Marshall Faulk acknowledges the reality of early-season "crash-test dummy" games

The new age of college football has made one of its time-honored traditions even more glaring — the early-season tuneup games.

First-year Southern coach Marshall Faulk witnessed it on Saturday, when No. 22-ranked Houston shredded his Jaguars, 77-6.

“That wasn’t really a game, that was kind of a preseason crash-dummy test for Houston to work on all the good plays,” Faulk told reporters, via Brad Crawford of CBS Sports.

Southern was paid $450,000 to serve as the cannon fodder for the Cougars.

For decades, high-level programs have scheduled lower-level schools in the early weeks of the season. What used to be games between Division I-A and Division I-AA have become FBS vs. FCS slaughterhouses.

“Let’s just be real, OK?” Faulk said. “They’re better than us. We’re FCS, everybody knows what this is, let it be what it is.”

The transfer portal has made matters worse, because the best young players at FCS schools typically end up getting big bucks with FBS programs.

“I was literally standing on the sideline thinking to myself, back when let’s say Southern had juniors and seniors . . . this could be a competitive game playing a team like Houston,” Faulk said. “In today’s landscape, we don’t have the budget to compete against them. We just don’t.”

Saturday’s game included an eight-minute fourth quarter, after Houston built a 70-0 lead through the first 45 minutes.

“The reality is our kids were giving their best effort, but we’re not good enough to beat a team that doesn’t beat themselves,” Faulk said. “There’s not anything we could’ve done. I’ve been around a lot of football, man. We don’t have the bodies, we don’t have the funds, we don’t have the equipment . . . all the stuff needed to compete with a team like that. . . . Guts and glory and want and will is not enough to compete with a team like that.”

Again, it’s been that way for a long time. Recent trends have made it worse. The question becomes whether the powers-that-be will change the rules to prevent games like this from happening.

The problem is that, even if the players have no business going against elite programs, their schools won’t want to give up the revenue that comes from serving as a sacrificial lamb.