Obama Wants Playoffs

Class, today’s guest speaker is Orlando Magic coach Stan Van Gundy.

Coach?

“At the end of the day, (it’s) one win or one loss. We’re not the BCS, where the polls and the power ratings and all of that ridiculous stuff matters. This is a legitimate sport.”

“I’m just glad we’re in a legitimate sport that is decided on the court and not a beauty pageant where the preseason rankings matter as much as anything to winning a championship. It’s the most ridiculous thing in sports.”

Of America’s favorite sports, which has the most legitimate balance of regular season and postseason procedures? And how does each system compare to a beauty pageant?

http://www.cbssports.com/spin/story/11315320

On the heels of a milestone football season that saw undefeated Utah and two other conference teams rank among the Bowl Championship Series’ top 16, Mountain West officials are pressing for automatic annual entry in the BCS’ five-game postseason lineup.

Presidents and chancellors of the league’s nine schools addressed the issue during a meeting shortly after the Jan. 8 national championship game and, with Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson, will try to sit down with Atlantic Coast commissioner and current BCS coordinator John Swofford possibly in the coming weeks, Thompson says. The BCS will conduct its annual spring meeting in late April in Pasadena, Calif.

Swofford, who rotates with commissioners of the Big East, Big 12, and SEC as the BCS’ coordinator, seems to underscore that. He echoes the fact that all 11 conferences, including the Mountain West, agreed to the current setup, which “incorporates the strength of a league as a whole over a series of years.”

Utah, he says, “had a terrific season this year, and the BCS provided an excellent platform to showcase their team.”

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/football/mwest/2009-01-25-bcs-mountainwest_N.htm

A handful of lawmakers used a resolution commending the University of Florida’s national football championship Thursday to protest college football’s much-maligned BCS system.

A dozen House members voted “no” or “present” on the resolution, the latest signal from the nation’s capital that many people aren’t happy about the way the NCAA chooses its football champion. Many of the dissenters were from Utah and Texas, both of which have schools that made a case to play for this year’s national championship but were passed over.

“A fine school with a great team deserves better than a national championship that was decided inside somebody’s computer,” said Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican who has introduced legislation to force a playoff system. “The Gators certainly could have won it on the field, but they didn’t get the chance any more than Utah, Texas and USC.”

President Barack Obama also has repeatedly criticized the Bowl Championship Series, saying he plans to “throw (his) weight around a little bit” to pressure the NCAA to adopt a playoff system.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5icSnpn2LnSgndZXpta9VlayXiqswD95SH12G0

Mr. President, The Ball Is In Your Court
By Sally Jenkins

1. Liberate college football from the tyranny of the Bowl Championship Series. You’ve pledged to use your muscle to do away with the skewed BCS system and to create an eight-team playoff. Actually, this may be one of the easiest things to accomplish in your first term. Opposition to a playoff comes from the despotic cartel made up by the major football conferences, which seek to hoard the millions of dollars in bowl revenue for themselves — and depend on the tax-exempt status they lobby for in Washington. Here are the names of the college leaders on the BCS Presidental Oversight Committee: Chairman David Frohnmayer (Oregon), Rev. John Jenkins (Notre Dame), Robert Khayat (Mississippi), Mark Nordenberg (Pittsburgh), John Peters (Northern Illinois), Harvey Perlman (Nebraska), Graham Spanier (Penn State) and Charles Steger (Virginia Tech).

These individuals preside over a commercial swindle. According to the Wall Street Journal, the bowls have become a $400 million-a-year industry, and bowl executives earn salaries of between $400,000 and $500,000. The bowls no longer serve any discernable educational purpose — the participating teams often have graduations rates worse than 50 percent, for which they are rewarded with extravagance. Players in this year’s BCS bowls received gifts such as Tourneau watches, Apple iPods and $300 worth of Sony electronics.

Take away their tax exemptions. Hand the BCS college presidents a bunch of 1120 forms and tell them to start filling them out. They’ll buckle.

Additionally, we recommend that the college football season be shortened. Schools begin playing in phony made-for-TV money games in August and the championship isn’t decided until the second week in January. A season should begin in autumn and end on New Year’s Day, so that everyone can get back to school.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/20/AR2009012003559.html

The truth is, a playoff would be less–not more–likely to produce a matchup of the two best teams on the field, would compromise the uniquely rich slice of Americana that is the college football bowl games, and would diminish the most dramatic regular season in all of sports.

The BCS preserves all of this, while ensuring that half of the bowl teams go out as winners. Furthermore, it gave unsung Utah the chance to play, and beat, an excellent Alabama team in the Sugar Bowl.

President-elect Obama seemingly doesn’t realize how unlikely that opportunity would have been in the pre-BCS days. In the 30 seasons prior to the BCS’s inception, what we now call “non-BCS-conference teams” didn’t play in a single major bowl game–not one. Since the 2005 bowl season, they have played in four–and won three.

In truth, the president-elect probably didn’t see too much college football this fall, being somewhat busy with other things.  The guess here is that he likely spent about as much time sharing his thoughts about how to reform college football as he spent watching games.

If so, he missed a great show. College football is alive and well, and more popular than ever–largely because of the Bowl Championship Series and the title game it provides, the bowl games it preserves, and, most of all, the meaningful regular season it produces.

The change we need is to stop bashing the BCS and start recognizing what a great thing it is for college football.

Jeffrey H. Anderson (with Chris Hester) created one of the six computer rankings used in determining which college football teams will play in the National Championship Game.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/023iifqy.asp?pg=1

Yet another challenge to the Bowl Championship Series format is on the way, just more than a week after the crowning of another controversial champion

Joining attacks already launched by a congressman from Texas and the attorney general of Utah is a bill introduced Friday by a California congressman that will prohibit the receipt of federal funds from schools with a football team unless the national championship game is the culmination of a playoff system.

The Miller Plan (H.R. 599), introduced by Rep. Gary Miller of California, is modeled after Title IX legislation in which the federal government forced the NCAA to give equal money to women’s sports.

The bill requires NCAA schools participating in the Football Bowl Subdivision to implement a playoff system to determine a champion within three years of enactment. It allows current bowls to be incorporated into the playoff system and does not dictate the number of teams that participate.

“While the current Bowl Championship Series system was created to identify a broadly accepted national champion, its implementation has shown that the only way to accurately determine a champion is to create a playoff system that is open to all teams,” Miller said in a statement. “There is no reason the NCAA should continue to disadvantage certain schools when every other major college sport’s championship is settled through a playoff.”

http://msn.foxsports.com/cfb/story/9044210/BCS-system-gets-another-legal-challenge

Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., incoming chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is the latest elected official to weigh in on the Bowl Championship Series. The others:

President-elect Barack Obama. Shortly after the election, he told CBS’ 60 Minutes, “I’m going to throw my weight around a little bit” to get a playoff in place.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas. The ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee introduced legislation last week to force the sport to adopt a playoff.

Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii. He and other House members have asked the Justice Department to investigate the BCS for antitrust violations.

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff. He is looking into whether the BCS violates federal antitrust laws.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/football/2009-01-14-bcs-hearings_N.htm

From the Kansan, the student newspaper of the University of Kansas, comes a suggestion to boycott the BCS:

Most college football fans, writers and probably more than a few players and coaches long for a playoff of some sort. Be it a plus-one system or an eight- or 16-team tournament, there’s a call for incoming president Barack Obama to quit fretting about this country’s budget deficit and shake up this corruption.

I must ask instead: What do you plan to do about it?

Nowhere in here will you find a damning of the current system nor will you find another brilliant proposal that would make everything right and true again in college football.

Instead, I ask again: If the BCS needs amending, what do you plan to do about it?

It has become an annual spectacle when December rolls around. With the same fervor as a kid scrambling toward the tree to find his presents, we get the same gift each year: An always reliable subject to bitch about and offer our own perfect fix that we spent two hours constructing on a napkin at Jefferson’s.

Then the title game comes and yet we still huddle around the television with beer and snacks in hand. And then it ends. Nobody but the school that won is happy, one final swarm of complaints floods the airwaves and then we are left to fill out March Madness brackets while the argument slowly fades from memory until the next year.

Wake up. If you don’t like the BCS system, there is only one thing you can do: Boycott it. Like any product in a free market, flawed goods generally are fixed or fail. That’s capitalism and it’s damned beautiful. So if you and those around you hate the BCS, start a revolution to cease boosting its television ratings and revenues. Stop feeding the beast so it can either adapt or die.

http://www.kansan.com/blogs/full_monty/2009/jan/12/bcs_boycott/

He said it again today.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec4kOGt-M4c]

President-elect Barack Obama held a news conference today to announce his picks to lead the CIA (Leon Panetta) and to be Director of National Intelligence (Dennis Blair). He also talked about the latest unemployment report and called for urgent action on the stimulus plan he talked about yesterday.

But he might receive the most attention for what he said about the Bowl Championship Series when asked about Florida’s win over Oklahoma last night. As he has done before on ESPN and on 60 Minutes, the president-elect reiterated his call for a playoff to decide the national college football champion.

“If I’m Utah, or if I’m USC or if I’m Texas, I may still have some quibbles,” he said. “That’s why we need a playoff.”

Mr. Obama, however, said he did say a congratulatory message to a former detail leader on his secret service team whose son plays left tackle for the Gators.

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/01/09/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry4709929.shtml

He is not alone among politicians in pushing for playoffs:

President-elect Barack Obama and Texas congressman Joe Barton don’t have much in common, but they do agree on one thing: the Bowl Championship Series must go.

Just hours before the national title game between top-ranked Florida (12-1) and No. 2 Oklahoma (12-1) in Miami, Barton proposed legislation to replace the BCS with a playoff system.

The bill is co-sponsored by Reps. Bobby Rush, an Illinois Democrat who chairs the committee’s commerce, trade and consumer protection subcommittee, and Texas Republican Michael McCaul.

Barton said that when Obama made a courtesy call to him a few weeks ago, the congressman told him, “OK, Mr. President-elect, let’s work together on this playoff system, because you said you’re for a playoff, and I’m for a playoff.”

According to Barton, Obama laughed and said, “Sure, let’s do it.”

The BCS is also under attack on another front. On Tuesday, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff announced he was investigating for a possible violation of federal antitrust laws. He argued the BCS unfairly puts schools such as Utah, a member of a conference without an automatic BCS bowl bid, at a competitive and financial disadvantage. Utah defeated No. 4 Alabama 31-17 in the Sugar Bowl last week, capping an undefeated season.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hYSdgxmLksFuqhYElicXHgK8JRLQD95J895G7

ESPN executive Burke Magnus said Thursday at the annual meeting of the Football Writers Assn. of America that the company recently bid for BCS broadcast rights with the understanding there would be no changes through the duration of the four-year contract, which expires in 2014.

“The format is left to the people who run the sport,” Magnus said.

http://www.latimes.com/sports/printedition/la-sp-bcsfyi9-2009jan09,0,2523971,full.story

“We will not be shy about giving our opinions, if asked,” ESPN college sports chief Burke Magnus said. “But I don’t think it’s appropriate for us to tell them what to do, just like they don’t tell us what to do.”

The “us” was represented Thursday at a Football Writers Association of America breakfast by Atlantic Coast Conference Commissioner John Swofford, who said he sees no compelling reason to change any aspect of the current five-bowl BCS format, even though President-elect Barack Obama has called for a playoff.

“I’m glad President Obama is a sports fan,” Swofford said.

Earlier, incoming FWAA President George Schroeder joked: “If Barack Obama is working for a playoff, we should work for world peace.”

Added Swofford: “I’m glad to see this group has moved on to world peace from a playoff. It will make the conversation a lot shorter.”

Swofford hears some segments of the public clamoring for a playoff, especially fans of Utah and USC.

“But the desires of the public may not always be the same desires of decision-makers in higher education,” he said. “A playoff would change the postseason experience for everyone who plays the game.”

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/college/chi-09-bcs-bitsjan09,0,7351682.story