College football has its problems. I wouldn’t want you to think this sport is supremely healthy.

The economics of the sport are problematic. The deaths of players due to abusive (at worst) or negligent (at best) training methods allowed by overzealous coaches are tragic and terrifying. Attendance at games is an issue for a host of reasons.

The sport faces a lot of serious problems. Those problems won’t go away anytime soon. No one is helped by pumping sunshine, all while dark clouds cover the landscape.

Point made… but let’s not forget the good stuff. College football endures — celebrating its 150th anniversary this season — because it is a captivating sport. More precisely, college football embodies the maxim that an entity is as strong as its weakest point. College football is an irresistible entertainment product because even when it is bad, it is good.

The season opener between the No. 8 Florida Gators and the Miami Hurricanes perfectly illustrated the point.

The game was hard to watch. It was — to reference the photo above this paragraph — almost blindingly bad. It made your eyes hurt.

Florida and Miami spent 60 scoreboard minutes — nearly three and a half hours of actual time — trying to see which team could do a better job of gifting a win to the other side. It was remarkable. We all expected the usual sloppiness and ugliness of a late-August college football game, but wow, this was far more than normal.

A first half in which neither team could tackle? That’s not unusual at all. An overwhelmed Miami offensive line? That’s not a mind-blowing reality. Feleipe Franks struggling to throw across his body when moving left? No big deal. Plenty of flaws and weaknesses could be accepted as natural parts of a season opener and all the rough edges it typically brings. Yet, this game’s tackling was still as horrible in the fourth quarter as it was in the first quarter. That’s different.

This game’s quarterback decisions by Feleipe Franks were still alarmingly poor in the fourth quarter. That late-game interception was hard to digest at the time. It still is. Florida committed pass interference on a 26-yard pass… on 4th and 34 near the end of the game! This was after a series of other defensive pass interference penalties in very long down-and-distance situations.

This game was, on the raw merits, an eyesore.

Yet, why does it not seem to matter to most Americans? It’s not because Clemson and Alabama are going to tower over this season, just as they have the past few seasons. It’s not because Americans don’t care. It’s because college football has something NFL football lacks: joy.

College football is serious business. In the American South and a few other places (Ohio State, Penn State, Texas, Oklahoma), it is a religion. Yet, the passion of the college game is vibrant in a way the NFL can never match. You learn how college football differentiates itself from the NFL when you watch a bad game in each sport. Miami versus Florida isn’t the worst football game ever played, but it does represent football played at a conspicuous bottom-rung level. You have watched plenty of bad football in your life, enough to have seen ample amounts of horrendous NFL contests.

When two bottom-feeding NFL teams slog through a 13-9 festival of ineptitude in the middle of November, the realization of how much money has been invested in the two teams, and how utterly stymied the two coaches are — confronting the grim truth that the height of their professional aspirations has reached a dead end– is profoundly depressing.

The professional context enveloping the NFL, without marching bands or fight songs or other aesthetic delights which create social lubrication or communal spirit, turns a bad pro football game into a supremely dreary experience.

In college ball, where attending a game is often an expression of loyalty to a school or (beyond that) a way of life, the mere reality of involvement — participation — can be thrilling. At Alabama or the other elite schools, sure, victory is the only acceptable outcome, but for people who enjoy college football as a specific theater of sports and entertainment, the reality of college kids playing for our amusement makes us tolerate a bad game, and even laugh at it — not to demean the athletes, but out of an acknowledgment that this isn’t the highest level of football.

Even with college football’s escalating coach salaries, widespread TV coverage, and through-the-roof emotions, there remains an allowance for failure. (“COLLEGE KICKERS!” SPARTY, NO! HORNS DOWN!)

The NFL’s businesslike veneer can’t compete with college football when a bad game is involved. College Football Twitter can laugh at Miami versus Florida. NFL Twitter eviscerates coaches, quarterbacks, and other high-profile acquisitions who fail miserably. College Football Twitter can watch Miami-Florida and say, “I love this stupid sport.” NFL Twitter looks at a bad game and can’t believe the waste of money or the sequence of bad decisions made by a front office.

Miami versus Florida was a very bad college football game. College football fans are still glad the sport is back.

When you see that first atrocious NFL game of the year, the reaction will not be the same.

College football isn’t more popular than the NFL, but it is stronger at its weakest point.