Thanks to the BCS, I’ve lost interest in college football over the last five to seven years. In the mid-Nineties, it was my favorite sports; Now, I keep a passing interest in it. The problems with the BCS are so deeply well-chronicled, I won’t get into them here. But this is the first year I’m personally taking some conscious action: I won’t watch a second of any of the BCS games in my own personal BCS boycott. And I encourage everyone to boycott the BCS bowl games as well. There are plenty of other bowl games to watch; And I hope people will support those bowls. But I won’t watch a second of the Fiesta, Rose, Sugar or Orange Bowls, or the (quote-unquote) “National Championship Game.”
I hope you’ll consider not watching or attending, either. Hitting them in the gut with reduced ratings is one of the few ways we can make our voice heard.
on Dec 31st, 2008 at 9:37 PM
Brilliant! Because making the games less valuable would certainly be the best way to get someone to pay the extra few hundred million necessary to host a seeded playoff tournament. It’s the worst of all possible worlds!
There will be no playoffs. The money’s not there. The money’s not going to be there. Get over it.
on Dec 31st, 2008 at 9:56 PM
The money is there waiting for them. Can you imagine how much people would watch and spend on the Fiesta Bowl if it actually MEANT something this year? If it was the national semifinal? It will absolutely happen; I just want to speed up the process.
on Jan 1st, 2009 at 3:55 AM
Have you been supporting the GOOD college football – the divisions that have real playoffs? Richmond is MY championship team. And Minnesota-Duluth and Mount Union are honest champions.
on Jan 1st, 2009 at 10:42 AM
I have yet to watch a bowl game this season.
For a meaningful sporting event on television today, tune in to the NHL Winter Classic @ Wrigley Field.
The “Ice Bowl”…the only game with any sort of relevance on television today.
on Jan 1st, 2009 at 2:40 PM
Is it possible to write our Congressional representatives and have them look into anti-trust violations by the BCS conferences? I just don’t know if I’ll be able to not watch Florida-Oklahoma or USC-PSU. It would be really difficult.
on Jan 2nd, 2009 at 3:34 AM
The Fiesta Bowl would mean nothing as a “national semifinal.” The fans would stay home because most of them couldn’t afford to go to two distant cities in two weeks, and anyone who thought their team would win the game would try to wait to go to the national championship instead. That’s not to mention the near impossibility of a college football team traveling on one week’s notice. The schools don’t want it, the bowls don’t want it, and the BCS series is moving to ESPN because Fox wouldn’t even match its offer of four years ago to retain them in the face of sliding ratings.
And it wouldn’t be in the bowls, anyway. It would kill the bowls. No football playoff is done on neutral sites before the championship game. It’s just ridiculously impossible to make that work. Bowl trips are usually 5-7 day vacations for the fans who go. That all ends when they’re just steps on a ladder. You think Boise State fans could afford to travel to three separate “bowls” in three weeks [in a 16-team tournament] and then to Miami for the championship?
What if it’s done on home fields, like the NFL and NCAA FBS playoffs before the championship? In that tournament, even the #1 seed, which would get to host three games if it kept winning, would have an impossible task putting a game together on one week’s notice when school is not in session. That’s even less predictable. In a 16-team seeded tournament, if #14 East Carolina beat #3 Texas in Austin in the first round, and #11 Ohio State beat #6 Utah in Utah, then suddenly Ohio State would have to host a game the following week. And if you think that’s improbable because the lower seeds couldn’t beat the highest seeds, then why bother with a seeded tournament? If it’s not seeded, who picks the match-ups? Computers? Hello, you’re right back at today’s kvetching, dislocated to a new target.
If you think putting together a game in an 85,000-seat stadium on one week’s notice is no trouble for a college football program, you have no experience with how even the very largest college football programs work. It’s not possible without this magic huge infusion of money that would not materialize because the networks have already said they won’t come up with it.
The only thing the BCS was designed to do was to put #1 and #2 together in a bowl game, using computer rankings to break ties if the two polls could not agree upon who those two teams were. It involves four bowls because those four bowls had the six major conferences locked up, and the #1 vs. #2 matchup could not happen without their consent. It involves ten teams now because the Utahs and Boise States kept complaining that they couldn’t get into the BCS bowls (even though they never crack the top five in either poll, and Boise State’s ability to win by trick plays only worked once, as demonstrated by TCU crushing them on those same trick plays in this year’s bowl).
They’ve tweaked the formula so many times because when the result is not the match-up that the sportswriters wanted, the sportswriters bitch and kvetch and moan and bellyache until they change the formula so that it would have provided the match-up they wanted.
The biggest hypocrite of all is the collective Associated Press, which complained that its poll “should not be used to determine a national championship,” and yet in 2004, as it has for decades, the AP gives a national championship trophy to the team that winds up #1 in the season’s final poll! They declare a “national championship” and then sanctimoniously retired to the fainting couch when people took them seriously. They still give out a “national championship trophy!”
The NCAA basketball tournament is instructive here. When they name the field (expanded to 65 teams from 32 to prevent sportswriter kvetching), the sportswriters spend the first week bitching about the teams that got in but shouldn’t have, and the teams that didn’t get in but should have. When a team like the Gators wins the tournament, they freely state that they were not the best college basketball team of the season, but they deserve to be called “national champions” because they put together a six-game winning streak. It’s not about finding the “best” team, it’s about an abdication of responsibility—they want to complain about who gets picked and not picked and who belongs and doesn’t belong, but when their votes are used to determine it, they all run and hide behind the curtains and cry “unfair!”
When I was in school (and going to bowls regularly as part of student activities), more often than not the top two teams could not meet in a bowl game because the bowl contracts (which no one claimed were an antitrust violation) interfered. If a Big 8 team was #2 and a Pac-10 team was #1, they would never ever meet in a bowl. Under the old system of that time, the Orange Bowl this year would likely have been Oklahoma vs. Alabama, if Alabama would go as the highest-ranked team that wasn’t already committed to another bowl. Or even OU vs. Texas again. But Florida would be locked into the Sugar Bowl against the Big East or ACC champion, and the Gators would have no way to contend they should be #1 if Oklahoma beat its bowl opponent too.
The BCS solves this, and yet all the sportswriters want is the magical unicorn of a playoff that’s logistically impossible, financially unattainable, and that ends the major bowl games. You’ll excuse me if I don’t see that ridiculous fantasy as any kind of improvement.
on Jan 2nd, 2009 at 7:30 AM
And yet, the toughest ticket in sports is the NCAA basketball Final Four.
You won’t see the amount of fans from the schools that come to bowl games at playoff games, but they will come to an extent as noted by fans of schools that make it to the basketball tourney for three straight weekends. Make that number four if you include the conference tournaments.
The bowls are nothing but a bunch of made for tv scrimmages stretched over the span of a few weeks. Forgive me if I forget to pay attention.
on Jan 2nd, 2009 at 12:28 PM
I love this idea that every other college sports program is able to get this done, but somehow with Division I football it’s impossible. Colleges in other divisions and high schools are able to adjust and make it to a playoff game with a one-week notice; But somehow the best ADs in the business in Division I can’t make it happen? Lol. That’s funny.
on Jan 2nd, 2009 at 4:55 PM
This is just “trees falling in the forest.” Have your boycott and enjoy. I still don’t believe we can put something as logistically challenging as a football playoff system together in this day and age. Do I like it? No. Do I have a good solution that actually DOES think through the logistics of the process? No.
The fan base size for Div I games is much different than the other sports or divisions. Remember, we’re talking schools that regularly seat upwards of 80,000 fans every week for their games. To make it equitable you would have to manage around 30,000 tickets per school for at least 3 weeks in a row. Then let’s talk about transportation, hotel and other logistics to consider. Then we have to deal with issues like which teams really get to enter the elite playoff system which could never resemble anything like an NCAA basketball tournament where 65 teams actually compete. The field would have to be MUCH smaller so guess what, we’ll still be arguing about who should have been in and who was left out.
So yea, your idea is just funny. Enjoy the reruns and money grabbing pro teams.
on Jan 7th, 2009 at 2:41 PM
The entire argument is a little silly. A playoff system wouldn’t mean that you would have “bowl” games at each level of the tournament. You would have the sponsors similarly to how it is now, like the Tostitos Quarterfinals games, which would possibly generate more of a cost effective thing as far as the NCAA is concerned as they would host each round in a different city, but use like 2, 3 or 4 stadiums, doing 2 games per day per stadium. Or however you want to do that. So you would have host systems like basketball does.
The whole bowl thing is getting out of hand anyway. Do I really care who won the sierra mist bowl? What about the Vagisil Bowl? There are way too many damn bowl games anyway. So how about this, cut it down to 3 bowl games. The main and then two lower games for runners up or something. Or do it similar to hockey and soccer. You have it be, you all play like 4 games or 5 games for the tournament and you get a point for a win and no points for a loss. The top two teams play for the championship and bingo bango, we move on.
In the end, I could care less about the whole system, no matter what you do, someone is going to piss and moan about how their school got hosed in the deal or someone cheated or bribed someone.
Do you want to know why schools love these bowl games? MONEY. Endorsements, ticket sales, merch sales, concessions and guess what, the players play for free! Yeah, you have to pay the coach like 2 million a year, but if every person in an 80,000 seat stadium pays only $25 bucks for one game, you just paid that guy’s salary. And then jack the prices up come bowl time, and that school is probably going to have some really nice landscaping done.
In the end, who cares, you will watch it and like it and bitch about it, but still love watching the games. And me, I will be happy playing in local leagues and crap because it’s a blast.