College football may get a Final Four – and millions in new revenue

The proposed playoff structure marks a big philosophical shift within the world of college football and opens the door to a Cinderella team winning a national championship.

|
Bill Haber/AP/File
Alabama (r) prepares to snap the ball against LSU during the first half of the BCS National Championship college football game in New Orleans on Jan. 9, 2012. BSC commissioners on Wednesday publicly endorsed a model for a four-team playoff to determine a national champion.

College football fans, you’re about to get your very own Final Four.

The sport went one step further in transitioning to a partial playoff structure Wednesday, giving legions of fans and analysts what they’ve been screaming for as long as there has been a BCS (14 years). All 11 BCS commissioners, along with Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, publicly endorsed a model for a four-team, seeded playoff to determine a national champion.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of pluses to this,” ACC commissioner John Swofford told reporters after Wednesday's announcement in Chicago. “You’ve got the financial aspects of it, the transparency aspect of it. I think it will be better understood, by the public. I think it will be, if it comes to fruition, a definite step forward for college football.”

The next stop for the playoff proposal is Washington, D.C., where the commissioners will present it for approval by the BCS presidential oversight committee next Tuesday. Before any further specifics are announced, the commissioners have said they will discuss the playoff model with university presidents and athletic directors from their respective conferences.

Detail are few, but here’s what we know so far:

  • Four teams will vie for the title, up from the two selected to play in the title game under the current BCS system.
  • The teams will be decided on and ranked by a committee similar to the one that determines rankings for the NCAA basketball tournament, likely made up of former coaches, athletic directors, and other college football insiders.
  • The committee will weigh factors including record, conference championships, and strength of schedule to choose and seed the teams.
  • The two semifinal games will rotate among the already-existing BCS bowl games – the Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, and Orange Bowls. The national championship game will be auctioned off to the highest-bidding city.
  • College football will become even more of a cash cow. According to ESPN, unnamed sources have hinted that the playoff could be worth between $400 million and $500 million for the NCAA

The commissioners’ group has been flirting with the four-team playoff for a while now. “There are still some issues to be resolved, but this shouldn’t be a surprise,” SEC commissioner Mike Silve, who has pushed hard for the playoff, said during the announcement.

So, now that the nitty gritty is behind us, what impact will a four-team playoff have? Well, it isn’t expansive enough to change the BCS being dominated by powerhouse programs from the major conferences – the ACC, the Big 12, the Big 10, and, especially, the SEC. The continued emphasis on regular season performances and conference wins all but ensures that no Cinderella teams from tiny schools will emerge. The most fans can hope for in terms of a major upset would be a team that routinely dominates its small conference (like the perennially spurned Boise State Broncos, who play in the Mountain West) squeaking into the final four and winning it all.

Detractors will point out, not incorrectly, that the commissioners’ proposal sounds awfully familiar: Regular season performance, poll rankings, strength of schedule, and conference championships are precisely the criteria already used by the BCS computers to determine how the postseason shakes out.

“Until you have an eight-team or 16-team regular season playoff, there will be folks out there who aren’t completely satisfied,” PAC 12 commissioner Larry Scott said, after the announcement Wednesday. “But we’re trying to balance other important parties, like the value of the regular season, the bowls, and the academic calendar."

Furthermore, the new structure could backfire and actually make the postseason even less inclusive by enabling the already dominant South Eastern Conference to steamroll everyone else. More than any other conference, the SEC has emerged as a junior NFL since the BCS’s inception, winning eight national championships in 14 years (and the last six in a row). Last season, the SEC had at least three teams with strong cases to compete for the title. Two of them did – LSU and eventual winner Alabama. Depending on how much weight the selection committee allots things like conference championships and schedule difficulty, an all-SEC team final four isn’t a totally crazy idea. Highly unlikely, but not crazy.     

While the teams in the hunt for the title may continue to look overly familiar, the likely playoff still represents a monumental philosophical shift within the game of college football. In virtually every other high-profile league, including college football’s professional counterpart, the playoffs hold the possibility of the unexpected, the improbable championship run. It’s a routine occurrence in the NHL which just handed the Stanley Cup to a Los Angeles Kings team that nobody saw coming. This year’s Super Bowl champs, the New York Giants, only won it all after a mediocre regular season that barely got them to the playoffs.

That’s still implausible in the college game, which takes unmatched pride in the importance of its regular season. But by agreeing to a playoff, the commissioners are conceding the possibility of the Cinderella team – or, at least, the appearance of such a possibility.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to College football may get a Final Four – and millions in new revenue
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Sports/2012/0621/College-football-may-get-a-Final-Four-and-millions-in-new-revenue
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe