If you’re reading this odds are you like college football more than the NFL. Perhaps you like college football a whole lot more than the NFL. As someone who is agnostic towards NFL team fandom but still watches plenty of professional football I’m definitely the type of person who cherishes college football so much more.

However, there’s something the NFL gets right that college football to this day struggles coping with each year: Appropriately judging and putting single games into perspective quickly.

College struggles with this because of the much wider talent disparity at the top of the game, plus a collection of teams more than 4 times the size of the NFL. In this way, the impact of one game makes sense especially when college plays fewer games in the first place.

I just don’t like it all that much.

We’re lucky that the playoffs has changed this thinking in a small way. I’ve long rallied against the romanticism associated with undefeated college teams and the belief that you’re done or spoiled after one loss. Nick Saban has put together the greatest modern coaching career and he’s lost one game per season in 5 out of his 6 National Title seasons. He’s only gone unbeaten once and never over the last 8 seasons!

Although we tend to see teams get overrated based off very small sample sizes or even one game the opposite happens far, far more. The opening weekend of college football is full of “that team sucks” or “I knew they weren’t any good” sometimes based off only a half of watching a single game. The NFL has its own yo-yo problem (“you’re good, you suck, you’re great, you’re terrible”) that fuels the increasingly headline-seeking news cycle. Still, we can see 2 really poor Aaron Rodgers games every season and in the big picture we know it will barely be a blip on the radar of his legacy both for that season or his career.

I don’t have a problem if one loss ends up really costing a team, if only the rest of the country shakes out in a way that this lone defeat really causes a team to miss the CFB playoff or some other major bowl game or conference title. That kind of misfortune is still a part of college football in a way that isn’t present in the NFL, and I’ve argued in the past it is heightened by the 4-team playoff race.

What I have a problem with is disproportionately weighing losses, a long common tactic in modern college football. For example, Notre Dame played seven ranked teams last year. The 1991 Notre Dame team with the same 10-3 record also played 7 ranked teams. Both the 2017 and 1991 teams went 4-3 against ranked teams.

Does that make the teams equal? Most likely not to most historians of the game–the Sugar Bowl win over eventual No. 7 Florida trumps the 2017 best win over No. 12 USC and is a big tie-breaker if it was close. But, that 1991 team headed into bowl season with the top wins over eventual No. 22 Stanford, No. 23 BYU, and No. 25 Air Force. These seasons are a lot closer than most people think, with of course, the surrounding 1988-90 and 1992-93 seasons also coloring 1991 in a positive light as well. By the way, the 2017 team did finish 2 spots higher in the AP rankings for what it’s worth.

My point is that today it’s more common for people to take losses and say, “Well these mean more because they’re losses and therefore those other games with wins over ranked teams mean less to me. The losses is where we saw the teams’ true colors.” This is certainly a prisoner-of-the-moment issue, to be fair. I have no doubt that in 20 years there will be more talk about how Notre Dame was so close to beating Georgia and that could’ve completely changed the season–which seems patently obvious.

Today, you often get more talk about how the Georgia game is rendered irrelevant because the loss at Miami was so bad. For the next 5 years or so I’m certain the Miami game will come to be the defining one for 2017, and yet, the 1991 team allowed one of the most horrendous comebacks in program history and were blown out the next week in Happy Valley…and these games are rarely if ever spoken of nowadays.

Isn’t that amazing!

I feel like the fact that in the NFL everyone is a professional a little more competitive is balanced out by the fact that college kids are so young and still not 100% focused on football at all times. There’s a case to be made that everything in college is much more crazy and wild, and yet we still expect perfection (or really, really close to it) from teams when so much of the sport keeps telling us that really doesn’t define greatness per se.

The 2016 USC team is a good example. They were absolutely destroyed in the opener against Alabama and right away some people never took them seriously again. They lost 3 out of 4 to start the season, largely due to the failed experiment of trying to start the mediocre Max Browne at quarterback. Then, they finished with 9 straight wins. In the NFL, I feel like that winning streak is such a bigger deal (primarily because they could still win the Super Bowl of course) and fans/commentators are more likely to forgive the early season swoon because Sam Darnold wasn’t at quarterback.

Instead, USC just slowly ended up winning the Rose Bowl and along the way there’s not as much talk about them actually being really good. Rather, all of that bottled up hindsight gets transferred to the following year when the pre-season hype takes over and we usually overrate a team based on the immediate past we didn’t evaluate correctly in real time. Even though it’s not always a clean 1:1 comparison is it wrong to want college football to be more like the NFL?