Boise State’s president makes an impassioned commentary on the BCS , I’m just not sure he gets it. I’m pro-playoff but he’s making the wrong arguments, probably to curry favor with the Mountain West.
He says, “There is considerable irony in the fact that in the highest temple of political correctness, American higher education, the BCS worships the false idols of monopoly, inequity and greed at the expense of the virtues of fairness, access and competition.”
Really? Maybe he needs to learn of an organization called the Association of American Universities. It’s only 60 schools yet the members pull in 58% of all research grant and contract income. Does anyone believe that if you swapped the Harvard students and faculty with the students and faculty at Boise State that the next rankings of academics would see Boise State ahead of Harvard? Please, not a chance of that happening. The BCS fits perfectly with how higher education is run.
He seems to think the revenue distribution is unfair. Well I love my school but I’m not blinded by self-interest. When the BCS opened the door to revenue sharing the five leagues (Mountain West, Mid-American, Conference USA, Sun Belt and Western Athletic) brought so little to the table in the free market (ie. TV, sponsorship, and bowl fees) that an additional game had to be added so that the five could be given 9% of the revenue and not cause a loss of revenue to the existing BCS leagues. Adding 51 schools to the mix, 43% of all of FBS football failed to produce a 9% increase in income.
The BCS is an anti-trust violation? Sue ‘em! Let me sit back and watch you throw good money after bad. The BCS has increased access to highest profile, richest games. Before the BCS existed the games and conferences working independently shunned the lesser known programs, if not for a boycott of Arizona over the MLK holiday, Louisville would have never cracked into the Fiesta Bowl. Pre-BCS, last year’s Utah would have been in the same boat as BYU was in 1984 stuck in a low-paying bowl game pre-Christmas playing a 6-5 team for the shot at the national title before a limited national audience. The BCS hasn’t hurt access, it has increased it.
There is an assumption that if you blow up the BCS, you get a playoff. That is a very big assumption.
The Big 10 and Pac-10 can quite easily say, we are opposed to a playoff and we’ll go to the Rose Bowl, thank you very much. Of all the bowls, none but the Rose can throw dollars that make it look as good as a playoff. A national playoff that doesn’t include teams from the bulk of the TV markets isn’t going to be a particularly lucrative playoff.
The Sugar Bowl will scramble to make the SEC a great offer and lock them in against the champion of one of the other leagues or a runner-up. The Orange and Fiesta will do their scramble as well and we can go back to the good old days when you could have end of the regular season 1, 2, 3, and 4 all in different games.
But don’t be mistaken, if you blow up the BCS and bring back the old bowl system, you’ve just denied access to the five poor sisters, who might be the six poor as the Big East scrambles for a bowl tie.
See the anti-trust law doesn’t let you argue that one plan is better than another. Instead you look only at what is before the court, the actual arrangement. That means the court looks at the current BCS vs. what we had before and the net result is pro-competition. More institutions have a chance to participate and a combined subjective/objective rating system is used to select participants in the championship and from the non-auto-qualifier leagues. You can’t force the participants to choose the best choice.
A court can say the BCS violates anti-trust, but imposing a playoff isn’t a guaranteed remedy. The BCS gets blown up and then either everyone can conspire to create a new monopoly (playoff) or they can let the free market do its thing and go back to the bowls.
It also helps to remember that the BCS AQ leagues are only co-conspirators for the BCS organization itself. Outside of that they compete independently with all the other leagues for bowl berths and television money. The BCS in truth is walking around money. Once you subtract team costs, the BCS money is only about 10% to 15% of the money distributed by the six AQ leagues. The real money is television revenue, conference championship events, and NCAA revenue sharing.
The Big East may not be as “deserving” of the BCS AQ based on what happens on the field compared to the Mountain West but the BCS isn’t about fielding the best teams, it is about maximizing revenue. Compare Big East TV to Mountain West TV. The Big East is far more like the five AQ leagues than the five non-AQ.
This is a meritocracy only if the merit is dollar generation. The non-AQ have produced some of the worst BCS TV rating and some of the worst ticket sales. Neither TV nor the bowls are begging to lock up more access, they would rather be rid of it but it was forced upon them by the AQ leagues.
Dr. Kustra woefully misses the mark as he sucks up to the Mountain West in his commentary. You cannot determine who belongs in the championship based on the bowl games. You have to judge the teams for the 1-2 game based on the regular season games.
At the conclusion of the regular season, none of the three major human vote polls had Utah rated #1 or #2 and as I recall only one of the six computer ranking systems said Utah was #1 or #2. Utah had a great Sugar Bowl win but in a championship where the participants are picked at the conclusion of the regular season, that doesn’t matter. Coaches, writers, the people affiliated with football through the Harris poll, and five computer rankings came up with at least two teams rated as better than Utah. The beef for Utah should never be that it belonged at #1 or #2, because their only legitimate complaint is that they might have had a chance to win it all if there were a tournament.
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