Tim Verghese

College football, you know it, you love it. What makes college football great?

Culture.

Culture is rooted deep in our veins, we all understand and respect the intensity of major rivalries like Alabama vs Auburn, Texas vs Oklahoma and Florida vs Georgia. Rivalry Week is the best week of college football every single year. Now, imagine if we had rivalries every single week.

Let me introduce you to HBCU football. HBCU stands for Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Most HBCUs are featured in the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) and the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC), two FCS conferences.

This past weekend, Kayvon Thibodeaux, the number one prospect in the 2019 recruiting class, visited Florida A&M, making him the first top-ranked prospect to visit an HBCU.

 

Thibodeaux is as good as it gets, finishing his junior year at Oaks Christian School with 99 tackles and 20(!) sacks. Last month he released a top 5 of Alabama, Florida, Oregon, Florida State and USC. But with his visit, it looks like Florida A&M has joined that group.  

Thibodeaux loved FAMU and even encouraged every recruit to make an effort to visit an HBCU.

HBCUs have produced generational talents like Walter Payton, Jerry Rice, Shannon Sharpe and Michael Strahan, but recently, the HBCU talent pool seems to have dried up.

That could all change if Thibodeaux commits to Florida A&M. First of all, this would be the first five-star since the ratings system began to not attend a D1 school. It wouldn’t really affect Thibodeaux either, he’s pretty much guaranteed to go in the first round no matter where he goes. Secondly, imagine the takes of pundits everywhere calling for heads because their school was out-recruited by an FCS school.

If Nick Saban and Urban Meyer lost top recruits to Grambling State, Florida A&M and North Carolina A&T, chaos would undoubtedly ensue.

Why the sudden gravitation to HBCUs?

College football fans enjoy watching lowly teams rise to the top. 2017 National Champs UCF, Boise State and TCU are just a few that have risen to prominence in recent years.

Remember when the MAC started airing games on Tuesday and absolutely nobody complained about more football? Let’s do more of that.

Every HBCU is like a family, think Texas A&M, but actually cool. So every week, these families are facing off against one another and things tend to get heated.

But HBCU football, just like #MACtion, is fun and helps grow the game of football. It has a looser feel to it than the SEC and Big Ten. Imagine if a player like Alvin Kamara ended up at an HBCU getting 15-25 touches a game instead of the 2 he got under Butch Jones, God bless his soul. Imagine Tyrann Mathieu with free reign to do whatever he wanted. That’s the content HBCUs gives us week after week. Take the time to research HBCU football and the tons of highlights on YouTube. Plus, the uniforms are fire; Grambling State’s black and yellow combo is the only way black and yellow should be worn on a football field, (talking to you Iowa). Beyond that, Bethune Cookman, Southern and FAMU have some absolutely tremendous uniforms.

It’s the off the field things that make HBCUs great. The food, the bands, the gameday experience, which, with the right TV crew, can truly be captured. I for one am envisioning a Netflix series, like Last Chance U, but for HBCU football.

So Kayvon, hit my line, lets build. Let’s put HBCU football on the map