College students across the country are returning to campus and moving into the dorms. One truth seems universal: Move-in day is the hottest and most humid day of the year.

The start of the college calendar also seems like a good time to wax nostalgically about the joys of college sports. Today, I present some of the advantages of college football and basketball relative to the pro sports.

I will try not to focus on subjective factors. For many people, the advantage of the college game is the atmosphere. Who doesn’t love to hear a college band rock out to Eye of the Tiger? A live band beats piped-in music every day of the week. But sometimes the cacophony of sounds at a pro-sporting event works too. Many folks get goosebumps when the New York Yankees play Enter the Sandman and Mariano Rivera takes the field. Pro sports arenas may be obnoxious at times, but our enjoyment of the professional stadium experience is at least somewhat subjective.

Similarly, I’m not going to focus too much on the quality of play. Personally, I prefer to see college players in action. For many of the players, they’ve been playing since they were eight years old, and this is the brief pinnacle of their career. They may only be playing for a chance to go to the Military.com bowl or the post-season CBI tournament, but they always give 100 percent. On the other hand, NFL and NBA players can do things that most college athletes can never hope to do. And whether you appreciate raw effort or superior athleticism is indeed subjective.

Rather than focus on these subjective factors, I want to focus on five things that make college sports unambiguously better.

1. The seasons are shorter.

Though less true for the NFL, the NBA season is just too long. The owners have figured out what they think is the right formula for maximizing revenue. But with such a long season, it hardly feels like the games are special. College seasons are always shorter, and each game has more weight and importance attached to it.

2. There are more games overall.

Even though there are fewer games for each team, there are more games on TV every day of the season. And if you love flipping between close games and watching dramatic endings, you have more chances to see a college game come down to the wire.

3. There is no TV monopoly for college sports.

Fox and CBS control the majority of NFL coverage, and if you don’t have DirectTV, you will often have only one game to watch in your TV window. But with college sports, the conferences sell their rights individually. You can watch six college games at once on Saturday with a basic cable package.

4. There is never an incentive to tank.

No one wants to cheer for their team to lose, but when teams are rewarded for poor play (with easier schedules or higher draft picks), tanking is often optimal. But the beauty of college sports is that losing is never advantageous. Teams win the recruiting battles by having winning traditions and exciting atmospheres. Even if your team is 1-6 in conference play, you’ll never find yourself cheering for your favorite team to lose.

(The one exception might be if you want you coach to get fired. See Wake Forest basketball and Jeff Bzdelik. But in most cases, you don’t need your team to finish in last place and have the team lose on senior day to get the coach fired.)

5. Nothing is ever clinched.

There is nothing more frustrating than buying tickets to a game and finding out your coach is resting the starters. For many fans, you only get a limited number of chances to see your team in person, and you would at least like the team to try and win when you pay $50+ for your ticket.

But in college football, there is never a point in time when a team has clinched a bid in the National Title game. A late season loss can always knock your team out of the game. And the same is true with the NCAA tournament selection process. Seeding is never set until the season is over.  No one ever feels they can rest their starters.

Of course, there is one key subjective reason too:

6. Debate is good. Debate makes us care more.

College sports are all about debates. And because that debate matters (it influences the selection process), every moment of the limited number of games counts.

This year in college basketball, the debate starts at the top. Who is the top team?

Louisville is the defending national champions and they bring back a core of Russ Smith, Luke Hancock, Wayne Blackshear, Chane Behanan and Montrezl Harrell. They must break in a new point guard, but they have two outstanding choices. The team can either utilize the top JUCO player in the country Chris Jones, or elite freshman recruit Terry Rozier, who is further along than a typical freshman after a year at prep-school. Replacing Gorgui Dieng’s defense may be a tall task, but Rick Pitino is an elite defensive mastermind who builds top defenses every year.

Meawhile Michigan St. returns even more minutes from last year (83 percent) and with a core of Keith Appling, Adreian Payne, Gary Harrisand Branden Dawson back, expectations are sky high. The team dominated the best conference in the country last year and Gary Harris hasn’t reached his potential yet.

But what about Kentucky? John Calipari has brought together 6 former Top 10 recruits on the same roster in Andrew Harrison, Aaron Harrison, Julius Randle, Dakari Johnson, James Young, and last year’s Top 10 recruit Alex Poythress.  This is the most elite talent assembled on the same roster in the modern era. And given John Calipari’s proven ability to bring freshmen along, this team has ridiculous upside.

Meanwhile Kansas has Andrew Wiggins, the most-heralded high school recruit since LeBron James, and a roster loaded with young talent too.

Settling this type of debate with a pure look at the standings would be so much less interesting. But when we know that judgments come into play, it is important to watch these teams as much as possible. We need to know these teams; we need to know the context; we need to obsess over every detail. Only then can we reach a conclusion about who deserves the top overall seed in the NCAA tournament.

Many sports fans disagree with this. They like clear achievable targets. They like magic numbers and the countdown to a clear articulated goal. But is this really the best way to pick or seed the playoff field? Imagine if a star QB was injured for three games and his team ended up losing home-field advantage on a tie-breaker. Is that the right way to settle things? Or is a deeper analysis of the teams more appropriate?

Now that doesn’t mean that college fans don’t want to see things settled on the field. But obsessing, studying, and debating these teams inside-and-out is half-the-fun. And besides, after you cool down from move-in day, you need something to do. The debate is fun. Finals are months away.