Obama Wants Playoffs

Bowl Championship Series executive director Bill Hancock has responded to Capitol Hill as Congress possibly looks to take action regarding a college football playoff. In a letter to Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Hancock says higher education officials should be responsible for decisions on college athletics.

“I believe that decisions about college football should be made by university presidents, athletics directors, coaches and conference commissioners rather than by members of Congress,” Hancock wrote.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/campusrivalry/post/2010/05/bcs-executive-director-bill-hancock-responds-to-capitol-hill/1

With the Bowl Championship Series meetings set to begin tomorrow in Scottsdale, Ariz., I had a chance to catch up with executive director Bill Hancock to ask about what is on the agenda and how conference expansion would affect the BCS.

Hancock said expansion was not a topic on the agenda, though that all could change. The Chicago Tribune reported an accelerated timetable for Big Ten expansion has emerged. High-ranking Big Ten officials were expected to meet Sunday afternoon in Washington D.C. to discuss expansion. If they came out of those meetings with a mandate to expand, commissioner Jim Delany could use the BCS meetings to notify other conferences of their intentions.

Hancock was mum on his expectations for expansion, but did say, “I don’t think conference expansion will change the attitude of the schools about a playoff. It’s very clear that the schools and conferences are not moving toward a playoff and I just can’t see expansion changing that.”

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/sports_college/2010/04/bcs-chief-bill-hancock-expansion-wont-change-attitude-toward-playoff.html

Some Georgia Tech and Iowa fans have been reveling in South Florida for days in advance of Tuesday’s FedEx Orange Bowl game, but local tourism officials worry that tradition will be lost if efforts to create a college football playoff are successful.

The Orange Bowl, after all, was created in 1935 to promote tourism, showcase the region’s balmy winter weather and provide a backdrop for a post-college football season party.

As the drumbeat for a college playoff system, however, grows ever louder and captures the attention of Congress and the White House, Orange Bowl officials fear their stature as annual host of one of four Bowl Championship Series games — and the national championship game every four years — could be in jeopardy.

The Orange Bowl and national championship game last year pumped an estimated $135 million into South Florida businesses, according to a study by the Sport Management Research Institute of West Palm Beach.

A playoff system — although far from a certainty — could involve on-campus games, costly last-minute cross-country travel and, if fans were lucky, more than one trip to watch their team get a shot at a championship, playoff opponents say. That could mean fewer visitors and shorter trips to South Florida in January.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/fl-bcs-playoff-0104-20100104,0,4444759.story

In October, Hancock was asked by the conference commissioners he had worked with over the past four years as the administrator of the Bowl Championship Series to serve as the event’s first executive director. They wanted someone who knew the BCS well, who could tell the event’s story aggressively from the side of those who believe in its virtues, who could defend the most highly controversial postseason in all of sports against a tidal wave of vociferous critics.

The commissioners chose Hancock, 59, a man with a gentle smile and a congenial tone. Dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans, Hancock spent two hours one recent afternoon inside a barbecue restaurant over a lunch of pulled pork and beans explaining why his latest promotion wasn’t the gulag sentence it appeared to be. He understands the vitriol with which many college football fans view the BCS, but he attributes much of it to misperceptions and the prolonged inaction of those who run the event.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/21/AR2009122103146.html

The image was familiar, but the setting was not.

There was Ari Fleischer, President George W. Bush’s former press secretary, fielding questions on Thursday from behind a lectern and grousing about the “cynical” and “often negative” reporters who won’t give his client a fair shake.

But this time, his questioners were not political reporters but college athletic officials who had come to hear him deliver the keynote speech at the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in Manhattan. His client was not the beleaguered former president, but the besieged Bowl Championship Series.

Since leaving the White House in 2003, Fleischer has shifted his focus to the world of sports, where he has represented clients such as the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour and the United States Olympic Committee. In remarks that often seemed aimed at drumming up future clients, Fleischer said the transition hasn’t been as jarring as some might think.

“People follow what happens in the world of sports and they follow what I did for different reasons,” Fleischer said. Still, “they follow sports and the White House with a remarkable — and as anybody who’s paid attention to the B.C.S. knows — noisy passion.”

http://thequad.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/bcs-criticism-feels-familiar-to-former-white-house-spokesman/

There are few people in sports as beloved as Bill Hancock, who was just appointed the first permanent executive director of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), the highly controversial, deeply unpopular system that determines the national champion of college football. A long-time college sports administrator and former director of the Final Four, Hancock is the rare sports exec who has amassed few, if any, enemies, and actually enjoys helping people in a pinch. “I know at least 99 people who would list Bill as their absolute best friend,” says Bob Condron, a veteran USOC executive who has known Hancock for some 40 years. “I’m just happy to be one of them.”

Hopefully, Bill Hancock negotiated a huge salary. Because he just took one of the worst jobs in the world.

Sporting News: What’s your response to those who say that, if a change is forced upon the BCS by politicians, the current system will simply die and we’ll go back to the even more flawed system we had prior to the BCS, with no No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup?

Karl Benson: It’s a fair assessment. If that did happen, the argument is that Boise State isn’t playing Oklahoma and Utah isn’t playing Alabama in those big games. That is one of the risks that we face if indeed we’re gonna challenge the current system from the legal standpoint and the political standpoint.

Following the 1996 season, when BYU was a member of the WAC and got left out of the Fiesta Bowl, we were making the same arguments then as the Mountain West made in 2009. We went to the Senate in 1997 about it. That led to the first alteration of the BCS that did provide greater access to the non-qualifiers. …

We’re always going to want greater access and more of the revenue. The founding six members don’t want to give up access and don’t want to give up more money. That’s understandable. If (Mountain West commissioner) Craig Thompson or I were in the group of six, more than likely we’re going to be agreeing with their position. And if (Big Ten commissioner) Jim Delany was the commissioner of the Western Athletic Conference or the Mountain West Conference, he would be on this side of it.

Some people have said the Mountain West Conference is deserving of an automatic BCS bid instead of the Big East. Are you concerned at all that the Big East could lose its automatic bid over the four-year period the BCS uses to measure automatic status?
“I feel comfortable that we’re secure in where we are in every standpoint for the next five years. so from that standpoint, we’re solid. Looking on beyond the next five years, I don’t know if there’s going to be a BCS, frankly. That’s more important.”

How would there be no BCS? Because of the push by some in Congress for a playoff?
“Right. You see what’s going on with Congress in regards to the playoffs, and you know how the schools and conferences across the country feel relative to that issue. At some point or another, I think people are going to be going back to the old system.”

By the old system, you mean the alliances between conferences for upper-level bowl games and the lack of a guaranteed 1 vs. 2 championship game, right?
“Yes. The BCS was really instituted as an attempt to get away from all that and create a 1-2 championship game. It may not be perfect. I think we all acknowledge it’s not perfect. But we all felt it was better than what was before. But with the issue of a playoff — and I know there’s some appeal to a large segment out there — to the people at the schools, they’re not supportive of that. If there are two choices on the table (playoffs or old system), I think they’ll go back to the old system.”

The American Football Coaches Association plans to no longer reveal the final ballots of the coaches’ poll starting in 2010. Is the lack of transparency a concern to you and other BCS commissioners?
“We’ve talked about it at every meeting. We’d like to have the people accountable and have the votes public. I shouldn’t say we. I’ll speak for myself. I would support the issue of transparency, and I would like to see the poll public. I understand the rationale of keeping it confidential. You don’t want people feeling like they have to do certain things and they could be compromised. I like the KISS method: Keep It Simple Stupid. I’m not smart. I like to keep things as simple as I can. I know that sounds counterintuitive to the BCS.”

In your mind, is a non-transparent coaches poll a deal-breaker for the BCS? Would that be the end of the coaches’ poll as part of the BCS formula?
“I don’t know. I know how we feel. I know they know how we feel. I know we’ll have some discussions in some point before the next cycle. Whether or not it becomes a quote unquote defining issue, I’m just not equipped or able to answer that.”

http://blog.al.com/solomon/2009/09/qa_with_big_east_commissioner.html

Like everyone else who’s experienced it, the senior senator from Utah couldn’t help but marvel at the huge video board hanging from the Cowboys Stadium roof. He could see blades of artificial grass and beads of sweat rolling down players’ faces.

“Really, really unbelievable,” he said. “Amazing.”

Even less believable was the final score glowing on that board last Saturday: BYU 14, Oklahoma 13. And as long as we’re talking picture clarity, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) had one more thought:

“If this doesn’t make my case against the BCS, I don’t know what does.”