Haven't any of you ever analyzed college sports?
College football does not primarily function as a sporting competition that endeavors with integrity, year in and year out, to find a "best team," or national champion. Oh, writers get caught up in it, and coaches occasionally, but athletic directors and university presidents? They know it to be a cashcow, a funding vehicle for all the other sports that the NCAA mandates a school house to be Division I, most of which serves as little trophy women for said athletic directors and university presidents as they compete for the Stanford Award, a.k.a the Sears Cup.
In other words, you're never going to see a 10-game season, because each home game is worth 2 mil in revenue. You're never going to see an end to the conference title game, because it, too, draws too much revenue. Television ratings for a college playoff, in my opinion, wouldn't be so much higher than bowl games that it would change the TV contract for them, which, under a playoff system, is the only way you could spread the money around to all other Division I programs who weren't in the playoff.
If you create a playoff, the bowls are dead, either literally or figuratively. They suddenly become the NIT. And if the bowls are dead, the perception that goes with getting to a bowl - a perception that leads rich men and women to donate millions of dollars in the name of progress - is dead, too. And that means a lot of programs are dead. Even if it's 16 or 24 teams - which it would never be, because it'd cut into home game revenue - you're either leaving any team from a smaller conference out that isn't undefeated - which gives them little purpose in playing - of teams from larger leagues like, say, the No. 2 team in the Big 12. Presidents and athletic directors would never stand for it. Too much money involved. Too many small-sport, Title-IX sanctioned mouths to feed.
Of course it didn't have to be that way. Just 25 years ago, prior to the most significant court ruling in sports history - the one that allowed college teams to be on TV as many times as it wished - facilities weren't an issue. Dorms weren't an issue. Stadium upgrades - not an issue. Skyboxes, banked tracks, giant video boards, rampant advertising - not an issue.
What changed? The athletic directors did. Out with the former football coach. In with the guy with a Master's in sports management, to whom accomplishment was fundraising, monument-building, and pissing contests. What the first thing most of these guys do?
Fire the current coach.
Throw money at some other coach.
Ask for money to throw at some upgrade.
Rinse your hands of anything that might go wrong. Repeat.
They look at boosters as stockholders - which they are most certainly not - that need to be caressed and babied. Enough of them get testy, and the coach is on the seat. How many of you have written that story? Do you know foolish and damaging and ennabling to fickle rich people such a story is?
It's one of the great failures of sports media, how they've allowed such repentant capitalists to take over college sports. Athletic directors are creating an economy that will price out most loyal fans with corporate boosters that will eat the pageant heart of stadiums on Saturday. We've got small sport teams taking monthlong summer trips all over the world, golf and tennis coaches making 70,000 to lead teams nobody watches, football coaches commanding seven figures. All in the name of "keeping up with the Joneses." College athletics is now, then, supposed to be both pure of heart and flush with cash out the ass.
The duality is a total paradox. How do you ask a boy who's just walked through a oak-paneled locker room with televisions and video games - flanked on both sides short-skirted hostesses who may or may not later lead him to a house of tail - that's he to come there in the fall, cut out all the distractions and play old-school, hard-nosed football? How stupid is that? While the media throws around scenarios for their fictional He-Man league, that's the real story behind college football and why it functions so idiotically.
Instead of these stories, I'd like to see the one that investigates why an athletic department pays 30 people to be on its marketing staff, complete with state payroll and benefits, when that worked could be outsourced to, say, a firm of ten people at a quarter of the cost. Or why an athletic department has 20 associate athletic directors, so as to squeeze them into a higher pay grade. Or why they feel the need to pay for 100-200 academic support staff, including tutors. Or why they need to have their own cafeterias, with dieticians, chefs, etc.
Mind you, I know the political answer behind those questions - college sports is a big business. Except that it's not for 20 other sports, which suck off the teat of one.
I'm not suggesting it's the media's job to give answers. It is their job to at least ask those questions, though. We ask those questions all the time of our government. Why is it that athletic departments are viewed as the same kind of wasteful entities?
So, in the spirit of Jim Mora, I ask: Playoffs?
