Today’s rant is about college sports in general and college football in particular so if you have no interest in sports this is the time to hit delete.
Before I get off on today’s topic, though, I want to extend a mea culpa to Rand Paul who I referred to as Dane Paul in my last rant, thereby proving that the people who I refer to as stupid don’t hold a candle to me.
On to college sports; the various conferences that make up today’s college sports scene are about to go on a feeding frenzy in which they will each attempt to ingest as many of their fiscally sound opponents as they can with the idea of getting richer than they already are. This disastrous program has nothing to do with the welfare of the various sports, nor of their traditional patterns or alliances but simply with how many good old American greenbacks the various college presidents can grab for their institutions of supposed higher learning.
If the purpose of the university is to mold American youth than the greedy slobs who run them are sure setting a hell of an example. This is especially true of the Big Ten; an eleven school conference that has already proved it can’t add and the PAC 10; a left coast organization that uses the Hollywood model of moral integrity as exemplified by USC which currently is under investigation for NCAA rules violation in almost every sport it fields a team. (This is an exaggeration) (But not by much)
What’s completely outrageous is that the perpetrators of this abomination are not the coaches and athletic directors who normally are the targets of moral outrage over their desire to win at all costs but the college presidents who normally enjoy standing above the fray and loosing moral thunderbolts at their underlings.
Yes, it’s about money but because it’s about money it’s also about continuing to make the college football championship a joke. If the biggest colleges can band together in a few super conferences then they can completely control both the BCS championship and all the bowl games and thereby make sure that the fat cats remain in charge of the cage. It’s kind of like the banking, oil or arms manufacturing businesses, which are actual if not legal monopolies.
Super conferences will guarantee that deserving smaller conference champions like Boise State or Cincinnati will never have any shot at a national championship simply because they will never be a member of the old boy monopoly. The concept of major and minor conferences is the main reason we don’t have playoff system in college football now and why we never will if the colleges are allowed to go ahead with their plans.
Football is the only college sport where the championship is awarded instead of won on the playing field and if you think the BCS bowl is winning on the field I have a beautiful bridge I’d like to sell you. Our colleges teach logic but operate in a completely illogical manner and then expect us to accept their lies as doctrine. The only logical reason we do not have a college football playoff is because the various bowls make a huge amount of money now and their controllers are too short sighted to realize that they would actually make more with a playoff series.
The college presidents would have you believe that they are thinking about the student athletes, which in the real world would be a monumental first. They claim that the extra games involved in a playoff would keep the little darlings out of class too long. The fact is that with about eight exceptions, the little darlings don’t go to class anyhow as can be seen in the graduation rates, especially in the south, of most college football teams.
Why don’t those presidents make the same argument about teams that play in basketball, baseball, soccer and lacrosse? All these sports hold multiple game playoffs, which keep their student athletes away from their campuses and classes far more than a football championship series would.
Most colleges now play a twelve game regular season; a few add a league championship game and almost half play in bowl games. That’s 13 or 14 games for at least half the teams in the NCAA.
A 16 team playoff series would mean one extra game for all 16, 2 extra games for eight, 3 extra games for 4, and 4 extra games for the 2 who would play for the championship. But if you cut the regular season to 11 games, made the bowl games part of the championship playoffs you’d only have to play 2 more games than are played now to achieve a real national championship that would be won on the field not by picking names from a hat. Anyone who doesn’t think the kids who play the game wouldn’t think that was worth it has obviously never competed in anything more athletic than dominos.
I realize that the big business of college football doesn’t want this, it’s just the fans and players that do. Nobody but the BCS and NCAA wants a negotiated college football championship. Everyone else wants one that is won on the field by a team that has gone through the fire to get there. Wouldn’t it be great if our college football championship was real, like the championships in all the other sports.