Last night's Beef 'O' Brady's Bowl presented the essence of what is wrong with the bowl system.
One side of Tropicana Field was basically empty, but that wasn't the side seen by television viewers. The other side had somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 fans -- probably less -- to create the illusion that more people attended Louisville's narrow win over Southern Miss.
That's basically what college football's postseason arrangement really is:
A big illusion.
Look, I realize there are some merits to the BCS system. Not sure I've ever anticipated a game more than the showdown between Auburn and Oregon.
And it's certainly good for teams to get rewarded by landing in bowls and reaping all the benefits that come with them.
But it's impossible to ignore the hypocrisy at work here. Impossible to reconcile the present system with the various defenses of said system by college and conference administrators, among others.
My three main beefs with it: Academics, money and merit (or lack thereof).
-- For so long, we've been told that college football can't have a playoff because it would infringe on these kids' academics.
This argument has long since collapsed under the weight of various arguments. The NCAA basketball tournament carries on for a month, and no one has proposed canceling March Madness so these kids can keep their noses in the books. In fact, there's a movement to increase the number of teams and games.
Several years ago, the college presidents lost any remaining credibility on this topic when they allowed schools to add a 12th regular-season game. Translation: The schools wanted the extra payday that comes with a seventh home game (more than a million bucks in a lot of cases). Promises of exciting cross-sectional matchups between powerful teams have been realized somewhat, but the proliferation of games against cupcakes has left fans feeling as if they're throwing money away.
In 1996, there were 18 bowl games. Now, the number is 35. And as this article in the San Diego Union-Tribune documents, the conflicts with academics have been far more plentiful as a result.
Twelve of the 14 teams playing in bowl games before Christmas had some kind of scheduling overlap with end-of-semester final exams and practices for bowl games, including Navy, which had reports of players in exams early this week. That’s because bowl practice started at 5:45 a.m., followed by final exams starting at 7:55 a.m.
“A couple of guys told me they fell asleep during it because they stayed up all night studying,” said Navy quarterback Ricky Dobbs, whose team faces San Diego State in the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl on Dec. 23. “They said once they got to 2 o’clock, it was kind of pointless to go to sleep because they had to wake up at 4:45. They went straight to practice and took the test.”
-- Now for the money part. The bowl structure is built on the act of schools guaranteeing a certain number of tickets told.
As an example, Clemson guaranteed the Meineke Car Care Bowl that it would sell 12,500 tickets. The school is responsible for making up the difference if that number is not met (at last check, Clemson had not yet reached 10,000 of its allotment).
Clemson is in a much better situation than some other folks. And the following numbers go a long way toward explaining why Clemson was so aggressive in its campaign to court the Charlotte-based bowl.
Two years ago, Virginia Tech lost $1.77 million on its trip to the Orange Bowl. And it looks as if the Hokies are going to be firmly in the red again on this trip to South Florida.
As of earlier this week, Hokies fans had purchased just 6,500 of a 17,500 allotment.
Stanford is also struggling to sell tickets to the Orange Bowl (no surprise there).
Even Nebraska, known for its massive traveling fan base, was having difficulty selling tickets to the Holiday Bowl for a rare regular-season rematch.
UConn is going to take a bath, too.
The one caveat to all this is that, in most cases, schools that lose money in subsidizing bowl games eventually will get a chunk of it back over the summer when they get their annual checks from the conferences. The conferences generally pool all their TV revenues together and split it evenly among their membership.
So the schools get reimbursed, the bowls stay afloat, and everyone goes home happy.
-- The anti-playoff folks are bent on "preserving the sanctity of the regular season," and it's a solid argument. No one wants to dilute the meaning of the weekly spectacles we see in September, October and November, and any alterations need to be approached with extreme care.
The bowl system, though, completely undermines the idea that the regular season actually means something. Because in so many ways, the selection process for bowls has absolutely nothing to do with merit.
That's how you get Boston College having to settle for Boise or San Francisco or some other remote outpost, because bowls in Atlanta or Jacksonville or Orlando don't think the Eagles "travel well."
That's how you get Maryland winning eight games this season and being confined to some low-rent bowl in Washington D.C. (sorry, forgot the name).
That's how you get Clemson, in 2008, playing its last regular-season game for the right to simply be bowl-eligible ... and then ending up in the Gator Bowl.
(No, Clemson should not apologize for capitalizing on its excellent fan support.)
And don't get me started on a chip-shot field goal meaning the difference between Boise State ending up in a BCS bowl, or landing in Las Vegas for the MAACO Bowl.
What a system, huh?
LW
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