Bench the BCS
"With all the serious matters facing our country, surely Congress has more important issues than spending taxpayer money to dictate how college football is played." So said Bill Hancock, executive director of the Bowl Championship Series, and for years this is a sentiment I have wholeheartedly supported.
No longer. When it comes to college football's utterly criminal Bowl Championship Series, Congress should do the people's work and make the BCS a memory. The House is debating the College Football Playoff Act of 2009, which would "prohibit, as an unfair and deceptive act or practice, the promotion, marketing and advertising of any postseason NCAA Division I football game as a national championship game unless such game is the culmination of a fair and equitable playoff system."
Currently, the teams chosen for the "championship" game are divined by convoluted statistical methods that often make little sense without an advanced computer science degree and leave fans, coaches and players enraged.
The legislation has bipartisan sponsorship, which includes Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton and former Black Panther turned Chicago Democrat Bobby Rush. Nothing brings the nation together like hatred of the BCS. I hope the bill passes with a rider that allows for some sort of public funeral so we can dance on its grave and achieve closure.
I don't say this because I feel a pressing national need for a college football playoff system. I don't say it because I am in torment that the unbeaten university teams at Cincinnati, Texas Christian and Boise State won't have a shot at the BCS' so-called national championship. I don't say this because the "championship" matchup on Jan. 7 at the Rose Bowl between Texas and Alabama feels like a dud.
I say this because the Bowl Championship Series fronts for a mammoth fraud that threatens the very foundation of public higher education. College football is a billion-dollar business, but one in which the benefits go to the few while most of the schools are awash in debt. These were the sobering conclusions of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. Its report in October stated that the 25 top football schools had surpluses, on average, of $3.9 million in 2008. The other 94 schools in the top division ran deficits averaging
$9.9 million each. "We've reached an indefensible, unsustainable situation," said commission co-chairman William Kirwan. "We've got 75% of the [college] presidents saying we cannot continue on this path."
The commission also noted that head football coaches at state colleges are often the highest-paid public employees. This year's BCS national championship coaches are Nick Saban of Alabama, who has a $32-million, eight-year contract, and Mack Brown of Texas, who just received a $2-million-a-year raise, for an annual salary of $5 million, until the end of his contract in 2016. That works as long as the teams are doing well, but if Texas tanks and attendance and alumni giving droop, then it joins the grand majority of schools for whom football is a budgetary black hole.
The BCS facilitates this process by making sure that the top conferences -- the Southeastern, the Pac 10, the Big 10, the Big 12, the Atlantic Coast and the Big East (otherwise known as the BCS conferences) -- get the biggest pieces of college football's bowl season pie. Winners of these conferences get automatic bids to the biggest bowls. A small-conference team such as unbeaten Boise State will see less money this bowl season than the 1-11 Pac-10 doormat Washington State.
In addition, such a system creates incentives for small schools to bet the farm on their football programs. Athletic departments become unregulated hedge funds to which schools plow tons of money into pigskin futures with the hope of playing against the big boys from the power conferences. And in the power conferences, it costs so much to "play ball" that exploding budgets are now threatening to swallow the entire academic institution.
At UC Berkeley, $430 million is going toward football stadium renovations while student fees have tripled in the last decade and academic programs are cut.
By changing how the BCS system works with this law, Congress would begin to address this reality, in which football gets stadiums and students get the shaft.
To fend off Congress, the BCS hired Ari Fleischer, President George W. Bush's former press secretary, as its spokesperson. He says that the BCS is hunky dory: "While the BCS has its share of critics, once people see both sides of the issue, they will see why the system has its great support."
This is a lie. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, only 15% of fans approve of the current system.
There are those who oppose Congress taking any action because they oppose government intervention in sports on general principle. One critic posted this on an ESPN comment section: "Too much power being given to the government. Are they going to start regulating when we can use the bathroom or what football game we are allowed to attend?"
Orwellian potty nightmares aside, government is already involved in college sports. The problem is that it plows millions into state schools with no oversight.
Congress' legislation may not fix the crisis in higher education, but at least it holds the potential to expose the way that the Bowl Championship Series facilitates a system willing to sacrifice education at the altar of athletics.
[Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]
9 Reader Comments | Add a comment
I do agree that Congress should have other matters to attend to besides college sports. As I came of age as a teen, this was probably one of the first questions that came to mind during the bowl season: why don't they have a playoff system like the lower-tiered divisions? Another question I have in current times is where's the NCAA in all of this?
Now, I could easily answer these two by simply saying money's the reason, which is the case with some of these programs. The system's in place and they're latching on like Scrooge does a shilling. They bring in the money to some of these schools, so the arguement can sort of get drowned out, unless you got concrete stats.
It would just be simpler to mimic the lower-tiered divisions in some sort of playoff system. They can even keep the bowl games and reschedule them for opening weekend. Also, we should be talking about a sport at academic institutions, not borderline corporations with academic names as fronts!
We are a nation at war, for the last 15 years, and we find time to argue about bowl games. Get your priorities straight.
Dave's priorities ARE straight. He has written numerous anti-war pieces over the years, if you haven't noticed. War sucks, but it's not the only thing going on in this life ... since when are issues of concern finite? And as the self-appointed arbiter of priorities, perhaps you should be directing those in charge of our institutions of higher learning to get THEIR priorities straight.
I suspect that the 85% who don't approve of the current system want a change not to reduce student fees but rather to have their college football team entered in the tournament. I also want a playoff system, but I am not delusional to think that this will automatically reduce student fees, after all there is a 64+ NCAA basketball tournament that probably UC has participated in and they still raised student fees.
I'm not sure that you have made a case that a Playoff system would address rising tuition fees, or that it would more equitably distribute TV money for the non-BCS schools. I think Hancock has some valid points about travel for fans to neutral sites, undermining the current bowls, or the burden of adding a few more games on the schedule for these student-athletes.
The priority should be on the student-fans and the student-athletes. I think the Presidents resistance to a playoff system is admirable considering how much more TV money they would make in a playoff system.
I find it interesting that the two American sports with the most money tied into the college system are also the only major sports that do not have a formal farm/minor league system, and instead force players to enter college. I'm talking of course, about football and basketball.
By contrast, both hockey and baseball players have a choice between a range of minor leagues or college. Hockey players can enter the NHL at 18, but basketball players are forced to wait until age 20 or 21 (presumably having spent the intervening time making money for some college).
It's not a good situation for anyone-- kids who want to play a particular sport and are talented are spending time focusing on studies that they don't care about, risking their bodies with no reward, and getting an inferior level of competition. Big name schools schedule cupcakes to pad their records. The biggest schools have a much easier time getting top talent, so even within conferences there is often a huge gap in quality between teams.
I feel like there's also some sort of connection between the way our colleges are used as a de-facto minor league, and the fact that American sports don't have the concept of relegation. In European soccer for example, there are a number of leagues. The top few teams in each league at the end of the year move up to a higher league, and the bottom few move down. There is no draft system, just youth teams, loans, and trading. The net effect I think is that it's easier to be a pro or semi-pro athlete, get playing time, and develop your skills. On the other hand, the biggest teams are in a much riskier position since a bad season can cause a huge loss of revenue (see Newcastle United for a recent example). Maybe someone else can develop this idea better?
If you honestly think that English soccer, which has had 5 champions in 50 years, is more fair than American Football, which has evolved to the point where no team is dominant and losers can be champions within a few years, you're either terribly un-informed or just dumb.
No need to go ad-hominem, and you should get your facts straight: I count 13 different champions in English soccer starting in 1960. Since the start of the premier league, however, there has been very little movement at the top of the league, mainly because of a vicious cycle of enormous bonus money for the top four teams coming from the champions league.
This money does create a distortion in the competition, not unlike what exists between a school like Texas or USC and somewhere like Boise State. However, beyond the personnel, Man-U or Chelsea don't have any extra pull in reaching a championship-- they have to play all the other teams an equal number of times, and their final rank is strictly based on their record. There isn't the ambiguity where multiple teams end up with a perfect record, but one is considered the "real" champion because of its prestige, and as fans we have no real way of comparing them because their schedules were so vastly different. There is no entitlement, just domination by the deepest pockets.
At any rate, I feel that a system with more clubs, more leagues, and movement between leagues (via relegation/promotion) offers more opportunities for athletes to develop their skills. In basketball, for example, there are only a very few players who go pro out of college every year, compared to the number of D1 players. The top player at a major school might not even go until the bottom of the draft. General managers can easily overlook talented players, and there are also some players who take longer to develop their skills. Surely having real minor leagues would help those players? What about those who are drafted, but end up riding the bench-- wouldn't playing at a lower level of competition be better for improving their skills?
Relegation and promotion fit into this picture because they create opportunities for scrappy players and teams to duke it out with big names (and sometimes win). For example, who would have known about Rory Delap if Stoke hadn't been promoted? Would he have ever been in the top flight otherwise? I'm sure there are a host of talented American athletes who could have benefited from similar opportunities.
The dumbest argument against a playoff(and they still push this)is "it would take too much time from the players' studies". Please. The boosters,BCS Honks,ADs don't give a rat's ass about their studies. And if that's the case,why aren't they saying that about the NCAA tournament and conference tournaments?
It's also an insult to the FCS(formerly 1-AA Football)schools. I went to Marshall University in the 90s,they played in several exciting football playoff tournaments. My wife went to William & Mary, they made the FCS playoffs this year. I guess students at those schools must have more goof-off time and don't need to study as much as the "BCS" students do.
9 Reader Comments | Add a comment
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Dave Zirin is the author of the book: "Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports" (Haymarket). You can receive his column Edge of Sports, every week by going to dave@edgeofsports.com.
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