Shellacking after shellacking after shellacking: To save New Year's Day, college football needs a payroll cap

For months, I've been bottling up my Jerzy Giants frustrations, sitting on my Mt. Vesuvius/ejector seat Lazy-Boy, ready to spew. Now that the season is ending, I'd like to erupt for a moment - not about the Yankees - but about the disgraceful garbage pastime that football has become.

Let's not mention the NFL's dildonic portrayal of women, its love of taxpayer funds, its denial of employee brain damage, its brown-nosing, paid-for patriotism and its nepotistic, old-money billionaires - and let's give the league credit for one positive element: At least the NFL is more honest than college football. The pros don't try to hide behind some ludicrous cloak of amateurism, like the NCAA, the North Korea of sports institutions. 

One of the best things that happened in 2015 was the international takedown of Seth Blatter and FIFA. If only American justice dared turn its attention to the NCAA. We'd have a reason to keep open Gitmo. Imagine... a place for Dean Wormer.

But that's not why I'm spewing. What rags me is that over the last two days, you couldn't sit for 10 measly minutes of enjoyable bone-cracking, skull-fracturing violence on your tube and find a competitive game. While your forehead was ringing in the new year, you got to watch contests as lopsided as the AL Wild Card, featuring the three-hit Yankees. Thank God for the Twilight Zone Marathon, featuring Brett Gardner in "To Serve Man." (Tip of the hat to John M.) If you expected football, you might as well eat your postal carrier. 

Clemson walloped somebody - I've already forgotten who - and Alabama - the Yankees of football - absolutely clobbered Michigan State. Why did they bother to schedule the game? It was like the parade of stiffs Mike Tyson fought while avoiding Evander Holyfield. Alabama might as well have played the Cornell Veterinary School. At least Cornell might have smuggled a gorilla into play.

That was Thursday. Yesterday, with your head still on fire, what do you get? Game after game was over by the third quarter. This was not competitive football. This was the bombing of Dresden. They put me to sleep faster than Bill Cosby. And it's time for a change. It's time for college football to end the hypocrisy and adopt the NFL model: 

Institutionalized socialism. 

Come on, football fans. Let's demand the NCAA do what MLB and the NFL have done: Establish a double-secret probation college payroll tax. Make Alabama spend the same amount of money on its players as Temple does. If the Crimson Tide overspends, make them pay a luxury tax. Pretty soon, we'll have parity, wonderful perfect parity. And the colleges will rake in cash like Ben Carson on the Shopping Channel. 

Maybe next year - as the Mara family chases the mythical 0-and-16 - maybe we'll see a game decided in the fourth quarter. Imagine the national championship game: Slippery Rock v. Stony Brook! Excuse me, I gotta see what's on TV. I'm hoping for the episode where Burgess Meredith locks himself in the bank vault. Like him, I need a book to pass some time.