Jagoff BCS power-brokers look awful criticizing Obama playoff comments

Tweak, don't ditch. Bring back SOS considerations. Add a Plus-1. Dump the Notre Dame exception. Force all conferences to have championship games. Force conferences that suck out of the BCS until they deserve it again. Let three teams from one conference in if worthy. Be more wary about mid-major riff-raff.

Boom. A bazillion problems solved. Everybody happier.

 

Wrong for, what, the 5,517th consecutive time around here?

 

How many times have we read about this setup? It makes for a nice soundbite but it won't work because the Sun/Independence/Rose/Fiesta/Orange/ChampsSports/Alamo etc. etc. etc. bowl-organizing committees that do all the work to run their games want nothing to do with an NCAA-run playoff.

They won't do all the legwork so the NCAA can stage a playoff game that eliminates their own bowl. The Rose Bowl is no longer the Rose Bowl if it's nothing more than an NCAA quarterfinal or semifinal.

Would a 16-team playoff work? Of course, using on-campus sites until the final 2, like I-AA, II and III, or until the final 4, with the games being run by the NCAA, just like they run the baseball and softball playoffs.

 

I want to hit Jim Delany in the head with a rock.

While I am not an Obama supporter, I am glad he spoke up. I just hope the gov't does not get involved like they did with the steroids scandal in baseball. I think the gov't has bigger fish to fry.

 

Rose would be a quarterfinal one year (the 1 vs. 8 game), semifinal two other years and a championship that other year, which is a better net for the Rose/Fiesta/Sugar/Orange than it is now.

The shitty little bowl games? The would continue to be shitty little bowls. Three second-tier bowls: Orlando, Tampa, San Diego?... would get promoted into quarterfinal hosting... or perhaps that threesome gets rotated among a dozen bowls.

Eight-team playoff being a supremely better method is inarguable among the sane.

 

ESPN's the biggest supporter of a playoff, and it's entirely out of sheer corporate greed.

 

Isn't the former I-AA going to a 20-team playoff in 2010 or 2011?

 

No doubt, play. The conferences get much more money than they would under a playoff system, what with eleventy millions teams from each conference getting a bowl bid to slice and dice X number of ways. For all the big numbers thrown out on hoops tournament revenue, it's still a relative pittance for each school (of course, splitting it 350 instead of 120 ways helps with that). Given how football finances -- not basketball -- determines the big dogs of college athletic-dom, I would expect the BCS to be around for a long, long time no matter what anyone else says.

 

Nothing would be affected revenue-wise, as explained above.

 

The reason we'll never see a playoff has nothing to do with classes missed or blue-haired bowl organizers or a fear that the regular season might ruined.

It's money.

The BCS conference schools haul in somewhere around 98 percent of the cash generated by these bowl games. They don't have to share. They don't have to divide the pot. They just rake it into their pockets and walk off whistling.

All of that changes if the NCAA institutes a playoff system. Because at that point, it becomes an inclusive event. Every team in (formerly) I-A has a shot to make the field, and every team, and every conference, has a chance to miss the tournament. The payouts get split more evenly. And the TV revenue, like it is with the basketball tourney, gets divided up among all the conferences. If you're one of the six BCS conference commissioners, why would you give up all that guaranteed money and start splitting the pot?

That's the bottom line. These college presidents and conference commissioners don't give a shit about the student-athletes or the integrity of the game. They want to protect their extra large slice of the money pie.

 

I think this is a silly "argument." Obama isn't going to talk about "real" policy in interviews, so he talks about the dog issue and the BCS playoff. Since this is one of the few things news orgs can run with, they run with it.
As for the main issue - I don't know if a playoff would be able to garner as much money as the bowls do. Consider the prices for the bowl tickets which already run between $200 and $500 per ticket and the corporate sponsorships, I just don't see it penciling out to be better with a playoff.