As you sit back today to watch any number of the six college bowl games, you might come across Chronicle sportswriter John Lopez’s column from yesterday in which he characterizes this past Saturday’s EV1.net Houston Bowl as the “Apathy Bowl” because of the low turnout from local football fans and renews the call for an NFL-style playoff system to determine a national champion in NCAA Division I-A college football.
Lopez’s opinion is a common one, arguably even the majority view of most folks who follow college football passionately. However, it is wrong for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the health of college football as we know it.
Lopez’s view is that the BCS system — which has set up Wednesday’s USC-Texas Rose Bowl matchup for the national championship and will have a championship game next season a week after four major New Year’s Day bowl games — is killing the bowl system, anyway. He cites the low attendance figures for lesser bowl games that do not figure in the national championship equation as dispositive evidence that the bowl system is flawed and that a playoff system would generate far more interest (i.e., money). Lopez predicts that peripheral bowls will die off as sponsors ditch games for lack of interest in the face of the more popular BCS bowl games.
Well, Lopez’s prediction about the lesser bowl games may turn out to be correct, but his view ignores current market conditions and severe logistical problems with an NFL-style college bowl system. Contrary to Lopez’s prediction, the market for such bowls is quite bullish — 20 bowls took place this season even before the traditional 8 New Year’s Day bowl games. That gave 48 teams of players — 99% of whom will never play professional football — and 48 university communities the thrill of enjoying bowl week festivities that would not have done so under an NFL-style 8-team playoff system. Even though Lopez characterizes the Houston Bowl as the “Apathy Bowl” because of low local turnout, I noted nothing apathetic about the thousands of Iowa State players, coaches, band members and fans I saw while hanging out with my old friend Coach Mac during the week — they thoroughly enjoyed their holiday week in Houston.
Why not simply incorporate the lesser bowl games into a playoff system? That’s where you run into severe logistical problems that do not exist under the current bowl system. College presidents, athletic directors, and most college football coaches do not want to see the football season extended into the second semester of school where it would interfere with college baskeball. Consequently, to conclude a 16 or 8-team, NFL-style playoff system by early January, such a system would have to be implemented early enough in the season — say, by at least the Thanksgiving weekend in the event of a 16 team system — to allow for the championship to be decided by New Year’s Day or the weekend thereafter. How many students and members of university communities are going to be willing or able to afford traveling to a neutral site in late November or early December (when most colleges are preparing for final exams) to watch a first round playoff game, particularly when a trip to a later round game may be in the offing?
Moreover, if a second round game takes place the weekend before or on a Christmas holiday weekend, how many of those folks are going to be willing to uproot their holiday family gatherings to attend such a playoff game? Indeed, beyond the wealthiest of alumni, who is really going to be able to afford the expense of traveling to multiple playoff games during the busy holiday season? The NFL playoffs work from an attendance standpoint because the games leading up to the Super Bowl are played at one of the participating team’s home stadium. A college playoff system could incorporate the same type of logistics, but that would do away with the holiday tradition and thrill of thousands of players and fans traveling to a city such as Houston as a reward for a successful season. And don’t suggest that the lesser bowls could survive outside of an NFL-style playoff system — just look at the NIT post-season basketball tournament, which generates nominal interest in comparison to the NCAA Basketball Tournament.
And the foregoing analysis doesn’t even address the physical toll on players of adding multiple additional games after they have already endured a physically brutal college football season. Again, almost all of these fellows will not be playing this game as professionals after completion of their college careers. Yes, players in high school and lower divisions of college football endure such additional playoff games, but the physics of the bigger and faster major college football players make the risk of serious injury far greater at the Division I-A level of play. NFL professionals get compensated well to take such risks. The same cannot be said for major college football players.
So, in the end, the question becomes whether the benefit of the additional television revenue that an NFL-style college playoff system would generate for participating schools justify doing away with a system that gives 40 or 48 (depending on whether a 16 or 8-team playoff system is used) more teams of players, university community members, and fans an opportunity to enjoy a holiday trip to participate in bowl game festivities? Perhaps Lopez’s prediction is correct that market forces will eventually lead us to an NFL-style college system, anyway. However, the market has not done so yet, and I’m not willing to advocate scrapping a largely successful system that rewards huge numbers of participants and supporters for a playoff system that would simply throw even more money at the relatively few large university football programs that would likely dominate such a playoff system.
Thus, my sense is that the championship game that the BCS system is implementing next season is a good compromise between a playoff system and the current bowl system. The real answer to improving the lesser bowls in the current bowl system is the hard work of making those bowl games as attractive as possible for the participating teams, which is something that San Antonio’s Alamo Bowl and El Paso’s Sun Bowl accomplish most seasons.
As far as the Houston Bowl is concerned, the bowl game already has most of the ingredients necessary to become a successful civic activity — great facilities, decent winter weather, and a fun city for participants to visit. By coming up with a long-term deal with a big-name corporate sponsor such as Shell Oil Company (the sponsor of the Houston Open golf tournament), the Houston Bowl could then offer the money necessary to attract teams that would generate more local interest, such as the Alamo Bowl had this season in its matchup between Nebraska and Michigan or the Cotton Bowl has with Texas Tech and Alabama. That’s a far better approach to generating local interest in the Houston Bowl than advocating an NFL-style playoff system that might not include a playoff game in Houston at all.
My solution to how to have a playoff system is:
1. Eliminate or cut the number of non-conference games.
2. Have a 16 team playoff lasting 5 weeks.
3. The first 2 rounds are played at higher seeds home stadiums.
4. After a week off (finals week), the final 2 rounds are played in a host city.
Should be doable, and would be worth a TON of money.
The sad part is, only about 30-40 teams could be competitive in this scenario, but I believe it’s inevitable. The potential money is just enormous.
Jeff, I have no doubt that you are correct that your playoff system would generate a ton of money, maybe even more than the existing bowl system.
But why would college football want to limit the bowl games to three cities or, as you suggest, one host city. You would, in effect, concentrate the economic benefit of the system on one metropolitan area and several of the top football programs.
The more widespread economic benefit of the existing bowl system — not to speak of the much wider participation — would seem to be a far more attractive system for the vast majority of college football programs and their supporters.
Nice argument, but how does Division I-AA, II, III, and the NAIA able to pull off what you call impractical?
I think both can exist, it’s only a matter of time and the BCS is only prolonging the hypocrisy that it will take away from school time.
Conde, the lower levels of college ball resemble the high school playoffs. Given the more limited and regional interest in the playoffs, they are much easier to pull off from a logistics standpoint. And obviously who gets the limited money generated from the playoff system is also not much of a consideration.
Great thoughts Tom.
Wouldn’t the concept behind next year’s “+ 1” game ruin the perfect ending that resulted this year? What would a game between the winner of USC/Texas and Penn State prove?
For the record, I prefer a 32 team tournament that includes some combination of neutral sites for the middle seeds and home fields for the top seeds.
Scott, you are correct that the BCS system worked well this season because USC and Texas turned out to be substantially superior to the other top teams. However, my understanding of the system for next year, if applied to this year’s games, would pit USC (1st seed) v. Ohio State (4th seed) and Texas (2nd seed) v. Penn State (3rd seed) in the semifinal games.
Tom,
I’m sure it would be like the Final Four tournament and rotate among many different cities. And it’s not about what benefits the majority of college football programs, it’s about how long to top 40 or so programs are willing to split the revenue with everyone else.
If they designed the system so that half the money went to the participating schools, and half went to the conferences, I believe it would work.
Once you get the Big 12, SEC, Big 10, Pac-10, ACC, Big East, and ND, who else do you need?
Jeff
I guess Jeff doesn’t value the contribution of a TCU to college football this year (mountain west conference).
But, based on the performance of their referees, I’d be perfectly happy with the absolute destruction (in fire) of Conference USA.
I’m happy for TCU, and believe they would have been a better fit for the Big 12 than Baylor. Unfortunately for them, Ann Richards and Bob Bullock were Baylor alums.
I’m not 100% happy with the scenario I outlined above, and it will be tragic for the less powerful Div I schools. But it doesn’t change the economics. Roughly 50 schools generate 90% of the TV revenue; eventually they will get organized well enough via the “Super Conferences” to maximize their revenue.
Tom,
I like the high school feel of the lower levels of the NCAA football playoff system.
What would really help is if the NFL developed a minor league football system and let college football be ‘college’ football.
Division I-A is nothing more than a minor league to the NFL.
A playoff system could work alongside the bowl system, granted in a much smaller format such as a post-National Championship game where the top two teams would meet for the National Title. That way the major bowl games can revert back to hosting their original conference champions.
It’s an idea.
The fundamental problem, as I see it, is in developing an ex ante system that works where you have clear ex post results. To use this year as an example, I would argue that any system that didn’t result in USC or Texas being crowned the national champion produced a wrong result; the use of a +1 game this year could have easily resulted in that, though. Last year, though, the +1 game could have settled some controversy, but do you include Utah in that system? Or do you limit it to three teams, as was the case in the 2003 season; then, do you do +1, or +2 so you can do a full round-robin (incidentally, this is how ties for sumo championships are divided, with the championship going to the first to win 2 consecutive games)?
Given the attractiveness of keeping the traditional (now expanded) bowl system, and the fact that you can only have a limited number of games, the only change I’d like to see made would be a replacement of automatic adherence to the BCS standings with a selection committee similar to that used for the basketball tournament. Such a committee would be strongly guided by the BCS rankings, as the men’s basketball committee is by the RPI, but would have the flexibility alterations (for example, the 2003 Sugar Bowl would likely have seen USC playing LSU in this case, though maybe not). This would likely reduce the need for the seemingly annual changes in the BCS formula (“quality win” points after FSU edges out Miami, conference champions after Nebraska makes it, etc.), or at least de-emphasize their impact.