This Is Not a Playoff

While the nation was focused on the Supreme Court and the fate of health care reform last week, another long simmering conflict came to a sort of resolution. As Fletch would say, it’s a smaller story, but I’m sure you were following it.

I’m speaking, of course, about the death of the Bowl Championship Series and the announcement of a college football “playoff,” to kick off in 2014:

Conference commissioners met with an oversight committee of university presidents and chancellors here Tuesday to approve the four-team seeded playoff, consisting of two semifinal games in bowls and a national championship game that will be put up for bid.

* * *

And the presidents endorsed the idea of a selection committee for the playoff teams, which would end the combination of computer and human polls that have been lightening rods for criticism since the BCS began.

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The committee will rank playoff teams based on won-loss record, strength of schedule, head-to-head and if a team is conference champion.

I put “playoff” in scare quotes because, whatever this four-team arrangement is (and “better than the BCS” is probably one of them), it is not a real playoff or even a facsimile of one. It’s a small invitational tournament, nothing more. Perhaps that’s why, at the end of the day, there still will not be a true NCAA-sanctioned champion in big time college football.

In my mind, a key feature of any playoff system are objective criteria for selection of at least some of the participants, arranged in such a way that everybody who starts the season has a path to participation. The NCAA college basketball tournaments do that, but setting aside automatic bids for teams that win conference championships. A selection committee rounds out the field, but every team starts the season with a way into the tournament. If they don’t make it, they’ve got nobody to blame but themselves.

That allows for smaller teams, underdogs and such, to have as much a chance to win the prize as anybody else. That’s the essence of a true playoff. This arrangement doesn’t do that, as Stewart Mandel admits:

Not to be condescending, but of all the reasons college football fans have clamored for a playoff, fairness to the little guy was generally pretty low on the list. I've never sensed the same love affair with Cinderella in football as there is with March Madness. If anything, it's quite the opposite, as evidenced by how Boise State unwittingly became a national villain two years ago when pundits had the audacity to consider the Broncos a national title contender. First and foremost, people want to see a more conclusive ending to the season, which they're going to get. They want to see at least two more exciting, high-stakes games between the nation's best teams. They want to see Ohio State play Alabama or Florida play Texas. They don't want to see USC play Louisiana Tech in the Southwest Regional semifinal.

In other words, it’s not about the best teams competing, it’s about the most popular very good teams that can draw fans and TV audiences playing. That’s a fine principle for arranging an invitational tournament – see all the early season basketball tournaments, for instance – but it’s not a playoff.

Mandel gives the game away in another column, in which he tries to look at the 2011 season and figure out who would have wound up in the big six bowls (the selection committee will select the 12 teams that participate, as well as the 4 “playoff” teams). That field includes ACC champion Clemson, but not Big East Champion WVU. Remember, friends, that WVU embarrassed Clemson in the Orange Bowl last year, 70-33. Heaven forbid Louisiana Tech had the chance to do that to LSU.

Look, I’m not wedded to the idea of a playoff in big time college football. The bowl apparatus and tradition of settling things by consensus makes it unique. And let’s face it, fans like nothing better than a good argument about which team is better, which college football fuels more than any other American sport.

Let’s just not fool anyone into thinking that this new four-team shindig actually changes anything. Come 2014, the national championship will still be mythical and still be the result of informed opinion about who’s better than who. It’ll just work a little different and have a different name. And it will still be unlike anything else in American sports.

A Few BCS Thoughts

Tonight, Alabama and LSU will lock heads in the BSC Championship Game. Not only do they both come from the same conference (the same division, in fact), but they’ve already played this year, LSU downing Alabama in overtime in what was either a brilliant defensive game or a crushing bore, depending on which side of the 9-6 final your team was on.

Like many college football fans, I’m not really a fan of the rematch in the title game. I’ve always been of the opinion that if you don’t win your conference, you don’t play for the national title. But, again like most college football fans, I’ll tune in tonight and watch. The game’s like a drug and I’m a junkie, I’ll admit. Besides, the buzz of WVU’s crushing Orange Bowl win last week is about to wear off. Stewart Mandel has more on the conflicted feelings of fans here.

I will say this for the BCS – it is blatant about trying to do what no other championship game in the world really can, match the two best teams against each other at the end of the year. Think about it. Any playoff system only works in getting close to that matchup if all the favorites win and all the underdogs lose. But what we love about playoffs is that they are unpredictable. One year, a NFL wild-card team can win the Super Bowl. The next, all the wild-card teams get eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. In a BCS setup, Greece never wins the 2004 European Championship because they never even play in the final. At the end of the day, it’s what makes playoffs worth playing.

So the BCS is bucking the trend, which is admirable. But the errand they set for themselves is a fool’s one. How on earth can you pin down the “top” (whatever that means) two teams out of the 120 that play through the season? If two, and only two, teams wind up unbeaten during the regular season, that might be helpful, but doesn’t deal with the strength of schedule problem. And what about seasons like this one, where only LSU made it through unscathed? You play the same game with the 1-loss teams (see here for a good argument about Alabama and Oklahoma State filling that role). And what if the unthinkable happens – Alabama upends LSU, but only barely, and nobody ends up undefeated? It might be fun just to see what happens.

For the record, my biggest beef with the BCS is there is no way for any team to say “if we do X, Y, and Z, we will play for the national championship.” The best bet is to be undefeated, but even that doesn’t guarantee anything. At least in the NCAA basketball tournament each team as a path to automatic qualification. Something more objective would be a good thing (my setup: a playoff involving only conference champions and the highest ranked independent).

In the end, the current system, while obtuse and completely fucked up, is the one that college football fans largely deserve. It gives us the one big game to decide it all, the focal point of all American sports (even the World Series or Stanley Cup Finals we want come down to a do or die game seven, right?). But it does it in such a way that everybody is free to argue about it until they’re blue in the face, often without any real mooring to the undisputed facts.

Damn it, it’s an American tradition! Sort of like presidential elections. I’ll be watching those until the end, well past my bedtime, too.

Same As It Ever Was

The scandals rocking major college football continue:

[T]he Carnegie Foundation made headlines with a report, ‘American College Athletics,’ which concluded that the scramble for players had ‘reached the proportions of nationwide commerce.’ Of the 112 schools surveyed, 81 flouted NCAA recommendations with inducements to students ranging from open payrolls and disguised booster funds to no-show jobs at movie studios.

By “continue,” I mean they’ve been going on for nearly a century. That Carnegie Foundation report came out in 1929. 10 years later, freshman players at Pitt went on strike . . . because they weren’t getting paid as much as their more senior teammates.

Those two tidbits are just a part of the fascinating, and depressing, history of the commercial side of college sports laid out in Taylor Branch’s new article in The Atlantic (via). Branch is arguing that college athletes should be paid, although I’m still not convinced (beyond the scholarships, academic assistance, etc.). What he does do is make a good case that NCAA invocation of “amateurism” and “student-athletes,” at least when it comes to the big money sports, is not only hollow, but pretty much always has been.

In fact, the term “student-athlete” first popped up in litigation:

The term came into play in the 1950s, when the widow of Ray Dennison, who had died from a head injury received while playing football in Colorado for the Fort Lewis A&M Aggies, filed for workmen’s-compensation death benefits. Did his football scholarship make the fatal collision a ‘work-related’ accident? Was he a school employee, like his peers who worked part-time as teaching assistants and bookstore cashiers? Or was he a fluke victim of extracurricular pursuits? Given the hundreds of incapacitating injuries to college athletes each year, the answers to these questions had enormous consequences. The Colorado Supreme Court ultimately agreed with the school’s contention that he was not eligible for benefits, since the college was ‘not in the football business.’

Equally fascinating is how the NCAA, which wasn’t organized with any real authority over the schools that made up its membership, leveraged the nascent TV coverage of college football (the schools thought TV would kill the sport!) in the 1950s to exert some control over the situation. That control slipped away in 1984, when the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA couldn’t keep individual schools or conferences from seeking out their own TV deals. Ironically, what kept the NCAA from being crippled financially was college basketball, because only it could sell the TV rights to the men’s national championship tournament, aka March Madness. Starting to see why there’s no similar tournament for major college football?

Of course, it’s TV money that’s largely driving the latest round of conference shifting we’re seeing go on right now. The drive for the ACC, Big (sorta) 10 and the artist formerly known as the PAC-10 to grow big enough to justify a conference championship game was because of the extra revenue, mostly from TV, they generate. Likewise, WVU doesn’t want to be relegated to a crippled Big East and potentially cut out of the windfall that is the BCS sweepstakes.

As I said earlier, I’m still not sold on the idea of paying college athletes. However, Branch does a good job of showing how profoundly fucked up the current system is. It's not quite this bad . . .

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But it's close.  Maybe the best option is to blow it up and start from scratch. There’s no good reason for sports to enmesh with academics at all. Let the NFL, NBA, and what have you set up youth academies like the soccer clubs in Europe and elsewhere do and go from there. Or reduce the whole thing to the level of Division III, where those involved really are student-athletes.

Yeah, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. So this Saturday I’ll choke down my concerns, put on my bright yellow WVU shirt, and cheer as “we” beat up on LSU on national TV in primetime. Hopefully. ‘cause if we don’t, it’s only a game, right? At least I have the luxury of looking at it that way.

Same as it ever was, indeed.