Part I: If the NFL Post-season Were Like the NCAA FBS

• The #1 team in the NFC, the Atlanta Falcons, met the #1 AFC squad, the New England Patriots, in the 2011 NFL Championship Game on Sunday, February 5, five weeks after the end of the regular season.
• In the meantime, the other top teams in the two conferences played each other in staged games at various cities like New Orleans, Orlando, Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, etc. (not Dallas because that's where the Championship Game was scheduled).
• The participants in the non-championship post-season games were chosen by the committees that stage and promote the games to attract fans to their cities. The game organizers were not limited to the top six teams in each conference. For example, the Houston committee chose the Cowboys despite their poor record in order to assure maximum attendance.
• Since the games are essentially meaningless, attendance at all sites is not nearly as high as regular season games. However, TV contracts allow the host committees to make money and pay the teams enough to entice them to participate.
• After years of fans complaining about the quality of the staged games, the NFL finally forced the host committees to use a more organized method of selecting teams. For example, #2 in the NFC would play #2 in the AFC, #3 vs. #3, etc. And no team not in the top six of its conference could play in a post-season game. At least not at first. But after awhile, more cities established committees and demanded the right to stage post-season games. So the NFL allowed teams that did not finish in the top six of their conference to participate to satisfy the demand.
• Eventually, the NFL teams would demand the right to pick their own divisions. For example, the Texans would join the division containing the Cowboys so that they could play them home and home every season. The Raiders would jump to the NFC West to be with the 49ers (or vice-versa). The Cowboys would be enticed by almost every other division of each conference since they are such a draw.
• What started out as a logically organized league that made the playing field as level as possible for all teams would soon be out of kilter. Some divisions would die as two or three teams jumped to other divisions, leaving the remaining one or two to align themselves as best they could. All this movement would be possible because changes in the structure of the league are not subject to approval by the owners at large but depend only on the vote of the owners in the division the team wishes to join.
• Jerry Jones and other owners of the most affluent franchises would sign their own TV contracts with the network as well as participating in any league contracts. They would also fight to eliminate the annual draft so that they could recruit the top players coming out of college by offering more money than other teams. Although the total number of players they can have on their roster is limited, there is no salary cap.
• After a period of time, some divisions prosper and continually provide the teams in the championship game. Other divisions languish. With no central scheduling, teams in the weakest divisions schedule road games at Dallas and other financially solid franchises.

Of course, none of this happened or will happen (except for the possibility of no salary cap if the owners and players union cannot agree on a new contract).

• When the NFL began in the 1920s, the owners organized their league like the dominant sport of the time, major league baseball. After a shakedown decade when franchises came and went yearly, the league in 1934 divided into two divisions, the Eastern and Western (like MLB's National and American League).
• The NFL's central office, like the National and American League offices in baseball, made the schedules for all the teams starting in the 1930s. Unlike baseball, the NFL had inter-division play from the beginning. Teams within the same conference played each other home-and-home and played the opposite division teams once each.
• Also like baseball until 1969, the Eastern and Western champions met for the championship – no wild cards. Sometimes, a playoff would be needed to break a tie in one or the other division (such as the 1941 Bears-Packers playoff for the Western Conference that was highlighted recently when the two teams met in the post-season for the first time since that year), pushing back the championship game a week.
• When television entered the picture in the 1950s, individual teams at first negotiated their own TV contracts. A far-sighted commissioner, Pete Rozelle, persuaded the owners to let him negotiate a single contract for the entire league with equal sharing of the revenues. Rozelle later presided over the merger between the NFL and AFL (which had also been organized like the NFL with a league TV contract and central scheduling). Pete also created the Championship Game between the winners of the two leagues. Within a few years, that game became known as the Super Bowl.
• At no time did polls of sportswriters and former coaches or computer programs determine which teams participated in the post season. The championships of the two conferences and of the league were always decided on the field.

As we know, college football's regular season and post-season have never been organized according to the MLB or NFL model.

Part III: Pros of NFL-Style Playoff Scenario in NCAA

The second installment of this series detailed a plan for a 12-team playoff in college football a la the NFL's post-season. Let's look at the advantages and disadvantages of such a system, starting with the advantages in this installment.

Advantages of a Playoff System

• Fairness: The system would be more fair than the BCS, which anoints two teams to play in the championship game - two teams chosen on the basis of human/computer rankings with all the built-in biases any such system entails.
  • An undefeated TCU from 2010 would be included in the top 12 whether determined by human/computer polls or a committee.
  • Even another "BCS-buster" like Boise State would get a chance despite their heartbreaking loss to Nevada when the kicker missed a chip shot FG at the end of regulation.
  • And perhaps the greatest injustice of the BCS era - undefeated Auburn of the SEC finishing #3 in the final BCS rankings in 2004 - would be corrected.
  • No conference champion would be guaranteed a spot in the playoffs just because it belongs to one of the six "BCS Conferences." So the injustice of Connecticut of the Big East, which was not ranked in the top 25 in the final 2010 BCS standings, taking a lucrative spot in the Fiesta Bowl ahead of many more deserving teams would be eliminated.
• Income: "Experts estimate a college football playoff could approach $750 million in annual revenue, more than $600 million ahead of the current system ... As tuition rises to obscene levels, endowments dry up, donations plummet, and schools look for taxpayer subsidies, the BCS bosses continue to sit on a diamond mine because they so relish their position." (Death to the BCS, p. 7) Even Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany, one of the lead architects and staunch defenders of the BCS, admitted before Congress in 2005: "I am absolutely sure that an NFL-style football playoff would provide maybe three or four times as many dollars ... than the present system does." The revenue would increase in two major areas and expenses would decrease in another area.
  • TV: The BCS presidents know very well that the major networks will bid far more money for playoff games than they do now for the BCS package of bowls.
  • Game day revenue: With all games prior to the finals played in college stadiums, schools would earn amounts commensurate with what they take in from regular season games. Even given the fact that half the profit would be shared with the visiting team (which doesn't happen now for either conference or non-conference games), schools should pocket even more cash than they do for regular season games because they can charge 50% or 100% more for tickets to playoff games, just as NFL teams do. "A first round playoff game would net conferences 40 percent more than the current BCS championship game." (Death to the BCS)
  • Addition by subtraction: For a playoff game, the home team doesn't have to travel. This obvious statement is made to contrast a playoff game with a bowl game where the two teams are expected to arrive at the host site 5-7 days in advance and spend the school's money on hotel rooms and meals. In addition, the schools must bring their bands at least several days in advance to help promote the game. None of these expenses would be incurred by the host school of a playoff game. As for the visiting team, it would travel to the game site the day before and spend no more on meals and lodging than for a regular season road game. It might bring its band as schools often do for key road games. (Auburn's full band always travels to Tuscaloosa and vice-versa.) Further, the visiting team's expenses would be paid off the top of the income before the net profit is split 50-50. Continuing the comparison to bowl games, the two schools would not be forced to purchase a certain number of tickets that they might not sell. Any empty seats would mean less profit for the game as in the regular season but would not be charged against either team's profit as is done by bowl games. Furthermore, the concessions, parking, program sales, t-shirts, etc. would enhance the coffers of the home team and not a bowl corporation.
  • The bottom line is that universities would not hand over the profit from their most lucrative athletic asset - post-season football games - to a bowl corporation to parcel out as it sees fit.
• Excitement: Late season games would pack more meaning for more schools than under the current system.
  • As an example, Missouri's 2010 regular season finale against Kansas would have meant more than just a chance to put the Tigers in a more lucrative bowl. It would have been a must-win for Mizzou to remain in the Top 12 (or Top 8 or Top 16 depending on the system used) and earn a spot in the playoff.
  • The Iron Bowl between Alabama and Auburn will always be a big game regardless of the teams' records. But with a playoff the 2010 contest would not just have offered the Tide a chance to knock their archrival out of the BCS Championship Game but also provided Bama an opportunity to make the playoff themselves.
  • Ohio State would have had to beat Michigan to have any chance at a first round bye (in the 12 team playoff setup) or host a first round game (in a 16 team playoff).
  • Tying this back to the revenue discussion, attendance would increase at many late-season games involving teams that have no chance at their conference titles but would contend for a playoff spot - the same advantages that baseball enjoys in September when multiple teams vie for wild card berths.
  • Alabama - Auburn, Ohio State - Michigan, and Texas - Texas A&M will always sell out. But that isn't the case with Rutgers - West Virginia or Virginia Tech - Virginia. Playoff implications for one or both teams in "second level" rivalries would put more fannies in the seats.
  • Games with implications for conference championships would have an added layer of excitement because they would also determine teams' playoff positions.
  • "By playing games on campus, the tournament would also include what is perhaps the best part of college football: its historic stadiums and game-day environments. There's no good reason to conduct playoff games in sterile, often-under-capacity crowds at municipal stadiums in far-off cities when the incomparable feeling of The Swamp in Gainesville, The Horseshoe in Columbus, or the Coliseum in Los Angeles beckons." (Death to the BCS)
• Growth of the Sport: Simply put, a playoff would engender more interest in college football than the bowl system. Currently, college football abandons the stage to the NFL for several crucial weeks between the first Saturday in December when the conference championship games are played and the week after Christmas when the bowl games crank up - and even then the early bowls generally hold little interest for the nation at large. A playoff beginning the week after the conference championships would build on the momentum generated at the end of the regular season just as happens with the NFL playoffs.

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Part V: Is There a Compromise Position?

Let's recap what we've covered so far.

Advantages of a Playoff System

• Fairness: All undefeated teams, regardless of conference, would have a chance for the ultimate championship.
• Income: A playoff would pull in far more money than the current BCS and bowl setup.
• Excitement: More teams would have a chance at the ultimate prize, increasing interest the final weeks of the regular season on many more campuses.
• Growth of the Sport: College football would not abandon the national spotlight to the NFL for most of December and early January.

Disadvantages of a Playoff System

• Less Important Regular Season: Regular season games would be less important in the sense that the loser would not be eliminated from the playoffs.
• Diminution of the Bowls: The vast majority of the bowls would continue, but the current BCS bowls would involve only the best teams not in the playoff.
• Severing Traditions: Playoff winners would play multiple post-season games. Many games would be held in winter climates. Visiting teams would arrive the day before and leave the day after the game.
• Interference with School: Depending on when playoff games are scheduled, they could cause problems with final exams at some schools whose teams must travel.
• Professionalizing of College Football: The already-great pressure to win at all costs would increase, leading to even more recruiting violations.

Is it possible to find a middle ground that achieves the most important of the advantages of a playoff while at least lessening the disadvantages?

• The chief advantage of a playoff was listed first above - fairness. As educators first and foremost, college presidents should advocate athletic competition that rewards excellence rather than mediocrity and doesn't discriminate against teams because of the conference they belong to.
• The main disadvantage of a playoff was also listed first above - diminution of the regular season. To take the 2010 season as an example, why should LSU still have a chance to win the national championship after losing to Auburn (with a loss to Arkansas on top of that)? Why should a team that did not win its conference championship have a shot at the national championship?
• The added excitement that a playoff would create the final weeks of the regular season derives from giving teams that have already lost key games a second chance to redeem themselves. So in that sense it's phony excitement.
• Yet, the problem with the current setup is that it's too restrictive by limiting the number of teams anointed to play for the championship to two. You could argue that none of TCU's 2010 games were significant because, despite winning every one of them, they still didn't get a chance to win the ultimate championship. Yes, they got to beat Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl to complete an unforgettable undefeated season. But name any other sport at any level where an undefeated team is denied the opportunity to compete for the final championship. And TCU's victory in the Rose Bowl underscored the unfairness of not giving the Horned Frogs an opportunity to compete for the national championship. We'll never know if TCU could have beaten Auburn.

Another point to show the deficiency of the current system: In order to get a better shot at playing in a BCS bowl every year, TCU is making the otherwise-ridiculous move of joining the Big East, where the nearest school is Louisville. Starting in 2012, TCU's women's teams as well as men's basketball, baseball, etc., will travel long distances - as far as Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey - for half their conference games.

• On the other hand, even an 8-team playoff allows too many teams into the post-season and inevitably lessens the significance of regular season games unless you require that each of the eight be a conference champion. But that artificial rule may create more problems than it solves.
  • Which one of the three one-loss teams would have represented the Big Ten in 2010?
  • If you want the eight "most deserving" teams, why should WAC champion Nevada take one of the eight playoff berths over either of the two Big Ten one-loss teams that had to be eliminated by a tie-breaking procedure? (That problem will solve itself for the Big Ten and Pac-12 because they will now have championship games. However, the Big 12 - known here as TAND ("Texas and the Nine Dwarfs") - has eliminated its championship game after dropping to ten teams.)
  • But if you let two or all three of the one-loss teams from a conference without a championship game into the playoff, isn't that giving that conference an unfair advantage simply because it had no clearcut champion? No undefeated team in a conference may mean balanced competition among multiple strong teams or it could mean that no team was really good.
• So the choice comes down to this.

  Include enough teams to be fair, but don't take too many and cheapen the regular season.

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Part VI: A Compromise Proposal

My proposal is usually called the Plus One Format although there are several ways that it could be done.

• After the regular season, including the championship games of various conferences, use a system like the current BCS rankings to determine who plays in the bowl games.
• After the bowl games, choose the top two teams to meet in the Championship Game 10-14 days later (mid-January).

I don't consider this a "playoff" scheme. I think of it as extending the regular season to include the bowl games.

You could determine the bowl participants in several ways. I list the better alternative first.

• Final Four: #1 meets #4 in a bowl and #2 and #3 meet in another bowl. In effect, these bowls serve as semifinal games. The winners meet for the championship.
  • The bowls hosting the 1-4 and 2-3 matchups could rotate each year. For example, the first year it would be the two oldest, the Rose and Sugar. The next year, Orange and Fiesta.
  • An alternate plan would be to assign the games to the bowls based upon the participants. For example, if the #1 team is Ohio State, the Rose Bowl is the host. If the #2 team is Alabama, the Sugar Bowl hosts that game. This would maintain the traditional conference tie-ins with the bowls. This system could also be used in the first plan above (predetermined rotating hosts each year) to determine which of the two games the Rose and Sugar host. (In other words, don't predetermine that the Rose Bowl will host 1-4 and Sugar 2-3. Decide that after the teams are determined.)
• Return to Conference Bowl Tie-ins: The Rose Bowl matches the Big Ten and Pac-10 champions. The SEC champion goes to the Sugar Bowl, Big 12 to Fiesta, ACC champion to Orange, etc. After the bowls are played, the same system used to determine the rankings before the bowls is applied again. Whichever teams come out 1 and 2 play in the championship game.

Here's how the two systems might have worked in 2010.

• Final Four

#1 Auburn vs #4 Stanford in the Sugar Bowl
#2 Oregon vs #3 TCU in the Rose Bowl

Note: You could have a rule that only one team from a conference can be in the Final Four. If that were the case, then #5 Wisconsin would replace #4 Stanford in the Sugar Bowl. That would avoid two teams from the same conference meeting again in the championship game.

• Honor Conference Tie-ins

Rose Bowl: #2 Oregon vs #5 Wisconsin
Sugar Bowl: #1 Auburn vs #4 Stanford
Orange Bowl: Virginia Tech vs Connecticut
Fiesta Bowl: #3 TCU vs #7 Oklahoma

Some of the same rules governing the BCS could continue. For example, a team from a non-BCS conference, like TCU, that finishes in the Top 8 would have to be chosen for one of the four major bowls.

The problems with the second system are obvious.

• The three undefeated teams could all win. So which one is eliminated from the championship game? Still, the advantage over the current system is that you would have one more game - against a highly-ranked opponent - to help the pollsters vote and the computers rerank the teams.
• The Orange Bowl, in this example, would face the same problem the Fiesta Bowl had this past season under the BCS. It would be stuck with Connecticut, not even in the Top 20, just because they're the Big East champion. Teams like #6 Ohio State, #8 Arkansas, and #9 Michigan State would be bypassed because they were not their conference champions.

Part VII: Advantages of the Plus One Format

In our last installment, I proposed that the two teams in the Championship Game not be determined until after the bowl games are played. I gave several ways to determine the bowl participants, the better choice being to set up a Final Four, with one bowl hosting #1 vs #4 and another, #2 vs #3. The two winners would then meet in the Championship Game 10-14 days later.

Advantages of the Plus One Format

• The system is more fair than the BCS. An undefeated team from a non-BCS conference, like TCU in 2010, would play its bowl game with a legitimate chance to make it to the championship game.
• The bowls would be preserved, and the top bowls would be enhanced because their games would determine or help determine which teams play in the championship game. Even the minor bowls would play a role because victories by teams in those games will affect the computer rankings of the top four teams. (This would be an especially important point if the top four teams were not seeded in bowl games (1 vs 4 and 2 vs 3) but, instead, the bowls would revert to their traditional conference tie-ins. In that case, you could still have more than two undefeated teams after the bowls. So the question of who's #1 and #2 could come down to which teams' vanquished opponents won more bowl games.)
• The regular season retains its importance. A team must make the Top Four to have a chance at the national championship. You could enhance the regular season even more by requiring that the Final Four participants be conference champions or, if co-champions (as in the Big Ten in 2010), be the higher/highest ranked of the co-champions.
• The Plus One satisfies this important criterion for determining which teams have a shot at the title game.

  Include enough teams to be fair, but don't take too many and cheapen the regular season.

• Players, coaches, and fans could have their Week in the Sun at a bowl game - that magical experience that Bill Hancock of the BCS waxes eloquent about. Players would get their Goody Bags filled with iPods, shirts, caps, etc. The economies of the host cities would continue to get their annual boost from the major bowl games.
• Only two teams would play an additional game beyond the bowls, unlike in an 8-or-more team playoff where four or more teams would play two post-season games.
• College football wouldn't take that giant stride into the abyss of "professionalism" with an "NFL-style playoff." Presidents like Gordon Gee of Ohio State who vow that a playoff will take place over their dead bodies can be outvoted by presidents who see the Plus One system as satisfying critics [like me] who say the BCS is discriminatory without plunging into a full-blown playoff.
• The BCS Conferences maintain control of the post-season. They can still gobble up most of the money but would allow a TCU or Boise State to have a shot at a major bowl and the championship game with the attendant financial benefits.

Part IX: Realistically, What Is Likely to Happen?

If left to its own devices, this is what the BCS may do. (I'll explain the phrase "if left to its own devices" in Part X of this series.)

• The BCS will not move to the Plus One Format.
  While there is heated discussion about the unfairness of the current system and calls for an 8- or even 16-team playoff, the ADs and college presidents are unmoved. The Big Ten and Pac-10 are both adamantly opposed. The six BCS conferences have established a tradition of not making major decisions without "consensus," which means a unanimous agreement among the six conferences. Some changes might be made on the basis of a private 5-1 vote if the dissenter is the ACC or Big East. But the Big Ten, Pac 10, SEC, and maybe even the Big 12 have de facto veto power over any initiatives they strongly oppose.
  And, obviously, if the BCS won't embrace a Final Four arrangement as in the Plus One, there is no chance it will go to an 8-team playoff.
• The BCS will add the Cotton Bowl as a fifth BCS bowl.
  The most recent Cotton Bowl, played on the Friday night after New Year's Day, gave a foretaste of what will happen after the 2013 season. Many commentators remarked on the BCS-type atmosphere of the game in Jerry Jones' palace. With the backing of the Cowboys, the fifth-oldest bowl (1937) will regain its position in the top tier of post-season games.
  From the viewpoint of the BCS, adding the Cotton Bowl is a win-win proposition. Not only do the conferences gain another high-paying bowl, but the BCS opens two more slots that could go to "non-BCS" conference teams. If a fifth BCS bowl had been available this past season, Boise State could have reaped the financial reward for their 11-1 regular season. This would deflect if not defuse the anti-trust argument that the BCS is stacked against the so-called "non-automatic qualifying" conference champions.
• It's not clear whether five BCS bowls would rotate in hosting the Championship Game.
  The Cotton Bowl will want a spot in the championship game rotation. The four current BCS bowls will resist because they would host the Big Game once every five years instead of once every four years. This negotiation could go several ways. The Cotton Bowl might be promoted to BCS status but, as the Johnny-Come-Lately, not granted a chance to host the championship game. Or the BCS could open a bidding war: top five bids based on monetary compensation to the competing teams gives you BCS status with the lowest bidder of the five not granted a spot in the championship game rotation. (If this all sounds venal, remember that the BCS is entirely based on greed - the desire by the colleges to squeeze as much money as possible from the bowls and TV networks.)
• The BCS will keep the championship game as a separate event that follows all the bowl games.
  There has been criticism of the long delay between the end of the regular season and the championship game, which was played on January 10 this past season. However, reverting to the procedure used from 1998-2005 the championship game when the championship game rotated among the four BCS bowls (Fiesta, Sugar, Orange, Rose in that order) reduces the number of multi-millionaire dollar post-season games. Adding the Cotton Bowl would only continue the ten BCS slots currently available instead of adding two more. The advantage of making the Championship Game one of the bowls again is that it could be played as much as a week earlier. The reason for the current delay is to give the host city a week to gear up for a second game after its bowl game. That will happen after the 2011 season when the Sugar Bowl holds its regular game January 2 (the 1st is a Sunday) and then hosts the Championship Game January 9.
• The BCS will neither add to nor remove any of the six conferences currently comprising the "cartel" (as critics call the BCS).
  Commentators targeted the Big East as not deserving an automatic spot in the BCS bowls for its champion after Connecticut finished out of the Top 25 in the final BCS rankings, yet played in the lucrative Fiesta Bowl. However, TCU's impending move to the Big East for the 2012 season improves the Big East's status while also weakening the Mountain West, which is the conference most often mentioned as deserving BCS membership. The BCS could change its rules to guarantee a BCS spot to the highest ranked team in each of the six conferences. But this is not likely since no conference wants outside interference in the manner in which it determines its champion. (Remember the furor after the 2008 season when Oklahoma made the Big 12 Championship Game over its South Division co-champs Texas and Texas Tech? Even though Texas wielded the most clout in that soon-to-be-defunct conference, the Big 12 refused to change its tie-breaking procedure.)

Part X: What Outside Forces Could Influence the BCS?

Having concluded that the colleges that make up the BCS will never make substantive changes in the system, people from the Attorney General of Utah to the U.S. Attorney General to an organization called Playoff PAC have launched sorties.

• Senator Orrin Hatch
  On March 10, 2010, Hatch, R-Utah, and Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., sent a letter to BCS executive director Bill Hancock seeking more information about BCS revenue sharing and TV contracts. The senators also questioned whether money that should go to colleges is instead being spent to lobby Congress.
  Hatch further issued a press release saying, "It's clear that the BCS is fundamentally unfair and harmful to schools, students, college football fans and consumers throughout the country." He added, "I think the architects of the BCS should provide the public with more information to dispel the notion that the system is explicitly designed to favor certain teams while disfavoring others."
  Hatch has been out to get the BCS since his Utah Utes went undefeated in 2008 but were not selected for the BCS Championship Game over one-loss Florida. At least Utah played in the Sugar Bowl, where they upset Alabama, lending credence to the argument that a team from a non-BCS conference can play with the Big Boys if given a chance. Hatch's latest salvo also mentioned that Utah's fellow Mountain West conference team, TCU, went undefeated in 2009 but gained no access to the championship game. Hatch also asked that the formulas used by the computer rankings that form an essential component of the BCS system be made public.
• Utah Attorney Seneral
  Mark Shurtleff is preparing a lawsuit against the BCS claiming it's an illegal monopoly that violates antitrust regulations. Like Senator Hatch, Shurtleff turned his attention to the BCS after Utah's undefeated 2008 season. He says he'll pursue the action in federal court within the next couple of months and likely will be joined by attorneys general from at least two other states. The suit could seek hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, which would be trebled if antitrust violations were found.
  "A number of AGs have asked me: Why are you still interested now that the University of Utah is going to be in the Pac-12 and benefit from it [the BCS]?" Shurtleff says. "It actually helps my credibility. I've always said, 'Look, this isn't about my university. It's about the rule of law and a system that's corrupt."
• Playoff PAC
  This is a Washington, D.C.-based political action committee dedicated to replacing the BCS with a playoff. They filed an IRS complaint last fall against the Fiesta, Orange and Sugar bowls questioning inflated salaries and lavish perks for bowl executives. Additionally, PlayoffPAC volunteers have become really good at filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
• U.S. Justice Department
  The United States Justice Department has informed the NCAA that it is conducting an antitrust inquiry of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). The Justice Department wanted the answers to these questions:
  • Why does the Football Bowl Subdivision not have a playoff?
  • What steps, if any, has the NCAA taken to create a playoff among Football Bowl Subdivision programs? To the extent any steps were taken, why were they not successful? What steps does the NCAA plan to take to create a playoff at this time?
  • Have you determined that there are aspects of the BCS system that do not serve the interests of fans, colleges, universities, and players? To what extent could an alternative system better serve those interests?
  Dr. Mark Emmert, in his first year as NCAA President, responded by telling the Justice Department to ask the BCS for answers. Other than licensing the postseason bowls, "the NCAA has no role to play in the BCS or the BCS system," Emmert wrote in a letter to the department's antitrust chief, Christine Varney. He added that short of member colleges and universities discontinuing the BCS and proposing an NCAA championship, "there is no directive for the [NCAA] to establish a playoff."

• Arizona Attorney General
  In December 2010, an article in The Arizona Republic claimed that Fiesta Bowl employees wrote checks to political candidates and that the bowl reimbursed them. The article triggered a series of investigations that resulted in the firing of the bowl's founding Executive Director John Junker in March 2011. An internal investigation spurred by the inquiries of the Arizona Attorney General found a number of improprieties in the disbursement of funds. The most embarrassing revelation was that Junker and fellow officials visited a Phoenix strip club where they charged more than $1,200 in expenses to the bowl.
  As a result of these revelations, the new executive director had to appear before the NCAA Bowl Licensing Committee to plead for the Fiesta's license to be renewed based on the new accounting procedures he had put in place. After the committee granted the request, the BCS held its own hearing and decided to keep the Fiesta in its annual rotation. However, the bad publicity added to the outcry for a full-scale investigation of all the BCS bowls.

Part XI: What Impact Will These Developments Have on the BCS?

Future of the BCS

Sports Illustrated's "SEC Preview" magazine includes an article by Austin Murphy entitled "Why There Needs to Be a Playoff." Austin reiterates most of the points he made in an article last fall but updates it with some new tidbits.

• "The current BCS system is locked in through 2014. After that, however, things get murky, and - for the vast majority of college football fans who yearn for a postseason playoff - encouraging. Who, exactly, is in favor of the status quo? Mainly the slender minority benefiting from it: those running the bowls and the commissioners, presidents and athletic directions of the power conferences that the system serves. But the BCS is losing support among the rank and file of college administrators disillusioned by the seamy Fiesta Bowl revelations and desperate to stop their athletic departments from hemorrhaging red ink. One way to do that is to stop handing over more than half the profits from their most lucrative product - the football postseaon - to the bowls. And one way to do that is to put a playoff in place."
• "With a 16-team postseason beckoning, late-season battles for a conference title and the jockeying for those precious at-large bids would inject enormous significance, interest and drama into games that under the current system have zero impact on the national title. SEC fans who could otherwise care less about the Mountain West might wonder whom their team would face in the first round and suddenly find themselves rabidly interested in the outcome of, say, Air Force-BYU. Thus would a playoff enhance the value of the regular season - dramatically - rather than diminish it, as BCS acolytes would have you believe."
  
• "For all but two or three of the non-AQ teams [teams from conferences that do not Automatically Qualify their champions for the BCS bowls], the reality is this: They have no shot at a national title. Even if Nevada had gone undefeated last season (the Wolf Pack lost only to Hawaii), there's no way it would've leapfrogged any number of one-loss teams from the power conferences. 'They didn't start the season ranked high enough, and they're from a non-AQ conference,' says Alan Fishel, an antitrust attorney with the law firm Arent Fox, which has been retained by the Mountain West Conference because of its desire to reform the BCS. 'They were eliminated before the season began.'"
  
• "That reality undercuts a primary BCS talking point - the one assuring us that in a world without a playoff, 'every game counts' in the regular season. Not only does every game not count, Fishel points out, for the vast majority of non-AQ schools under the current system 'no game has ever counted' - at least in terms of its bearing on a team's hopes for winning it all." [Read Fishel's 22 BCS Tall Tales.]
• "Even if the BCS is found guilty of anticompetitive practice, say true believers, the Justice Department cannot force us to adopt a playoff. What could happen instead, they threaten, is a return to the days of 1991, when (most) teams were free to make independent deals with bowls. Dan Wetzel, a coauthor of Death to the BCS, refers to the possibility of the BCS's 'take my ball and go home' scenario ... Of course, it woud pain the presidents of BCS schools to surrender control of the fortunes earned by college football's postseason - as they would have to do if a playoff were implemented. (Indeed, that's the single, overriding reason we don't have a playoff this instant.) But would they really turn back the clock to '91? Would they really choose retro-anarchy that pays less over a playoff system that pays them much, much more?"
• "The bowls will survive, albeit it in the shadow of the playoff. The major ones would no longer have their pick of the elite teams, and the minor ones would have more trouble finding 6-6 squads. ... Exposed, at last, to free-market forces, the bowls would simply be demoted to the status of the NIT."
• "Of the 120 athletic departments that play FBS football, 106 lost money in 2009, according to an NCAA report. All over the country schools are cutting entire sports programs while turning to student fees, academic funds and taxpayer support to balance the books of athletic departments. Meanwhile the presidents are missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars by outsourcing postseason football. Bowl organizers have taken them to the cleaners by such methods as the now infamous 'ticket commitment.' A school playing in a bowl is required to purchase a set number of tickets. When the university is unable to resell those (often wildly overpriced) tickets, it takes a bath. Forced to purchase $3,349,835 worth of tickets, Connecticut lost $2,673,587 at last January's Fiesta Bowl on admission sales alone."
• "For a long time unversity presidents were credulous consumers of the BCS's so-called tall tales. Now many are wavering in their support of the BCS. At the request of Oliver Luck, West Virginia's AD, the Big East's annual spring meetings included what Luck hoped would be 'a legitimate and intellectually honest discussion about bowl finances.' Luck has also called on the NCAA to look at the issue and has decried what he perceived as 'a knee-jerk reaction to defend the system without engaging in a reasonable dialogue.'"
• "Wetzel, also a Yahoo! columnist, has written of 'exhaustion' among commissioners and administrators who are weary of advocating for a system they no longer believe in. If they're sick of it now, imagine how they'll feel should a Department of Justice investigation kick in and the discovery process start. Imagine if they have to deliver reams of documents they would just as soon never saw the light of day."
• "It only gets uglier from here on out, and if the presidents at whose pleasure Hancock serves decide to cut their losses, the result could be a compromise: a plus-one. That is, two finalists for a national title game would emerge from the traditional bowl season - regardless of conference. That would fall far short of what playoff advocates are asking for. And cash-strapped schools would still be handing over more than 50% of their profits to the bowl bandits. But it would be a start."
• "Decades hence sports historians may look back on this as the year the BCS lost its grip on the postseason."