The first photo is of the 1979 Cotton Bowl (UH vs Notre Dame), the second is from the famous Texas goal line stand against Alabama (led by Joe Namath) at the end of the 1965 Orange Bowl. Kids, these were two of the greatest games of all time...ah, forget it. I'm old and my hip hurts.
Thankfully, an ill-gotten OU national championship was averted due to a now-familiar Sooner BCS collapse ("Boomer Swooner"). Those mouth-breathers north of the Red River annually have either the best or second best Texas football program. The OU roster typically features a sizable number of the best Texas high school players. Because, really, Oklahoma high school teams just aren’t that good. So they have to import their players from Texas. Without Texans, OU would be competing with Tech every year to go to the Cotton Bowl.
But that’s for a different day. Today I want to talk about a cutting edge subject. Did you know that the Bowl Championship Series is an inefficient means to determine the college football national champion? No, really. You heard it here first.
I know this is tired-1998 is sick of arguing over the BCS. But this thing is so broken down, leaking oil, rusting and slipping out of gear that its beginning to resemble a Reeder family car. The time has long come and gone to take it out back and put it out of its misery. The thing has lost virtually all public acceptance. Even our new President has found time in his busy schedule of saving the world from America and walking on water to support blowing it up. Now that would be “stimulus” I could support. Even those school-jumping, swag grabbing coaches now want a playoff. Up to now, they had opposed playoffs because playoffs would hold them to a higher standard. Now most of them can claim success just by reaching one of the 243 bowl games-with a playoff they used to fear being measured by whether they qualified for the tournament. But the BCS has been around long enough to screw multiple coaches in each conference. Because most coaches now realize a sizable bonus by qualifying for a BCS game, even the coaches want to change the system.
But the real reason to get rid of the BCS has nothing to do with whether its “champion” truly is a “national champion” or whether a playoff should determine the national champion, or whether the BCS rankings essentially use the same criteria to rank football teams as are used in figure skating contests. The real reason is that it’s a monopoly that stifles college football, and ultimately all sporting programs, at non-BCS institutions.
Division I (now the Football Bowl Subdivision) college football is the only NCAA sport that does not recognize a national champion. Instead, schools are ranked by two polls (one by coaches who don’t watch any of the games, and the other by largely anonymous individuals nominated by the schools themselves) and several computer services no one knows anything about (for all we know, e-Harmony runs one of the BCS computer ranking services), and the top tier schools go to the top bowls. Why does any of this matter? Money. Bowls with BCS tie-ins have significantly higher payouts than other bowls. This year, each BCS bowl paid out a total of $17.5 million to the participating teams, which were split among their respective conferences. Rather than a playoff system that would need to admit all 120 Division I/FBS schools, the 66 BCS schools have managed to restrict entry into these top bowls. And that has real meaning. Now, the BCS does give about $9.5 million to all the non-BCS schools (combined), but that pales in comparison to the money the BCS schools share.
Football is by far the leading collegiate money-making sport, to a degree that football (and in some cases men’s basketball) revenues typically fund all other university sports programs. Lets face it-this is really about women’s sports, which federal law requires to be offered on an equal footing with men’s programs, and non-revenue men’s sports like swimming, hockey, lacrosse, and the like. Universities fund their entire sporting program (and thereby comply with Title IX) through successful football programs. Yet, Division I football is split into the “haves” and “have-nots,” whereby the lesser schools (e.g Baylor, Vanderbilt, Purdue, Mississippi State) depend on revenues shared, through conference affiliations, with the leading programs (USC, Texas, Michigan, Ohio State, Florida, LSU, etc.) that annually appear in the top bowl games. “Top,” of course, being measured in payout amounts. Appearance in a top bowl game can go a long way toward funding an entire conference’s non-revenue sporting programs.
The BCS is merely the latest incarnation of what was first known as the College Football Alliance. This was a reaction by the larger schools with more wherewithal to relatively confining NCAA restrictions that inhibited them from realizing natural revenue sources and using their inherent ability to outspend smaller schools to their advantage. Since then, the BCS has solidified a schism in Division I football: members of six conferences obtain preferential access to the bowls with the biggest payouts, making it much more difficult for the non-BCS schools to reach these games and obtain these payouts for themselves and their non-BCS conference affiliate schools. By any other name and in any other industry, this would be known as “monopolization,” but because it involves so-called “academic institutions” (the concept is itself a fraud, as the administrators of nearly every major university have absolutely no control over the football program or its budget) it somehow escapes (or has so far escaped) these usual restrictions.
What was life like just a few short years ago, back before this all started? College football teams could appear on national television once per (regular) season, and twice on “regional” telecasts. Freshmen were not eligible to play varsity ball until the early 1970s. Notre Dame would not even play in bowl games until the 1969 season (they played Texas in the 1970 Cotton Bowl-they lost). Ties were possible. Independents like Houston, Miami, or Florida State routinely appeared in New Year’s Day bowls and competed on a relatively level field with the majors. But the Texases, Penn States, USCs, Alabamas and the like, with far greater fan bases and funding sources than the New Mexicos and the Central Michigans, chafed for greater exposure and to start an arms race that would leave behind the smaller schools. The CFA was the result. Although it did not include the Big 10 or Pac 10, it began to negotiate television deals directly, around NCAA rules, affording greater exposure and higher revenues. Eventually, the bowls, ever desperate for money, allied themselves and agreed to restrict access to only the then “Bowl Coalition” member schools, thereby roping off this major funding source to the participating institutions.
The end result has been to create a BCS brand, with the traditional New Year’s Day bowls (less the Cotton) and a newly contrived “Championship” game as the centerpiece. With the cartel controlling these games and protecting its brand, ESPN just paid a record $125 million per year for the rights to televise the games through 2014. Along with the BCS brand and preferential access to the BCS games comes other largesse, such as shoe company deals, corporate sponsorships, luxury suite deals, stadium expansions, marketing deals. The days of letterman sweaters and malt shops, as Jeff Ward puts it, are gone and dead forever. Think Barry Switzer and his Uzi-toting wide receiver.
Now, the non-BCS schools had their shot at taking down the BCS, but they settled for a bone. In a 2003 settlement that averted a planned antitrust suit, the non-BCS schools settled for a limited right of access to the BCS games, in which they are guaranteed that one of them may go to such a bowl if they are in the top 6 of the BCS rankings. But, only one non-BCS school can go at most. That may have been somewhat acceptable when the settlement was made, but the non-BCS schools have clearly stepped up their game since then. Who can forget Boise State beating the Sooners in the 2006 Fiesta Bowl, or Utah crushing Pittsburgh in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl. This year, TCU and Boise State were clearly better than Cincinnati and West Virginia (who played perhaps the lamest Orange Bowl of all time, quite a feat given the previous year’s Wake Forest-Louisville matchup), and Utah ripped Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. The “quality of play” figleaf no longer holds water as a means to keep out the non-BCS schools. Now, you may say, how did that happen if the BCS is so damaging to the other schools’ finances and keeps them from reaching the same levels as the BCS schools. The difference is not at the top of these conferences, but in the middle and bottom. That is, the middle to lower quality schools in the Mountain West, Conference USA and the like don’t get the revenue sharing that their analogous BCS brethren obtain just by being in a BCS conference. Pitiful Baylor is in the money, while less pitiful but still unspectacular Wyoming is not.
Like any other cartel that reduces access, quality has suffered as well. In the “old days” plenty of now non-BCS schools played in major bowls and gave the bigs outstanding games. I’m thinking of the 1979 UH-Notre Dame Cotton Bowl, or the 1980 BYU-SMU Holiday Bowl. But the BCS guarantees each conference winner a berth in a BCS game, so each BCS conference is guaranteed a payday. This means that some clearly non-deserving teams (are you listening, Big East Conference?) have gotten in the big games to the exclusion of more deserving BCS conference teams or non-BCS teams. The BCS has featured some really stinker games these last few years. The bowls always strain to select teams that have large fan bases that will buy the most tickets, not the teams that will produce the best games. Aside from this year’s Orange Bowl, how about the last few times Notre Dame was in the BCS (e.g. 2006 Sugar Bowl, LSU 41, Notre Dame 14, or the 2000 Fiesta Bowl, Oregon State (!) 41, Notre Dame 9), or the ridiculous 2007 Rose Bowl (USC 49, Illinois 17) that should have paired USC against Georgia that year. There have been some good games of course, but on balance the quality has suffered by restricting access to the conference champions and so-called “at large” teams. Why the ACC champion should automatically be admitted to one of these bowls, other than monopolization reasons, is beyond comprehension. We'd be far better off with a third SEC team in these games than watching Louisville or Boston College or West Virginia or whatever garbage conference winner the Big East or ACC throws up in a given year.
And with the new ESPN deal, these bowls will now leave the free public airwaves and be accessible only to cable or satellite subscribers. While most people have one or the other, not everyone does, and in particular, I would think a higher proportion of the families whose sons grow up to play major college football lack cable or satellite. That may ultimately be a self-defeating move.
Get rid of the BCS, let all the Division I teams compete on an equal footing, and go back to the polls. In the end, that system probably wasn’t much better or worse than what we have now, but at least it gives the smaller schools a better shot at being in the money.
One last little shot. Some guy called John and Lance on 1560 radio in Houston the week before the Texas Tech-UT game this last year. This is the game everyone was saying was the biggest game in Tech history. This guy said something like "this is the biggest game in Tech history, but its just the next game in Texas' schedule." Well played, sir. We are the Joneses.
Next-OK, I give up. I’ll do my 25 random things about me. Will that make you happy?
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