College football makes itself hard to love sometimes. The money has primarily gone to all the wrong places — coaches’ salaries and expensive locker room features have increased sharply during an era of skyrocketing revenues, and players weren’t allowed to profit off anything until about eight months ago. (And in the meantime, coaches’ salaries rose even further.) Meanwhile, the people in charge of this gold mine of a sport have … well … there really aren’t any people in charge.
The game itself, however, is just about perfect. It has roles for all sorts of different sizes, shapes and body types, it requires chess-level strategy and it depends on 18- to 22-year-olds, which gives it a level of silliness and instability that professional football can only sometimes provide. That combination can create absolute magic.
If you ever find yourself falling out of love with this often-ridiculous sport, if you ever find your eye wandering to what other sports have to offer, pull up a random game from this list and fall in love all over again. Here are the 60 best college football games of the 2000s.
(Why 60? Because it was supposed to be a top 50 and I couldn’t stomach eliminating 10 games from the list.)
