Imagine the atmosphere at Bryant-Denny Stadium for the clash between a team that has won six national titles since 2009 and a team that has won nine national titles since 2011. The place would be packed. The energy would be off the charts.

And, in April, the weather probably would be beautiful.

Down on the field, Alabama coach Nick Saban would smile as his team prepared to face North Dakota State. Not because his team would win the game, but because North Dakota State’s starters would make his younger players understand everything he’d been saying about how much work they still need to do to uphold Alabama’s standard. It would be a three-hour, made-for-TV lesson that no number of team meetings could replicate.

This is what college football’s spring games should be. The sport has evolved past intrasquad scrimmages that sometimes don’t even look like football because teams don’t have the depth at that moment to field two full rosters. The College Football Playoff is about to expand. Regular-season scheduling likely will shift to more Power 5 versus Power 5 nonconference games because the teams at the top no longer have to go undefeated and the teams closer to the bottom want to sell some tickets and provide some value for their television partners. So why not help everyone in the ecosystem by playing true scrimmages in the spring that allow some schools to collect checks and others to collect teachable moments such as the one described above?

First-year Auburn coach Hugh Freeze made the suggestion again this week. Freeze has been beating this drum for some time, and it makes sense.

“Allow us to scrimmage somebody on A-Day. Another team,” Freeze said. “I think everybody would get out of it exactly what they want.”