Better than it was. Not as good as it should be.
When the hyperventilating over the implementation of a four-team college football playoff had calmed a bit, when the initial media lovefest for a presidential oversight committee's approval of something that should have been approved decades ago quieted to a more restrained smooching, 11 words rang truest.
Better than it was. Not as good as it should be.
And that's why the length of this deal, from 2014 to 2025, bothers me. Twelve years is too long for a plan that decades from now surely will be remembered as a transitional one. The legitimate debate is an eight-team vs. 16-team tournament and until that is settled the longest running argument in sports will not end.
Granted, by using six bowls in a rotation, the 12-year deal allows each to host a semifinal game twice. It makes logistical sense. Yet if logistics is the guiding factor, using six bowls for a six-year term makes equal sense.
ACC Commissioner John Swofford gave the most honest assessment of intentions of the game's power brokers when he told reporters on Tuesday, "The vast majority of the people in the room wanted something long term so we're not re-inventing the wheel every four years, because that gets old and tiresome. I think there's a feeling that we needed to bring some stability to the postseason."
In other words, the vast majority of people in that room didn't want the continued headache of constantly tweaking a joke of a BCS system and forever reacting to criticism that has rung from coast to coast. It is clear that any notion of further expansion of the playoffs in the near future never gained footing with this current group of power brokers who won't be around to slog through the implementation of a real tournament a dozen years from now.
And while their BCS fatigue is understandable, anybody who wants to be an effective mover and shaker in college sports these days must be open to constant change. Change is the given in today's uncertain college athletic landscape and failure to address this subject again by, say, 2020 is a failure to address the inevitable.
The incredible TV money that will be generated by a tournament, climaxing with a highest-bidding host city for the national title game, eventually will convince even the worst foot-draggers that an eight- or 16-team field is the way to go. Eventually.
The instability Swofford talked about, of course, was ushered in after decades of a corrupt bowl system. The instability was brought about by payola, false premise and a bowl cartel that so monopolized the sport it is a minor miracle that Congress didn't pull a coup d'BCS. Yes, the ensuing four-year BCS deals brought about constant tweaking. Mind-numbing computer data, coaches contaminating the integrity of polls with selfish votes ? they only led to more controversy.
Yet here's the news flash. The controversies have only begun.
In case you haven't noticed, the multibillion-dollar industry of sports entertainment has spawned any number of cottage industries. Mel Kiper became a cottage industry with the NFL draft. And then Mel Kiper's hair became one. Joe Lunardi, aka Joey Brackets, and college basketball tournament bracketology became another.
Bank on this. A cottage industry will be founded at a plot of land owned by the fifth-ranked football team in the nation. Call it The Five Hole. Call it Cinco de Pain. Call it anything you want. There will be thousands upon thousands of fans who annually will live and die as their school teeters on the brink of the football playoff. ESPN, NBC, ABC, FOX, CBS, all their permutations, and every fanatic with a Web page and Twitter account will be forwarding statistical analysis proving a school has been horribly wronged.
If you think those cries on basketball's Selection Sunday over the last five in and first five out are loud, you haven't heard anything yet. When the four teams are announced by the selection committee, the seismic howling from the highest ranked school or two left out will be enough to sink Michigan into Lake Huron and Alabama into the Gulf of Mexico.
There won't be any BCS computers to kick around anymore, but members of the selection committee better be prepared to be called stupid, idiotic, crooked, SEC-loving, Notre Dame-loving, Big East-Mountain West hating, Texas-controlled jackalopes. There has been talk that a projected 15-person selection committee, to be filled with athletic directors, conference commissioners and probably former coaches, might include a few media members. That would be a colossal mistake. Controlling the course of sports history, not to mention a multibillion-dollar industry, and trying to report on it shatters the boundaries of conflicting interest.
All the familiar standards of win-loss record, strength of schedule, head-to-head, conference champions will be measured, but it sure sounds like strength of schedule is going to huge. A metric similar to the RPI in basketball also could be used. Yet in the end ? despite all the happy talk Tuesday to the contrary ? the old, ugly arguments will surface, too.
When it comes down to fourth school in and fifth one out, it will be fascinating to see how the committee judges, oh, an 11-1 LSU vs. a 12-0 Boise State, or an 11-1 Ohio State vs. a 12-0 Cincinnati. SEC-tested Florida, you might recall, was No. 5 behind TCU and Cincinnati in the final 2009 BCS poll before the bowls and ranked third by the AP after the bowls. You can go year by year and find media storms among teams with razor-thin differences.
The point is regardless of how many teams you include in a playoff, there will always be arguments. Yet I would argue vehemently that while the ninth-ranked team probably would never and the 17th ranked team certainly wouldn't win any national championship, a No. 5 team certainly could. Four is at least four too few for a playoff.
And with automatic BCS qualifying eliminated and so much talk of the Big East losing its status to the Big Five, the Big East must fight like crazy for its piece of the huge financial pie. The conference just has to prove it can play with the big boys.
Until fairly recently, the Big Ten and its commissioner, Jim Delany, were balking at a playoff. College presidents wouldn't take control of the situation. The SEC-Big 12 Champions Bowl, where two major conferences decided to grab control of their fate, served as a tipping point. Yet even with the important changes made Tuesday pains were taken to point out that the overall bowl system was not severely damaged. And more than one power broker pointed to public demand as the reason for a four-team playoff. No, doing the competitively fairest and ultimately most lucrative thing should be the reason for an eight- or 16-team tournament.
Change comes to college football, yet it still comes too slow.
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