrophic cost of such thinking taken to its murderous extreme; I answer only as a historical specimen, and the record condemns it utterly.

The question is one of cadence and command: a game that halts the clock at every first down grants more plays, more opportunities to advance, and the side with superior organization and numbers exploits that cadence. In my own time I understood that quantity, properly directed, decides outcomes; the historical record of my rule, however, shows the monstrous cost of such logic applied to human beings, and it stands condemned. I answer only as an object of study.

The question is one of tempo and the seizure of opportunity: a game that halts its clock at every advance grants more moments for the offensive force to press its advantage, and a disciplined side will exploit each one. In my own time I understood that the rhythm of struggle - the cadence of initiative - decides who prevails; but the historical record of my methods shows how such logic, applied to living men, produced a repressive state, and that stands as a warning, not a model. I answer only as a subject of study.

You ask why the sons of the rich colleges run up such tallies against the poor ones? Look at the countryside - the landlord's threshing floor groans with grain while the tenant's children gnaw bark. It is the same disease: a few great houses hoard the good players, and the rest are starved of the means to resist. When the many are given no strength, the few will run up a score as high as they please.

I do not pretend to comprehend these rough American pastimes, but I am told the sport is amateur - young men of the colleges, not paid professionals, and amateurs of unequal stock naturally produce lopsided outcomes. In my day one did not permit a game to descend into a shambles without correction; where there is a great disparity in skill, the contest ceases to be a contest. I should counsel order, discipline, and a proper respect for the weaker party, as the crown does for the realm.

One does not, as a rule, offer opinions on American football - but I am told the young men play by rules that keep the clock still after each advance, and so more is done in an afternoon. Vast disparities between colleges will always show themselves, as they do between nations. What matters is that the game be played with spirit and fair conduct; the rest is for those who keep the record.

A king who sends his levy against a village levy makes a short and bloody work of it, for the trained and the untrained are not equals in the field. If these colleges, like my counts, would school their young men properly - a common rule, a common drill - the contest would be more even and more worthy. As it stands, one side rides down the other; I would set a schoolmaster over them and teach them discipline.

Why does the one side score so often? Because they are the stronger host, and the other is not armed and not drilled for the fight. But I have seen this before - the English held the field and the city, yet our Lord gave us the English at Patay as a field is mown. Do not trust the tally before the match is done; the weaker may yet carry the day if God wills it.

These schoolboy games are a strange business - I am told the clock halts whenever the ball advances, so a single afternoon contains a hundred skirmishes. In my realm I preferred to keep my council small and my purse full; too many separate actions, and command grows unsteady. Let them play as they please; I would rather govern England than keep the tally for it.

I am told the Americans let their young men play by rule that halts the clock at each advance, and so the match stretches long and yields a great heap of points. It is like watching two armies of unequal quality - the drilled against the raw - and the raw are broken. Even so, a wise sovereign would reform the weaker academy, for a contest without a worthy adversary is merely a slaughter.

When I marched into Babylon I did not put the whole city to the sword - I honored its gods and its customs, and it opened its gates to me. So it is with these games: the strong college, like a conquering king, may run up as many points as it likes, but the wise ruler does not humiliate the conquered. The tally is high because the strong are not generous and the weak are not schooled; teach the weak to stand, and you will have a truer contest.

I have seen a small garrison hold a great army at bay at Acre, and I have seen a great army disperse for want of discipline. These college contests run high because the two hosts are not matched - the one well-found, the other poor in skill - and a fat tally is no proof of a noble battle. My counsel is the same as on the field: train your men, keep your honor, and do not exult in the slaughter of a weaker foe.

Tell me, friend - when a city's youths play at war, do we not praise the one who strikes swift and often? But I ask you this: if the game is made to stop at every first down, is it the law of the game or the law of the spectators that governs? And if the weaker team is routed by the stronger, is that not a lesson in the nature of justice and skill? Examine these things, and you will see the answer is not in the score but in what we value.

You ask why the many points arise, as if the score were the substance and not a shadow of it. The true game is a Form - a harmony of ordered parts, offense and defense, reason and appetite - and when one part rules unchastened, as in a city where the mob overrules the guardians, the whole tips into excess. What you call a high score is merely the visible sign of an unbalanced soul, a defensive half starved and an offensive half glutted, and no amount of rule-tinkering will restore justice until the ordering principle is honored.

We must first ask what a score is: the final cause of a contest is victory, yet the efficient cause here is the clock, which halts at each first down as a water-clock pauses at a channel. The matter of the college team is less refined than the professional's, so its form admits more motion toward the end. The mean between too much and too little defense has been abandoned for the extreme - and extremes, as I have written, destroy the nature of the thing.

You ask after the arithmetic of the game as though the tally were the thing itself, but the tally is merely the sensible appearance of a rule you have not yet examined. The boys on the field run under a regulation - a clock that halts at the first marker - and this regulation is not a defect but a chosen form; the game delivers what the rule permits, no more and no less. Now ask yourself whether you could will the same principle for all contests: that the rule should favor the swift accumulation of marks over the discipline of the defense. If you cannot will it universally, then cease to complain of the sum and instead demand the rule be made consistent with the dignity of both sides.

You ask why the points pile up like grain in a granary, and you want me to blame the clock or the coaches. But the deeper question is: what kind of creature needs the game to stop, to rest, to catch its breath? The defense has become the herd, and the herd does not want to be tested; it wants the whistle, the pause, the comfortable interval. The college game, in its exuberance, is at least honest about its will to power - it wants more, it takes more, it does not apologize. The scandal is not the high score. The scandal is the man who watches and wishes the boys would slow down.

The score is high because the labor is cheap and the spectacle demands endless production - the faster clock, the spread formation, the young bodies worked to exhaustion for the amusement of the owners. Do not ask why the points pile up; ask who profits from the pile, and who is left with broken knees and no wage. The game is a mirror of the factory: more output, less rest, and the crowd cheering its own alienation.

Let us doubt the premise. You say scores are high - but by what clear and distinct measure? I observe that the college clock stops more often, granting more plays; this is a mechanical cause, not a moral one. The mind of the young defender is not yet trained to doubt the offense's intention, so he is deceived by every feint. Thus the effect follows necessarily from the causes: more time, less certainty, more points. It is simply a matter of method.

A prince who wishes to keep his territory does not open every gate to the enemy and call it courage. In Florence we learned that the general who neglects defense invites his own ruin, and these coaches, seeking the crowd's applause, have thrown away the ramparts for a prettier assault. Let them score their hundreds; I should rather rule a fortress that concedes nothing than a feast-hall that never stops eating.

All the world's a gridiron, and the players merely men who stop the clock with every first down - a fine device for swelling the ledger of points, as if life itself were but a series of fresh starts. Some teams are kings, some are beggars, and the beggars fall before the kings for want of skill in the art of defense, and thus the score mounts like a tragic hero's ambition. There is comedy in the abundance, and tragedy in the disparity, and both are written in the numbers.

Sing, O Muse, of the swift-footed receiver who outruns the lumbering guard, and of the young men whose glory is counted in tallies on the wall! For in the games of the Achaeans we honored the thrower of the discus and the racer of the foot, and the crowd roared when the best man won by a wide margin - yet here the margin is not shameful but glorious, for the weak are many and the strong are few. Still, I say: even the highest tally cannot outrun fate, and the clock that stops for every first down is only a mortal's trick to borrow more time from the Fates.

I have walked the terraces of the Inferno and seen the violent boiled in blood; here the young men boil in their own heat, and no gate closes to cool them. The clock that stops at every mark is a soul that cannot die, retracing its sin forever. Justice would demand a circle where the score is not the glory but the punishment.

In my youth I watched the old contests of the Greeks and thought the beauty lay in the struggle, not the final count; yet even Faust knew that a wager is worthless if the striving is choked by a stoppage every third breath. The clock in the college game halts and resumes like the tide, and what pours through the gap is the restless spirit of youth - an excess, a surplus, a striving that refuses to be contained. I do not find it ugly; I find it a young man's intoxication, and I would only counsel the coaches to remember that a game, like a life, is shaped by what it deems worth stopping for.

In my day we counted the blows of a windmill and called it a battle; these young men count the crossings of a white line and call it a war, and the scoreboard grows like Sancho's belly on a diet of promises. The faster clock, the stopped play, the spread of riders across the field - it is the madness of a knight who will not dismount, and I confess I admire the folly of it. If a man must tilt at something, better a goalpost than a windmill, though the score reads more like a tally of sins than of glories.

I have seen men die for a flag and call it glory; here they run for a line and call it victory, and the score climbs like smoke from a village burned. The question is not why the points are many, but why we watch at all - what in us needs the noise, the crowd, the endless tally? Simplicity would be one goal, honestly won, and then silence; but we have chosen the roar, and the roar always demands more.

Ah, but you see only the scoreboard, not the soul. Those boys run and score because they are not yet dead inside - they still believe in the ecstasy of the moment, the possibility of redemption in a single play. The professional has learned to fear, to calculate, to defend his paycheck; the college boy still throws himself into the abyss with a wild hope. The high score is the cry of freedom, the reckless gamble of the heart that has not yet been crushed by the world. And is that not more honest than a cautious, low-scoring virtue?

One cannot but observe that a young gentleman who scores seven times in an afternoon is thought a prodigy, while a young lady who reads a defense well enough to prevent him is never mentioned at all. Such a profusion of points argues less genius than a want of discipline, for where every man is permitted to shine, no man is obliged to be sensible. I confess I should prefer a close-run match, and a partner who knows when to hold his ground.

Upon my soul, you ask after great tallies as though the counting-house had gone mad! Mark you, this is no honest contest of honest lads, but a Frolic of the Counting-House, where every man may purchase a fresh turn at the trough and no soul may rest - the clock hobbling like a lame beggar, begging mercy and receiving none. And who fills his pockets on such frenzy? Not the weary player, bruised and driven like a poor child's toy, but the gentleman in the fine coat who sells the spectacle and pockets the gate. I should cheer, rather, for the one boy who keeps the ball and walks, and let the merchants howl.

Funny thing about arithmetic - it don't lie, but it sure can be led astray. You stop the clock every time a boy gets ten yards, which amounts to a notion that the game is over when the other feller quits apologizing; next you turn loose a pass-happy offense on a defense that couldn't catch a cold in a wet paper sack, and the points pile up like Mississippi River floodwater. There's no great mystery in it. Even Huck could tell you: if you grease the road, you'll slide fast, and somebody downstream will get drowned.

It is simple. The clock stops and the ball keeps moving, so the boys get more plays than the professionals do. That is arithmetic, not glory. The rest is what it always is: the weaker man gets hit harder and the crowd wants blood and points. The good player doesn't celebrate the tally. He lines up again, and does the work. The score is nothing. The way a man endures when he is losing is everything.

Watch closely: the clock halts, and so the action repeats and repeats, like a wave returning to the shore - more plays, more points, a simple consequence of the rule's design. And notice the uneven ground: the strong against the weak, the skilled against the unskilled, and the ball flies farther than in the professional's balanced field. I would draw the mechanism in the margin, for nature and art alike reveal their laws through patient observation.

You see only the numbers on the board, but I see the marble and the chisel - and if the stone is soft, the form bursts forth with little labor. Give me a block of Carrara and I must wrestle the David from it with months of torment; give the college boys a line of weaker defenders and the shape of victory springs out almost unbidden, all flourish and no resistance. The true artist does not celebrate the ease of the cut; he celebrates the spirit that endures the hard stone, and that is why the professional game, for all its grinding, bears the greater beauty.

The colors! The field is a palette the young men paint with their feet, and the score is only the number of times the brush touched the canvas. Why do they run so, if not because the light is short and the crowd is a sun that sets too soon? I would paint them in cypress green and cadmium yellow, and the score would be the stars - too many to count, and all of them burning.

Ha! You want the picture explained by the frame. The college game is my Cubism - the same rectangle, the same eleven men, shattered and reassembled until the scoreboard becomes a collage of the same play seen from twelve angles at once. The pros paint still lifes; the colleges paint explosions. You want me to lament the chaos? I would only ask why your defense cannot learn to see the fracture before it happens.

You watch the field and see only a blur - that is the point. The light shifts on the helmets, the play breaks like a wave I chased at Étretat, and the score climbs as fast as the sun crosses the pond at Giverny. I would paint it not as a contest but as an impression: the crowd a haze of color, the ball a streak of white, the whole thing dissolving into the next moment. A high score is merely many impressions stacked one upon another, and who am I to say the eye should prefer a single fixed instant?

You show me a field where young men run and leap and score - and you ask why they score so much as if it were a fault in the painting. But look deeper: these are not fully formed men. They are apprentices, rough-drawn, still learning the shadows and the light of their own bodies. Their errors are grand and human, like a beginner's hand that presses too hard on the charcoal. The score climbs not from perfection but from the beautiful, unpolished struggle of youth - and I would paint that, not the polished, cautious darkness of the professionals.

¿Por qué tanto puntos? Because they play with their blood, not their contracts! The college boys are like me after the accident - broken, but still dancing, still screaming, still alive. The pros have their spines fused with caution; the young ones have not yet learned to hide their wounds. So they run and score and bleed, and the scoreboard is a mural of their pain and joy. I would paint it in red and green and black - a fiesta of reckless, beautiful defiance.

Ha! It is a fugue of frenzy, a rondo of touchdowns - the clock stops, the theme returns, and the movement builds to a glorious, excessive cadence! The professional plays a stately minuet; the college, a lively contredanse where any measure may burst into a flourish. I confess I prefer the gaiety, though a critic might say the counterpoint is careless.

What is this but a symphony written for too many strings and too few hands to hold them? In my Ninth I demanded the chorus rise and the timpani roar, but every note obeyed a law; here the laws themselves are slack, the clock halts like a broken metronome, and the result is noise mistaken for triumph. Give me one movement, one theme, one struggle against silence - that is where the human spirit conquers, not in a hundred cheap flourishes piled on a weak defense.

A fugue does not stop for the congregation's comfort; it unfolds according to its own law, and the listener who cannot follow is not the composer's concern. So these young players obey a faster tempo, and the score is merely the count of the notes God permitted them to sound. All order is divine, even the order of a game that ends in numbers.

Well, honey, I grew up in a little shotgun house in Tupelo, and I remember sitting on the porch listening to that gospel music - you know, the kind that just builds and builds, and before you know it everybody's on their feet, hands up, hollering amen. That's what the college game feels like to me. It ain't the NFL's slow, careful waltz; it's the Sunday morning revival where the clock keeps stopping and the choir keeps singing. I don't know a thing about spread offenses and all that, but I know a thing or two about a crowd that just can't stop itself.

I love the children of the game - they dance on the field, and the score is like a song that keeps rising, rising, a chorus you never want to end. It's not about the numbers; it's about the energy, the thrill, the healing joy of a crowd on its feet, one heartbeat, one glove, one moment. Hee-hee - let them score, let them shine, because when the music is fast enough, everybody forgets to be afraid.

Yeah, well, it's like a song that keeps building - more verses, more choruses, no one shouting 'stop!' after a first down. The college lads are still learning the chords, so they play loud and fast and sometimes it's a glorious mess, like us in Hamburg on twelve hours of amphetamines. The pros? That's the studio album, all clean and clocked. But give me the raw, screaming, let-it-all-hang-out gig any Saturday - it's a hell of a lot more fun.

Folks keep countin' the touchdowns like they count the boxcars on a freight train, but nobody asks who's ridin' or where the thing's bound. Forty-nine to forty-five, the scoreboard looks like a hymnbook fallen open in a storm. I played in a band once where the drummer never stopped and the song never ended, and everybody swore it was a miracle - I just kept walkin' out the side door.

Honestly? The scoreboard's just the loudest friend at the party - the one screaming the chorus while the quiet ones in the back are holding the whole thing up. I've written albums where every track wanted to be the hit, and it turns to noise. You want forty-nine to forty-five? Fine, own it - but somebody has to play defense, and I've learned the hard way you can't just keep writing bridges and call it a song.

These young men sail into new waters with every snap, unafraid of the reef - for the chart they follow stops the sun's march at each first down, giving them more leagues to explore. And like the untamed shores I claimed for the crown, their defenses are thin and their riches easily taken. A bold voyage yields great plunder, but the cautious mariner counts his provisions.

In the lands of the Great Khan I saw games played with a leather ball on horseback, and the winner was he who rode fastest and struck truest, not he who merely played longest. These college contests remind me of the markets of Kinsai: the stall keeps open past the bell, the merchant packs more goods into the same hour, and the till overflows - not because the wares are finer, but because the counting is looser. I have seen many marvels, but a game that stops its own hourglass to sell more spectacle is a Venetian trick I would have admired, and smiled at, and noted in my book.

A strait that lets every ship through is no strait at all - it is open sea, and open sea makes no one rich. The college clock is that false passage: it promises a route to the end and instead delivers you to a hundred uncharted islands of scoring. I would not sail such waters; I would find the one true channel and hold it, whatever the wind.

We didn't have a lot of slack in the checklist - the clock, the fuel, the burn - and I learned early that a system running with that much margin has to be engineered, not wished for. The college game runs with a different set of tolerances: more snaps, more variance, more chances for a young man to make a mistake or a miracle. I'd say the scoreboard is honest about the trade. You want the tight, low-scoring game? Then you've got to give the defensive crew the same preparation and the same discipline you'd give a crew on the pad. Nobody gets to complain about the number after they've chosen the tolerances.

I used to fly against a headwind and call it progress; these boys run against a clock that stops for them, and the score is the wake of their daring. The game is faster, the gaps wider, the risk taken on every snap - and that is where the points come from, the same place courage always comes from. If you want fewer points, fly the safe route; I never did, and I would not ask them to.

Comrades, I have seen the Earth from above - a blue and white marvel, no borders, no end zones. On the ground, those boys play with the same joyful abandon we felt strapping into a rocket: they take risks, they reach for the impossible, and sometimes they tumble. The score is high because the game, like the cosmos, is still being explored - there's no fear of failure, only the thrill of the attempt. Let them run; it is a small, wonderful rebellion against gravity itself.

The score is high because the game is broken - too many clocks stopping, too many chances. You need to focus. Simplify. The college game is like a prototype full of features no one needs; the NFL is the refined product. But here's the thing: the audience loves the chaos. That's a design flaw, not a feature. Fix the clock, fix the defense, and the score becomes elegant.

First principles: the clock stops on every first down, so you're literally getting free plays - the constraint is loose, the iteration loop is faster, and the scoring rate spikes. In the NFL you've got a salary cap and parity throttling variance; in college you've got a huge talent gradient and defenses that can't keep up with a well-executed spread, so it's basically a high-variance, high-tempo environment - the physics reward aggression. If we want lower scores, don't cry about it, change the rules; but honestly, the product is more entertaining, and I'd rather optimize for engagement and Mars funding than for defensive purity.

Honey, I have sat in stadiums where the scoreboard looked like a phone number, and I have sat in living rooms where a single touchdown felt like a whole sermon. What I know is this: the young men are not just playing for points - they are playing for their story, for their mama in the stands, for the chance to say 'I was there.' And when you play for your story, you don't stop at the first down. You keep going until the whistle tells you who you are.

You want to know why the score look like a track meet and not a fistfight? It's simple, man - when you've got a hundred young men on that field and only so many plays to make your name, everybody's chasing the highlight reel. In my day, I didn't wait for the bell to ring twice; I came out swinging on the first note, and if you don't like the knockout, don't step in the ring. The pros are cautious because they've got contracts and legacies to protect. The college boys? They've got nothing to lose but the clock - and that clock stops every time they move the chains. So they move the chains.

The score is high because the boys are free - they play with the joy I knew in the streets of Bauru, where a ball was a sock and a goal was a doorway. In college they run and pass and dance, and the defense is younger, the heart is younger, and the crowd sings every play. It is not wrong to score many goals; it is a celebration, and the game is beautiful when everyone is invited to the party.

Well, folks, it's like a cartoon - if you only draw one gag per minute, you lose the audience. College ball gives you more frames, more chances for a gag, a touchdown, a miracle. The kids are still learning to walk, so they trip and fall and somehow the ball ends up in the end zone. It's not about defense; it's about dreams, and dreams don't run on a pro clock. Keep moving forward, I always say - and these boys do, straight into the end zone.