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Posted on 12/06/2007 5:35:44 PM PST by FreeAtlanta
Vote (Freep) your picks of Virtual College Football Play-off!
(Excerpt) Read more at sportsillustrated.cnn.com ...
NCAA, College Presidents, wake up! You could be making 4 or 5 times the money with a play-off!!! And, the fans would be satisfied with a real NCAA Division I College football champion.
This could be fun. :-) Unfortunately, my team (UGA - University of Georgia) is behind Oklahoma - In reality, my Dawgs would smoke the Okies.
See what you think about this.
One of the elements of the current bowl system is the ability for 50+ programs to continue their practice sessions well into December, if not beyond.
What a playoff would do is end that extra month of work for all but the elite 16 (I see 16 teams in the original graphic so I assume Sports Illustrated started with 16 teams).
While the money for the 16 team playoff would likely be astounding, in most respects, the current 28(!) bowls already provide an astounding payday. Money really isn’t the issue, except perhaps the distribution of it.
In the playoff system proposed by SI, the WAC, Mountain West and all the non-6 BCS conferences would have a single team participating (and perhaps receiving the dough). As it is now, there are, by my count, 15 teams receiving a payday.
This is one of the main reasons a Div 1A playoff is really not any closer to occurring.
Some of the money from the play-off could be distributed to non-participating teams in a profit sharing scenario.
That’s what I keep saying. And because there would be more games played that actually mean something the revenue would be sky high. Everyone involved would make more money than they ever dreamed of under the old non-system.
The eight BCS team could play in the first round of playoffs in the Sugar, Orange, Fiesta, and Rose Bowls on New Year’s Day. The surviving four teams play two more rounds of playoff ending with the college championship game the “dead” weekend before the Super Bowl.
Everybody would win with this system!
What makes you think the colleges wouldn’t lose money on a playoff? If it is an NCAA playoff, the NCAA would control the TV rights. The last time the NCAA controlled the TV rights to college football, it skimmed 50% of each game. Why would this time be any different?
Assuming each playoff game paid as much as a major bowl does today, a team would have to win the first game just to break even (winners of the first round get to play twice). So half the field would do worse than the present situation. Winners of the second round would do better but that’s only 1/4 the field. Considering the fact that the earlier games might pay less than a big bowl, then it would be even worse.
You want a playoff? Figure out how to have one without the NCAA being involved. The NCAA really hosed up Div 1-A the last time they were in charge of TV coverage, limiting each team to a total of three regular season appearances on TV in two years. It took a supreme court ruling to break that up. (Thank the University of Oklahoma for that one. They sued. They won. The NCAA put them on probation.)
“Some of the money from the play-off could be distributed to non-participating teams in a profit sharing scenario.”
That ‘profit sharing’ is exactly why this won’t work. By the time the NCAA ‘shares’ the profits, the schools in the playoffs lose money.
I’d like to see it in real life, but it’ll never happen. Too many shortsighted people are in charge who want to preserve the system of bowl games. Nevermind that a) there are too many bowl games, and b) they can become integrated into the playoffs....
If a playoff would be utilized, I think it would be horrific if there was a 1 month delay between the final reg. season week and the start of the playoffs.
Think about this. For the final two teams, their players would be in organized practice & play from late July to the end of January. While only true for two teams, that is still an enormous amount of days actively playing. What is that, nearly 180 days? Don't Div II & III schools play 10 weeks then have their playoffs?
As for keeping the other non-premier bowls if a playoff occurs, I guess that's conceivable.
I have more thoughts on the matter, for sure.
... Pac-10 commissioner Tom Hansen, who replies, "Uh, no," when asked if his conference is open to the possibility of a plus-one.
"If you seed the teams, and that's the only fair way to do it," he says, "then you're going to seed the conference champions out of their traditional bowl games. And that would be very injurious to all those games."
So "injurious" and abhorrent do Hansen and his ilk find such crime-against-nature bowl matchups that they are only too pleased to block the path to a playoff. And so tied to tradition is the Rose Bowl that, having lost Ohio State to the title game, it invited 13th-ranked Illinois, the only three-loss team to get a BCS bid, to face USC. The sport is being held hostage, as one frustrated AD puts it, "by the Rose Bowl parade."
Springing to the defense of his Pac-10 counterpart is Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, who together with Hansen forms a kind of Axis of Obstruction. Pointing out that their conferences already compromised once, back in 1998, when they joined the Bowl Alliance -- later christened the BCS -- Delany says, "We gave up a lot. I don't feel like we're takers. I feel like we're givers."
It is the rest of college football's problem that they are no longer in a giving mood. That nine-year-old decision to play ball with the Bowl Alliance "was not a first step toward a playoff," Delany emphasized last Friday, "but a last step." The Big Ten, Pac-10 and Rose Bowl recently signed an eight-year deal with ABC. (Fox has the rights to the four other BCS bowls in a contract that runs through 2014.) Says Delany, "We intend to honor that commitment."
What freaking jerks. Maybe the rest of the country should stop scheduling Pac-10 and Big Ten teams and have a play-off at the end of the season. Ignore those protectionist Delany and Hansen!
The sport is being held hostage, as one frustrated AD puts it, "by the Rose Bowl parade."
Hmm...I see a Florida/LSU rematch in this scenario. The way UF is playing now, even without the benefit of a neutral site, they’d beat LSU handily. The question then becomes, if OSU won their bracket, how far and how fast would they run away and hide to keep from playing UF again?
(C8
What do you think of my prediction here?
The 4 main New years bowls: top 8 teams (#1 vs #8, etc)
Following sat at warm, neutral site: both semi-final games starting at 4pm and 8pm (EST)
Following sat at warm, neutral site: semi winners meet for championship
That sums it up perfectly. I think the rest of College football should just shun the Pac-10 and Big 10. Other than USC, what do they really have to offer?
Yep, the two teams nobody would want to face in a playoff would be Florida and USC. Especially if our defense plays like they did against FSU. They’ve gotten much better since the Georgia game.
If the NCAA was serious about a playoff, Hansen and 'his ilk' are not powerful enough to stop it.
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