The Sports Curmudgeon

Don’t worry; this is not going to be a diatribe for or against the BCS. All I want to say about the BCS is that it stinks just like the good ol’ boy system of bowl games stinks. If you prefer one to the other, you are merely picking the least worst “stink”.

I want to make sure you realize just what a bunch of hypocrites the people who run college football are. Whenever anyone talks about the idea of some kind of “tournament” or “on-field determination” of a football championship, the people who run college football go into passive-aggressive mode and tell you all the reasons why they can’t do it. And the reason they “can’t” do it is that they “don’t want to do it.” The reason they “don’t want to do it” is that they are very happy to be lining their pockets with the current system and do not want to rock the boat. As “Deep Throat” purportedly told Woodward and Bernstein, follow the money. It applies here too.

The money that flows to colleges and universities from the bowl games approximates $90-95M. That is the cumulative payout from the bowl games. That is why there are so many bowl games; that is why no one wants to do anything to make the money machine take a hiccough. Read that number again; it is $90-95M that pours into the coffers of the universities.

The coaches get paid big bucks to be sure that their teams get to participate in these games meaning a larger share of the money for the school. The AD’s have a similar responsibility and focus. Those sanctimonious and preening university presidents talk about academics and standards and control but they do nothing – other than sneaking off to try to lure a new coach to their schools in the dark of night – because when you list the top three responsibilities of EVERY university president they are:

1. Raise money for the university.
2. Raise money for the university!
3. Raise money for the university!!

And if they don’t raise sufficient money for the university, they get to look for other work. So don’t look for these ladies and gentlemen to do anything grand and noble. That is why Dr. Myles Brand is an annoying feckless animated suit dummy.

The NCAA has a rule that says every team has to end its regular season of football by the second weekend of December and that no post-season game can extend beyond an early January date. The reason given is that to extend the season would interfere with the education of the student athletes and conflict with the university mission of education. If you believe that, you’re dumb enough to think that Mike Tyson could win on Jeopardy. What this rule actually does is to prevent an on-field determination of a national football champion.

The NCAA publicly worries about the student athletes who need to study for exams and is horrified about how an on-field tournament would/might/could interfere with that. Let me clue you in to what nonsense this is. When I went to college – right back after rust was invented – most schools played a maximum of 10 games and some played only 9. The season started in September – and not on Labor Day weekend mind you. It was over the weekend after Thanksgiving weekend. If there were scholar-athletes, they had December to prepare for exams and they had time at the beginning of the semester to get their academics started properly.

Today, the season begins in August – long before any students have arrived to begin the fall term. The season ends for some teams on the second weekend of December. One team this year – Kansas State – has already played 14 games and will be in a bowl game to make it 15. Nine teams have already played 13 games this year prior to a bowl appearance. Only one team invited to the 28 bowl games has played only 11 games this year. So in the recent past, the college football schedule has increased by at least 20% for the vast majority of the schools that are going to be contending for bowl games. How does that give the scholar-athlete more time for classes and exams?

Oh, but it gets worse. Now we have schools and conferences – with the explicit approval of their administrations and the NCAA – playing games on weeknights. This year, there were night college football games on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Tell me how that fits into the concept of going to class and learning anything. It doesn’t, but it does bring in extra dollars to the universities from the TV networks that put the games on. So once again, the process by which knowledge is imparted to and poured into the skulls of the scholar athletes can be subsumed to football on TV.

Fifty-six teams will spend much of the month of December practicing to play a game at the end of December or in early January. Assume for a moment that there are 75 students involved with a football team (counting managers and folks like that, this is VERY conservative). Assume also that the teams will practice an average of 20 days in December (remember some of the games are early so that keeps the number down) That means that 4200 players/managers will be consuming 84,000 people-days of time and energy to put on these bowl games.

Memo to hypocritical university presidents: Think of what kind of academic progress and growth might be achieved with 84,000 extra person-days of involvement…

All of this time and energy and money are devoted to giving us a crock of mediocrity as a product.

The Bowl Season starts with the New Orleans Bowl matching North Texas and Memphis. Who gives a rat’s ass about this game unless you are an alum of one of the schools or the family member of one of the players?

In case you think I picked the one bad game on the list to make my point, tell me about the Tangerine Bowl with NC State (fourth in the ACC) playing Kansas (eighth in the Big 12 with a conference record of 3-5); the cumulative record of these teams is 13-11. Do you care? You shouldn’t.

On December 27th, Pitt will play Virginia in the Continental Tire Bowl. I don’t care who wins. I just hope the Continental Tire Bowl is a blowout.

In the Silicon Valley Classic, Fresno State will play UCLA. The Bruins have lost their last four games; back when they were winning, they managed to beat Arizona and Cal and Illinois by a total of 9 points. This game should be as interesting as a nose-picking contest.

Two “natural rivals” – Colorado State and Boston College – will travel to San Francisco to battle it out. Why?

As the bridge from the Fiesta Bowl on 2 January to the Sugar Bowl on 4 January, we can watch the Humanitarian Bowl on 3 January. Playing on the blue carpet in Boise Idaho will be Georgia Tech (a loser to BYU and Duke this year) against Tulsa (with its stirring victories over SMU, UTEP and San José State). Watch this? I’d rather have a colonoscopy.

If that is not enough mediocre football for you, remember that some of these busy scholar-athletes will be playing in “All-Star Games”. The Blue-Gray game is back this year on Christmas Day – offering you some competition for your viewing attention to the Hawaii Bowl between Houston and Hawaii. And that is not the only All-Star Game by any means.

So when you think about adding one or three more games to the bowl schedule to determine the real champion on the field and you are told that this “just can’t be done”, tell that person to go to any one of the “bowl participant aspiring schools” and to audit their course called Hypocrisy 101. Probably, the university president along with the Athletic Director will be teaching the course.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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