by Jeremiah Tittle

How many economists does it take to end a corrupt system’s reign over a publicly-funded institution like NCAA athletics?  The answer: 21(hopefully)

Our friends at Playoff PAC have once again pushed the envelope. This time, the target is the Department of Justice antitrust division. 21 prominent economists have sent a letter to the DOJ to investigate the BCS’s violation of antitrust laws. It’s about time that the government serve the people and push for Division I football follow suit with every other sport in the NCAA.

Read the Playoff PAC press release here.

Read the Wall Street Journal article here.

QUICK KICK: Here’s What’s Wrong with the BCS System

by Scott Weiss

If you are one of the few still on the fence about the effectiveness of the BCS system in college football, please this article in fanhouse.  It reads more like a meeting of the six main mafia families than it does a meeting of college football executives.  This is not what college athletics is supposed to be about; reps of the big conferences belittling and threatening reps of the smaller conferences.

Like every other pro and college sports league, it’s time for a playoff system to decide the champion, not a return to the old Bowl system that one big conference exec threatens.

Scott Weiss is the Local Chapter Chair for SFC-New York/New Jersey and an SFC Sportwriter Fellow. He has been involved in the sports fans advocacy movement since 2000. He is a life long fan of the Mets, Jets, Knicks, and Rangers.

For those who don’t understand the BCS rankings in college football – and there are many who don’t, a fact that itself is indicative of how convoluted the BCS is – there are three components that make up the rankings – a poll of college football coaches, a poll based on a combination of computer models and the Harris Poll. The first two have their flaws, particularly the computer polls, but let’s focus on the Harris Poll.

Here’s how Harris Interactive describes the poll:

The 2010 Harris Interactive College Football Poll is comprised of 114 panelists and includes former coaches, players, administrators and current and former media. Panelists are randomly drawn by Harris Interactive from among more than 300 nominations supplied by the 11 Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A) conferences and independent institutions. The panel meets Harris Interactive criteria for sample design and is a statistically reliable representation of all 11 conferences and independent institutions.

And here’s how the authors of Death to the BCS describe the Harris Poll:

While the media, coaches, and even coaches’ secretaries aren’t particularly adept at ranking teams, college football is the undeniable focus of their lives. Not so with the Harris Poll voters, who aren’t chosen by Harris Interactive or from some huge pool of applicants. Conferences nominate and sponsor voters, whose history of back-scratching is evident. While many Harris Poll voters are former players or administrators, they have families and businesses and other interests. Understandably, they follow the game only so much. That their previous involvement in football gives them sufficient expertise is like arguing that a long-retired Honda mechanic could service a 2010 BMW.

The Harris Poll was launched in 2005 after the Associated Press demanded that its poll not be used to determine a national champion. The AP realized that it was being associated with a broken system and wanted no part of it.

Before his untimely death last summer in a bicycling accident, my father was a Harris Poll voter. He was a former athletic director at the University of Kansas who once served as chair of the NCAA Division I men’s basketball committee. He had decades of experience working in the business of college athletics and college football. And he favored a college football playoff.

Since I was hired at Sports Fans Coalition, I have heard many words of encouragement from several of my father’s colleagues. One of them is a former college athletics administrator who is well respected and is also one of the 114 Harris Poll voters. He shared his thoughts on the BCS with me and now I share them with you:

I believe a playoff is best “for the good of the game”. That is, if it is important to determine who is # 1, then access should not be restricted. We just kind of go along with what we did last year with a tweak here and a tweak there. Actually, the NCAA is the natural point agency to control and manage post season football at the D-l level. Never understood their reluctance to do this.

It seems the status quo [BCS bowl system] advocates are primarily TV executives and bowl administrators. They are smart business men and women who have a very definitive bottom line…make money. It appears they have managed to convince key conference commissioners and athletic directors and through them, college presidents, that the current system is in their best interests. College presidents and athletic directors are good people but they come from a background of teaching, education and the world of academia…as they should. However, the missions of each group are at opposite ends of the spectrum. The mission of TV, bowl executives and conference commissioners is a bottom line of money and control. While the mission of those from the institutions is one of teaching, research and outreach. One group operates on generated revenue while the other attempts to operate on allocated revenue. One group has the money and the control and the other isn’t sure about what to do about it.

Unfortunately, along the way the important values of education have been compromised and the gap between athletics and academics continues to widen. I don’t see this changing as long as postseason football and all of the money connected to it is in the control of a status quo mentality. And it is my opinion the current mentality is not in the best interests of “the good of the game.”

I believe my father would agree with his former colleague. I sure do.

–
Brian Frederick is the Executive Director of Sports Fans Coalition. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication and lives in Washington, D.C. Email him at brian@sportsfans.org.

College football’s “Kickoff Game” takes place on September 4 with LSU facing UNC. And at the conclusion of that game, one of those two teams will all but be eliminated from winning the national championship this season. Meanwhile fans at TCU and Boise State get to look ahead to a season where they may play perfectly and be eliminated as well. Get ready for another season of the BCS, sports fans!

In recent comments defending the Bowl Championship Series, BCS executive director Bill Hancock stated that college football has the “best, most compelling regular season of any sport.” Hancock was concerned that if college football had a post-season playoff like college basketball, fans would only care about the post-season.

“March is so wonderful, but the regular season is losing its appeal,” Hancock said. “It breaks my heart, but it’s because everything is going into March.

“We can’t take the risk of that happening in football because we have the best, most compelling regular season of any sport.”

Hancock is a good man tasked with the unenviable task of defending a system that has lower public approval ratings than Congress. And one of his primary defenses is the “most compelling regular season” claim.

But there are several problems with that claim.

First, is Hancock really claiming that the NFL’s regular season games aren’t as compelling as college football regular season games? What about Monday night football? Speaking of Monday nights, does Hancock think that Monday night Big East and Big 12 conference basketball games in January aren’t compelling enough?

Essentially, Hancock is arguing that every other sport that has a playoff is getting it wrong?

Second, under the BCS system, once a team falls out of contention for the national championship, don’t their seasons become less compelling than if they were playing for a conference championship or an at-large playoff berth, not only for fans of those schools but for the rest of us?

Take the powerhouses where anything short of playing for a national championship is a wasted season. This year those schools included Florida, Oklahoma and Ohio State. If those schools lose one game – and certainly two – there is no way those schools are playing for a national championship under the current system. While this might make the games up until the losses more compelling, what happens after those teams lose one or two games?

How compelling was the 2009 season for Oklahoma Sooners fans after the team lost their opening game to BYU? A friend who is a Texas alum told me that if UT loses to Oklahoma in the Red River Shootout, he hardly pays attention to the rest of the season after that. Maybe those UT and OU fans still find their seasons compelling, but how about the rest of us? Why was there any reason to watch OU after losing that first game? On the other hand, if a team could still win the national championship in a playoff, the games after one or two losses would still be compelling.

A college football playoff would create a scenario in which a number of teams would still have a shot at winning their conference championship or an at-large berth and thus would still be in the hunt for the national championship.

Third, even if we grant that the college football regular season is more compelling than other regular seasons, what if the cost of saving it is a less compelling post-season? Does the NCAA really think that one national championship game and a few marquis bowl games would get better ratings and be more compelling than a series of playoff games each one becoming increasingly more significant. A 16-team playoff would give college football fans a reason to watch at least 15 meaningful postseason games. (That’s in addition to any bowl games they might be interested in.) How many bowl games did the average fan watch last year? A few?

Bowl games just aren’t that meaningful to any college football fans without a rooting interest. Sure, they can be entertaining (sometimes) but there is no larger post-season narrative. Just a series of random bowl games punctuated by one often-controversial championship game.

Moreover, by sticking with the bowl and BCS system, the NCAA may actually be losing money – a lot of money.  SI.com writer Andy Staples writes:

Even BCS leaders will admit that there’s more money in a playoff. The NCAA basketball tournament brings in an estimated $545 million a year, and college football is exponentially more popular than college basketball. The BCS brings in only $150 million a year, but it funnels most of it to the most powerful conferences. Government intervention would strip those conferences of their power. After that, given a choice between less money and more money, here’s betting college presidents forget about their arguments against a playoff and opt for more money.

It’s clear that the claim that college football has the “most compelling regular season” is simply a sleight of hand to cover up that college football’s post-season is not only problematic and controversial, it’s not even that compelling. That is, unless virtually every other sports league (and the NCAA itself with its Football Championship Subdivision) has it wrong.

–

Brian Frederick is the Executive Director of Sports Fans Coalition. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication and lives in Washington, D.C. His favorite teams are the Kansas Jayhawks, North Carolina Tar Heels, and whichever team his brother is coaching for. And the underdog. Email him at sportsfanscoalition@gmail.com

NCAA Weighs Expansion on Eve of Final Four

by Jeremiah Tittle

The NCAA has been considering expanding the tournament beyond 65, and has only a couple of months to determine if opting out of its contract with CBS – making way for another 31 teams to join in on the Madness of March – is indeed a wise decision beyond the financials.

According to ESPN SportsCenter, the NCAA has “walked media through the proposal” to expand the brackets despite the pleas of many who feel the product would be diluted by stretching the 3 week tournament to fit an entire month on the calendar. The debate will continue as the NCAA takes the temperature of the media measuring the public response to the idea floating out there.

Meanwhile, the BCS headed up by Bill Hancock and Ari Fleischer(not that he could help Tiger Woods) look to use some of college basketball’s over pursuit of the almighty dollar (the tournament brings NCAA Basketball 92% of its revenue) as standing for their steadfast tactic of doing nothing. They reject the fans’ demands. They look to use fans’ against each other as a method for spinning the issue. Enough is enough. College football fans want a playoff.

SFC has proven that protecting the integrity of the college athlete is a sham. If that were so, why do the highest ranked college football teams schedule cupcakes mid-season? Why do they pad their schedule with lesser opponents claiming that additional contests at the end of the season could stretch undergrads too thin and would compromise academic endeavors. Talk about dilution! Gimme a break.

The bottom line is that those in power are the benefactors of  the system. The University Presidents want to stay put cashing million dollar paychecks each year ignoring the cries of fans as the system continues to work in their favor.

Andrea Adelson writes in the Orlando Sentinel that this behavior is pure ‘hypocrisy’ to be so closed minded about expansion in one sport in the name of the student athlete while pushing an extra 32 games onto another sport. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, or put more accurately, the one hand that collects paychecks is still demanding more, more, more.

Jeremiah Tittle is Managing Editor of www.SportsFansCoalition.org.