Except that it wouldn’t have to. Oh, and except that the BCS system already interferes with the academic calendars of some schools.

Let’s look at the present system.

The college football postseason starts on December 18 with the much anticipated (ha) 5th annual New Mexico Bowl. The postseason starts on that date because by then all schools are finished with fall/winter finals exams. The postseason runs through January 10, when the BCS National Championship Game will be played in Arizona. That means there are four weekends of postseason football that apparently don’t interfere with the academic calendars, at least that’s what the defenders claim.

Except that the Orange, Sugar and Cotton Bowls take place during the first week of classes for many schools.

And the January 10 national championship game takes place during the second week of classes for several schools.

So by the BCS defenders’ logic, Ohio State shouldn’t be playing in the title game or two of the other BCS bowl games. After all, classes for the Buckeyes start on January 3, 2011.

Same goes for 4 of the other 7 schools who played in BCS bowl games last year. The Oregon Ducks (January 3), Cincinnati Bearcats (January 4), and Florida Gators (January 5) all start classes in the week before the BCS title game. And unless the TCU Horned Frogs plan on attending classes the day of the title game, the national championship game would interfere with their schedule.

It is true that the January 10 BCS title game might interfere with the academic calendars of two schools — a sacrifice the NCAA and the BCS seem willing to make in order to have a national championship game. But is interfering with the academic schedules of (possibly) four teams instead of two really threatening the academic missions of all 120 FBS schools? Of course not.

Moreover, consider that the college basketball season not only spans two semesters, its postseason takes place over three weeks during the semester. And college basketball teams also typically play games during the winter break.

Truth is, even a 16-team playoff could work in the current time allotted for postseason bowl games with a title game on January 10. An eight-team playoff could culminate with a title game on January 3, causing student-athletes to miss virtually no class time. Or if the 16-team playoffs started on December 11, when there are no games scheduled, except for Army-Navy, the title game could still be January 3.

(For those wondering, in the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly I-AA), 16 teams play on December 4, 8 on December 11, 4 on December 17-18 and two meet in the championship game on January 7.)

Clearly, there is plenty of time set aside for bowl games so as not to interfere with academic calendars during which an 8- or 16-team playoff could be completed. A 4-team playoff would be a piece of cake with the current schedule.

Just as the BCS title game itself kills the heart of the argument about the “great traditions” of bowl games, the date of the title game also proves that the BCS and the NCAA are willing to interfere with the academic calendars of some schools. They’re just not willing to do so for the sake of an equitable and far more compelling postseason.

Unless sports fans stand up once and for all.

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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 sportsfanscoalition@gmail.com

by Jeremiah Tittle

Look no further than Notre Dame football when weighing the pros and cons of going independent.  Media exposure? Check.  Being a part of the national college football conversation even when your quality of play on the field seldom warrants it? Check.  Flexibility in scheduling to suit the school’s needs? Check. Qualifying for a BCS Bowl? Well, that’s the biggest (pay)check of all!

Yesterday, Brigham Young University announced that it would be joining the West Coast Conference for all sports except one.  Football. The school’s greatest revenue generating sport will not share profits as it has announced its independence.

BYU Football has been knocking on the door of the BCS for many years only to be relegated to lackluster bowls despite its strong record in the non-BCS Mountain West Conference.  Since talks of realignment strengthening in-conference competition, and in turn computer points, have fallen apart, BYU switched its strategy.  They got out of Dodge!

The 2011-2012 season will be different as BYU has followed in Notre Dame’s fighting french footsteps securing control of their own destiny with respect to revenue from television contracts and potential qualification for a BCS Bowl come winter.  That’s right. The same University that prohibited women from wearing jeans in the 70′s and banned Madonna CD’s in the 80′s has ventured down the road not (or rarely) taken.

From the sports fan’s point of view, how will this affect the entertainment factor?  Will this cause roadtrips to be out of reach for college kids and alumni?  Will other schools follow in BYU’s footsteps throwing off the cartel’s stranglehold?  These questions have yet to be answered.

Independence should buy BYU flexibility, but what will the ultimate result be in terms of breaking through the opaque ceiling held steadfast by the BCS?

While the wise path follows Notre Dame, BYU will need to ensure that the University Presidents continue to receive every penny of their expected million dollar paychecks they receive as being part of the cartel.  Plus, they must demostrate that this move won’t catalyze more independence and ensuing anarchy.

The bottom line is the bottom line.  The BCS conferences want the system under their control to stay the way it is.  Why create an equitable method to determine a champion, on the field of play, through a playoff system when it threatens the guaranteed cashflow and conference spots in all the big time bowl games each January?

Jeremiah Tittle is the Managing Editor of SportsFansCoalition.org. Reach him at Jeremiah@SportsFansCoalition.org. Apply for a position with the SFC Sportswriter Fellowship here.

Before we go any further, it should be noted that postseason playoffs and bowls are not mutually exclusive. In fact, bowl games would still make a great showcase for those programs that don’t make the playoffs.  This season, 70 out of the 120 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision (worst moniker ever) will play in bowl games.  If 8 of those 70 teams played in a playoff, there would still be 62 teams that could play in 31 bowl games. Several playoff proposals include using the most prominent bowl games for the playoffs, including a rotating national championship, similar to how the BCS works now.

So this is not a call for eliminating bowl games, but an attempt to show that the BCS’ claim that playoffs would endanger the “great traditions of the bowls” rings hollow. College football and the BCS sold out the “great traditions” long ago in the name of corporate sponsorship and television contracts.

The bowl games are often lampooned – as they should be – for their shamelessness in affixing corporate brand names to their bowl names. Some of the all-time greats include the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsetta Bowl, the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl and the Poulan Weed-Eater Independence Bowl.  Some bowls don’t even bother with the pretense of maintaining the original name (if there was one). Consider the GMAC Bowl, the Beef ‘O’ Brady’s Bowl (who knows), and the Chick-fil-A Bowl. Even the “Grandaddy of them all” is referred to as the “Rose Bowl presented by Citi.”

Tradition could not save the Bluebonnet Bowl, which was played from 1959 to 1987 in Houston. Indeed, it was the lack of a title sponsor that ultimately did in the bowl. There were no NCAA bailouts for the Bluebonnet in the name of tradition. It wasn’t making money so it folded. That’s the real tradition.

The latest one is the Pinstripe Bowl, which takes place for the first time on December 30 in the lavish new Yankees Stadium. Nothing says tradition like celebrating the successful swindle of over a billion dollars of public money into private hands by hosting a game in a baseball stadium in frigid late December between the sixth-ranked Big 12 team and the third-ranked Big East team. Apparently, someone forgot what happened last time they tried to host a bowl game (1962’s Gotham Bowl) in Yankee Stadium – no one showed up. Or maybe they were inspired by the late Seattle Bowl, which played its inaugural game on the Mariners’ baseball field and folded after two seasons.

If the bowl games feel watered down now, it’s because they are. The NCAA’s decision to add an extra game starting in 2006 meant that teams could now play 12 games, opening the door for teams to be bowl eligible with a 6-6 record. Last season, 8 teams entered bowl games with .500 records overall. Further, 21 teams had .500 records or worse in their conferences. The pinnacle of mediocrity was surely the Insight Bowl which pitted Minnesota against Iowa State – both entered the game 6-6 and 3-5 in their respective conference.

The Insight Bowl itself is just over 20 years old. It originated in Tucson, moved to Phoenix and now is played in Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe. Meanwhile, the Fiesta Bowl started in Tempe but now is played in Phoenix. The actual location of the bowl game itself obviously isn’t fundamental to the “tradition” of these bowl games. In fact, only the Rose Bowl seems truly married to its location.

The “Grandaddy of Them All” has begrudgingly accepted the changes that come with accepting massive amounts of television revenues.  The BCS itself is responsible for ending the tradition of the Rose Bowl being played on January 1 (or the 2^nd if the 1^st is on a Monday). The BCS also hampers the Rose Bowl’s traditional Pac 10- Big 10 rivalry. And ultimately, the mystique of the Rose Bowl, the true granddaddy, died when it became just another cog in the BCS wheel.

So depending on the bowl, the location, name, date and conference ties to the bowl have been sacrificed for the sake of generating revenue and because of the BCS. In fact, the BCS now trumpets the same arguments that were once used against it. Prior to the BCS or its predecessors the Bowl Coalition and the Bowl Alliance, the argument was made that even having one national championship game would hurt the bowl games.

Regardless of whether the BCS has harmed the specific traditions of the bowl games, the BCS does mark a fundamental transformation of the college football postseason landscape. For the first time the system features one game above all the other bowl games. There really is one winner now; not just a group of teams that won their final game. The decision to play one national championship game ended what was once unique about the college football bowl system – that there was no one winner.

The BCS and the NCAA have decided that television revenues trump bowl traditions and that the largest bowls are now just vehicles for showcasing one game above them all. So we might as well fix the system so that these bowl games are used to feature an equitable system of determining a national champion. There’s no sense in pretending that the bowl games have great traditions. The bowl games long ago sold out their images to the highest corporate bidder and the BCS killed the spirit of the whole thing.

–

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

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

ESPN surveyed 135 players from across the country – 72 from BCS schools and 63 from non-BCS schools – and asked them, “Do you want a playoff?” 62.2% of the players said yes, they favor a college football playoff.  (61.1% of BCS players support a playoff, as do 63.5% of non-BCS players.)

Clearly, college football players want a playoff.

The support for a playoff, however, breaks down when it comes to how exactly a playoff would work – and what it would mean for bowl games. The majority of players would rather have the current system than a 16-team playoff and would rather go to three bowl games in their career than one playoff trip. (This latter question seems a bit arbitrary.)

These results aren’t surprising. Basically, players don’t want a playoff to mean that they themselves don’t get to compete in the postseason.

But there’s no reason that college football can’t have a playoff and bowl games. One Big Ten “defensive standout” told ESPN:  “I’ve got the perfect solution. Take the top 16 ranked teams in the country and play it off like the World Cup. Take the next 24 teams with winning records and put them in bowl games.”

Had ESPN asked whether players favored a system with a playoff and bowl games, there would have probably been overwhelming support.

But that’s not what we have now.

No matter how hard the BCS tries to spin these results, the fact remains that college football players – and fans – support a playoff.

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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

Sometimes sports can channel some sort of Dionysian spirit, filling the sports fan with an ecstasy impossible to describe but best captured in moments – for me, these include Mario Chalmers’ 3-point shot to lift KU into overtime and onto the NCAA title and Landon Donovan’s last-minute goal against Algeria to advance the U.S. in the World Cup.

Such moments are few and far between, however. When was the last time a diehard Detroit Lions fan really got to experience such euphoria?

Sadly, the typical sporting experience for most sports fans these days consists of paying way too much for tickets and parking, sitting in the nosebleeds while the front rows and corporate boxes sit empty, and drinking an $8 warm beer while watching a perennially losing team that has been mismanaged. All while sitting in a taxpayer-funded stadium that was only built because a greedy owner threatened to move the team to another city.

Fun times.

And if we simply cannot or choose not to spend money at the ballparks anymore, the leagues and media corporations blackout our games so we can’t see them on TV. (And sometimes we cannot even see the games on our TVs because we don’t have the right cable package.)

Yet, we still go to games and watch them on TV. Why? Because we love sports. Because we love the camaraderie sports gives us. If we are going to be miserable Kansas City Royals fans, we are going to be miserable Royals fans together.

And it is that spirit of camaraderie and teamwork that we must channel if we are going to take sports back and make them fun again.

In his must-read new book, Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love, SFC board member Dave Zirin writes: “Fandom doesn’t have to be a slouching, passive exercise and club supporters the world over don’t need to just meekly consume whatever thin gruel owners serve.”

If you’re tired of the “thin gruel” you’ve been served by the owners of your favorite teams, it’s time to take action. Join Sports Fans Coalition and tell your friends. All you have to do is provide your email and zip code. That’s it.

No spam. No dues.

The more members we have, the louder our voice and the greater our power to hold owners and corporations accountable.

If you want to become more involved, reach out to me. How can Sports Fans Coalition help you? Let me know in the comments section below or send me an email at sportsfanscoalition@gmail.com.

Over the next few months, we will be working tirelessly to get as many people signed up and involved as we can. But there are just a few of us. There are many more of you. And there are countless sports fans out there who would love to see someone fighting for them. All you have to do is tell them to come to the website and sign up. That’s it.

In the meantime, know that we’ll be fighting to give you a voice in the political arena. Our mission is simple –

Lower ticket prices.

No blackouts.

And for the love of God, let’s get a college football playoff system already.

But it’s going to take some work. There is no magic bullet. This is a game of inches.

And we are going to fight for every inch.

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.

By Scott Kornberg

As usual, Bowl Championship Series critics are condemning how the BCS process always seems to find a way to leave out the Cinderella’s of the sports. In this article by Tim Brando, Brando harps on the fact that the college football “National” Championship, is in fact, not “National” because teams like Boise State and TCU consistently get left out.

The one thing missing for college football is the Cinderella. The Cinderella is what makes college basketball great, and it could do the same for college football in the fall. Think back to 2006 when the #11 seed George Mason somehow danced to the Final Four. Or in 2008 when the #8 seed Davidson barely lost to the #1 seed Kansas in the Elite Eight. A more recent example is the #5 seed Butler Bulldogs coming within a missed half-court prayer of being the National Champion this past season.  Those teams made miraculous runs, and made each of those tournaments memorable to fans.

There is no miraculous run to be had in college football without a playoff system. Last year, Boise State was not given a chance to be the “National” Champion despite finishing undefeated. The Broncos were not given that chance either when they were undefeated in 2006, or in 2008, when Boise State had one loss. That one loss was the same amount of losses that the LSU Tigers and Ohio State Buckeyes had coming into their battle for the “National” Championship.

With no playoff system in place this year, the likelihood of a Cinderella crashing the BCS “National” Championship scene is slim. Boise State seems to be the most probable candidate, as they will likely enter the season ranked in the Top 5. The Broncos, however, will face only one team that finished with more than 8 wins last year (Virginia Tech). They played a slightly more difficult regular season schedule last year, with two teams on their slate that finished with 8 wins or more from the 2008 season (Oregon and Tulsa). The Broncos, or any other “Cinderella” team, are going to need to finish undefeated and hope that every other team in the country loses at least once in order to have a chance to play for the “National” Championship because the BCS computers will deem their schedule too weak to vault the major-conference teams with similar records. A playoff system is the only way to give these small-conference teams a fair chance at the BCS “National” Championship.

Scott Kornberg is a sportscaster for WMUC Sports (www.wmucsports.com). He hosts his own sports talk show, and announces baseball and softball games for the University of Maryland. He covers Maryland’s football and basketball writing for www.turtlesportsreport.com part of the scout.com network.

It’s Just a Bowl Game

by Scott Weiss 

As the 2010-2011 College Football season approaches, college football fans will once again be subjected to the sham that is the BCS system.  Computers deciding who will play in the supposed championship game; could anything be more contrary to the concepts of competition and fairness than this?  The NCAA wants fans to buy into the contrived game that they create as a championship game.  As a fan, I have never considered this to be a championship game.  Let’s face it, the game is just another bowl game.  There were 34 bowl games played in the 2009-2010 college football season, and to arbitrarily call the winner of one of these games as the national champion is a total joke. 

Somehow, the NCAA has found a way to come up with a playoff system to determine their basketball, baseball and hockey champions.  They have even found a way to come up with a 16 team playoff format to determine the champions of the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly I-AA).  Contrary to what Gordon Gekko said, greed is not good.  Should college football fans continue to endure the bogus way that the national champion is determined because the NCAA needs to stuff their pockets with bowl game bucks?  As a sports fan, I think that the answer is a resounding, no! 

Scott Weiss is the Local Chapter Chair for SFC-New York/New Jersey.  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.

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by Jeremiah Tittle

While all the discussion and opinion and argumentation and analysis of what expansion would do to or for or against the NCAA Tournament spiraled out of control, the reality was something altogether anticlimactic.

In a nutshell, the NCAA opted out of the last few years of its previous contract with CBS only to net an additional 4.8 billion dollars over the course of a 14 year deal – adding revenue of more than 2oo million per season – with both CBS and Turner in which the television host of the Final Four and National Championship will toggle back and forth following the 2015 season.

As if the TV networks agreeing to share wasn’t strange enough, the only expansion in terms of actual games played resulted in the addition of 3 play-in games on the Tuesday before the real bracketology starts. Despite the approval of the NABC to move forward with the much hyped 96-team bracket, the NCAA decided to take the money and minimize expansion to merely 4 play-in games resulting in a 68 team tournament.

Whether a team must win 6 games or 9 games straight, a playoff is the only true way to determine a champion. If only the BCS was taking notes when March Madness dwarfed the appeal and satisfaction of college football’s finale.

Jeremiah Tittle is the Managing Editor of SportsFansCoalition.org.

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.