6/5/06: College Football+Television=Corruption

June 5, 2006

I know it may not be one of the biggest dilemmas the world faces, but as a sports fan, I’m pretty ticked off. I searched through the many articles available on the subject, there were some with both sides of the argument, but the majority leaned toward the disapproval of the college football postseason. I feel that as television gets more involved with the game, college football will lose its amateur status in the people’s minds. It seems that everything has a price or a way to make a profit from. The sacred difference that was college football was the fact that money was not to be involved. Well with all the sponsors and television opportunities, especially in the postseason, college football has been “deflowered.”
We are all familiar with the big name bowls such as the Rose, Orange, Sugar, and Fiesta Bowls, but how many know about the MPC Computers, Meineke Car Care, or Champs Sports Bowls? The games are about as exciting as the names they hold. Many of these small bowls have trouble making a profit from the games due to locations of the game or just no interest in a game between to mediocre teams. A good example was last years GMAC Bowl in Mobile, Alabama. The Toledo Rockets thumped the University of Texas at El Paso, 45-13 in front of a near empty stadium and low rated television audience.
It obviously gives small schools an opportunity to play in a postseason game and on television. Both of those things lead to money for the schools beyond the payout the bowl game pays automatically. It also tends to draw recruiting for the schools. When interested prospects watch the schools on television, it gives them a recognition they may want. Honestly, there are many more negatives here than positives.
College athletics soars during the month of March when the national college basketball tournament is going. The sixty five team single elimination tournament layout offers many chances for underdogs to shine. It truly gives every team the same opportunity at being titles the national champion. There are 367 teams in NCAA division one basketball, and after conference tournaments, 65 teams are chosen by a committee for the tournament field. This system is heavily scrutinized due to the fact that there are so many teams, some teams maybe left out. Nonetheless, it honestly is the best tournament system in sports.
Then we move to college football, NCAA division’s 1-AA, two, and three. All of these use a single elimination tournament to crown a champion. Just as in basketball a committee chooses thirty two teams for these tournaments. Again, this gives any one of those thirty two teams a chance to win the whole thing, and again you get positive results.
I use these tournaments to try to make a comparison to the dreadful state that NCAA division one football is in. Unlike division one basketball, there are only 117 teams currently in division one football. It would seem like with fewer teams, it would be easier to run a tournament. Of course, that is only what it seems. Instead, division one football uses an atrocious system known as bowl games.
Last season there were twenty eight bowl games played, which means fifty six colleges made the post season. This also means that the lower the name recognition of the bowl was, the lower quality of teams was invited. The requirements to be bowl eligible are quite absurd. A team only has to have one more win than there loss total. So basically, one game above five hundred in sports terms. This means we have many teams who play with records of six wins and five losses and so on. These schools usually are ones with football tradition and had a bad season. These teams also usually square off against smaller schools with very good records. In some cases you will have two very well known schools with six and five records that play each other, when they both have had bad seasons. The results are usually a terrible game in which no one wants attend and television ratings are terrible.
With these kinds of problems one would assume that college football would decide to have fewer games right? Well if you’re like me and thought that, you would be incorrect. Next season division one football will invite sixty two teams to the postseason, which means there will be thirty one bowl games! Three more games were added to the slate! I don’t understand why not just add one more game then, and there would be sixty four teams, and it would be a perfect format for a tournament.
I’ll elaborate on that by clarifying that the national champion is chosen by not the winner of a game, but by sports writers and coaches. That’s right two different groups, and they will not combine their votes, so there are separate polls. Each week these two polls differ in their ranking of the top twenty five teams, which then gets thrown into a whole mix of other polls and miscellaneous stats put together by a group of people who probably have never played football in their life, and jammed into a computer for one final composite top fifteen. Confusing? Don’t worry we all are. I don’t understand why with all the success of the other college tournaments, division one football can not do the same.
What is this computerized system? Well it goes by the incorrectly named Bowl Championship Series, or BCS. I say incorrectly named due to the simple fact that it does not crown a definitive champion, there is more than one championship in some cases, and it is not even a series. The case that hits most close to home was in 2002, when the University of Oregon entered the postseason as Pac-Ten champions with a record of ten wins and one loss. The University of Nebraska who was number two in the polls all year, but lost their final two games, including the conference championships by thirty points, ended the regular season as number three and Oregon was number two. So one would think it’s only obvious to put the number one team, the University of Miami at the time, versus the number two, Oregon. Well, once again division one football shocked everyone and the final BCS had Nebraska number two with a better computer average than Oregon, and the national championship game was Nebraska versus Miami. Miami would go on to embarrass the Cornhuskers, and Oregon would silence any doubters and thumped the University of Colorado by forty points.
The BCS would make a statement that admitted that there might have been a flaw and the next season made some corrections. In my opinion some corrections are not enough. The BCS includes four games, the Rose, Fiesta, Orange, and Sugar bowls, the premier tier of bowl games. With four games it seems logical to invite the top eight teams from the final BCS rankings to these games, but with contracts that’s not even the case. The national championship rotates through those four games each season, but the other three have contracts to invite only the champions of some major conferences, even though they may not even be in the top eight; or in this year’s case not even the top twenty.
Florida State University entered the final BCS at number twenty-two but after an upset victory over Miami in the Atlantic Coast Conference championships, Florida State was automatically invited to the Orange Bowl, even though Miami was ranked ten spots in front of them. Florida State proved to be a fluke and was beaten by West Virginia. The BCS made no apologies for the dull game, and only gloated at the fact that they finally pitted the top two teams against each other in the championships. Yeah, well if they hadn’t the system would need to be torn down, because they were the only two teams undefeated at the seasons end.
Again, this is not the case every year. For example we only have to go back two years when six teams had undefeated records, so who has the right to the spots in the title game? Well we went to the BCS, and it proved incorrect again when they chose Texas. The Longhorns played a yawner in the championship and Oklahoma, Auburn, Utah, and Boise State all won their respected bowl games. I guess the better question is how can five teams end the year with undefeated records? Well its simple, the BCS did not even put those other four teams against each other. With the contracts, they had to play teams with one or more losses, and Boise State did not even make a BCS bowl.
For small schools like that, they have added a fifth BCS game to the upcoming season. The explanation, it gives an at-large team the chance to play in a BCS game. An at-large is basically a team who meets the top ten BCS ranking requirement to play in a BCS game, but did not win their conference. Once again we can look at Oregon, who finished the regular season last year with a 10-1 record again, but USC was the conference champion. Oregon was number eight in the final BCS ranking, but with contracts to the Southeastern conference and Notre Dame, the Ducks were booted from the BCS.
There are so many problems with college football I could go on and on and hit other little things, like the years where there are multiple national champions; 1991 Miami and Washington, 1997 Michigan and Nebraska, and 2003 Louisiana State and Southern California. How can there be more than one champion? The word loses its meaning. Or how small no-name bowl games are played way too late in the season. The upcoming season has the inaugural International Bowl in Toronto, Canada, being played on January 6, one night before the national championships. One thing the BCS had going for it was the fact that at least they were all the last games of the season, not anymore.
So many problems, and there is only one real clear-cut answer to why things are the way they are, money. With so much money being made by these brand name games, sponsors throw their names in now, the Blockbuster Bowl, the MPC Computers Bowl, what’s next the Preparation H Bowl? I suppose for the right price, we may have one. I thought college athletics were about just that, the athletics, no monetary interest, it is what separated itself from professional sports. With so many bad postseason games, I feel that Pete Alfano put it best with the renaming of a game the “Tidy Bowl.”