Obama Wants Playoffs

IRVING, Texas — All you folks who hate the Bowl Championship Series and favor a playoff, meet your new hero: Texas Tech coach Mike Leach. He doesn’t want a Plus-One. He doesn’t want an eight-team playoff.

How about 64 teams?

“The thing that always interested me on this is: ‘Oh, my God! This has never been done! How can you suggest this? This has never happened in college football,’ ” Leach said Wednesday on the last day of the Big 12 media days. “Everybody else does it this way. There’s nothing unique in what I’m saying. I’m the mainstream. This other system is not the mainstream.”

Leach’s idea is to cut the schedule to 10 games and run the playoffs through December, like Division I-AA, D-II and D-III and use the bowls in the process.

“Texas high school champion: 16 games,” Leach said. “Division II: 16 games. Division III — and some of them fudge on a game — 15 or 16 games. And everybody thinks I went into a cave and carved all this out.”

http://www.denverpost.com/sports/ci_12942296

On July 1, Larry Scott replaced Tom Hansen as commissioner of the Pacific 10 Conference and spent his first official day on the job in… Florida,

Did we mention Scott is a big fan of the FloridaGators, defending college football national champions?

Scott also reaffirmed the conference’s marriage to the controversial Bowl Championship Series. When he first got the job, Scott said he was open to exploring all options, including a playoff, which some misconstrued as a change of course for a league adamantly opposed to expanding the postseason.

Scott on Wednesday galvanized that point, saying there was “no ambiguity about the Pac-10′s BCS position right now.” Sorry all you playoff advocates.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/sports_blog/2009/07/its-great-to-be-pac10-commissionerand-a-florida-gator-fan.html

In the past, if one of the Rose Bowl’s traditional opponents, the Pacific 10 Conference and Big Ten champions, was selected for the national championship game, officials could take the conference’s second-place team.

That’s what happened when Ohio State played for the title in 2008 and Illinois came west to face USC.

Starting with the 2011 game, the Rose Bowl must fill the empty slot with a non-BCS team if that team is ranked No. 12 or higher.

So, in 2008, it might have been Hawaii facing the Trojans on New Year’s Day.

But once the Rose Bowl takes one non-BCS team, it has fulfilled its obligation and can revert to the old rules until the current contract expires in 2014.

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-rose-bowl28-2009jul28,0,7041039.story

GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP) — John Swofford already faced Congress. This time, it was the media’s turn to grill him.

The Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner who’s entering the second year of his two-year term as Bowl Championship Series coordinator defended college football’s postseason as “very successful in what its goals are” and predicted very few tweaks for the new contracts that run through the 2013 season.

“In terms of the next five years, I think what we’re going to see is the BCS, by and large, as it is today, and then we’ll go from there,” Swofford told a packed conference room of reporters Sunday at the ACC’s media day.

“It’s not perfect. We know that. It is controversial. We know that,” he added. “But like it or not, I think it has reached its goals and what it’s there for.”

Those goals, Swofford said, are to match the Nos. 1 and 2 teams while maintaining the bowl system.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/football/ncaa/07/26/acc.kickoff.ap/

The homeless man walked among U.S. senators. He wore a rumpled pink button-down shirt and dirt-stained khakis and nervously fidgeted with a blue pen, as if he knew he was somewhere he did not belong. In his hands, he held the three-page document that has consumed him for a better part of the year.

“Some call it obsessed,” he said. “I call it dedicated.”

Room 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building provided the setting during a Senate Judiciary subcommittee meeting on June 7. The participants included Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) , the lone panel member for most of the session, and four men who testified for or against the use of the Bowl Championship Series to determine a national champion in college football.

Fans, television pundits and even elected officials have debated the BCS since its inception in 1998. The system has been controversial in part because it relies on computers, not a playoff, to determine who plays for the championship and because some believe it marginalizes teams from smaller conferences.

But very few fans have as much desire for change as Brandon Kennedy, 21, of Cheney, Wash. And there are even fewer who have taken such extreme steps to try to make it happen.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/24/AR2009072402824_pf.html

For the nearly two years that Dan Beebe has served as Big 12 commissioner, he’s been as button-down as the shirt he wore for an interview last week.

That diplomatic demeanor changed when Beebe was asked about the Mountain West’s playoff proposal, the one that led to BCS hearings in both houses of Congress.

“I was very disturbed about any of our conferences that are a part of the BCS coming out after we negotiated with television and then proposing drastic changes to the system …,” Beebe said.

“I went to my board last December with the ESPN contract and got approval to sign it. Afterward, the Mountain West makes these proposals and acts like we’re holding a gun to their head on the television contract.”

Beebe readily admits that the BCS isn’t perfect. He said that is part of its charm and contributes to a meaningful regular season.

The criticism has been harsh, even though the Mountain West eventually signed the BCS contract.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, compared the BCS to communism, a statement Beebe disputed.

“My memory of when I studied history and Karl Marx was that a major tenet of communism involved taking from each according to their ability and giving to each according to their need,” Beebe said.

“It’s ironic we’re being labeled as communists when what was actually being asked of us was to be more communistic, taking from those of us who produce more in the marketplace and giving to those who don’t produce in the marketplace.”

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spt/colleges/texastech/stories/072609dnspocarltoncolumn.33567d6.html

“I am for the playoffs. I just don’t see how it works effective­ly,” Miles said. “I think it’s one of those issues where everyone in the room can come up with a playoff system without ques­tion, and then you bring in the presidents of the university. (He) says, ‘How about the educa­tion of your student athlete? Isn’t that a priority? Then you bring in the bowls, and you say, ‘Isn’t this a priority?’ You bring in the TV and you say, ‘Oh my goodness.’ The calendar for the student-athlete becomes much more difficult.”

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20090725/SPORTS/907250348/1002/sports

Urban Meyer is a tireless worker. Ashtabula, Ohio, is about as far from Gainesville, Florida as steelworkers are from white, sandy beaches. But Meyer didn’t get to where he is today by being dumb. After graduating with a bachelors’ degree in psychology from Cincinnati in 1986, he received his master’s degree in sports administration in 1988 from Ohio State. He grew up in a middle-class family, and it’s from those Midwest roots where he probably got his work ethic. In fact, Meyer may be the most astute head football coach in college history, and it’s hard to argue with his record, which has to do with his knowledge of not only the game but also its inner workings. But the thing that sets him apart from most coaches is his ability to politic. He used his chutzpah to lobby the stodgy Bowl Championship Series into inviting Utah to the 2004 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, marking the first time any mid-major had been invited to a BCS bowl since the BCS‘ inception in 1998. Also, Meyer has been a tireless campaigner for a college football playoff system, even at Florida where his teams have had BCS success.

http://www.examiner.com/x-2306-Utah-Sports-Examiner~y2009m7d20-Urban-Meyer-101-Needto-know-information-about-the-former-Utahcurrent-Florida-football-coach

Concerned in part with continuing attacks on the Bowl Championship Series, BCS officials successfully lobbied the American Football Coaches Association to delay a controversial change in the coaches poll by a year, CBSSports.com has learned.

The AFCA raised eyebrows on May 27 by announcing that its 16-member board of trustees voted unanimously to once again hide the final ballots of its 62 voting coaches starting in 2010. The AFCA has made those ballots public the previous four years.

The return to a lack of transparency upset BCS officials more than what was originally known. There are indications that the change could be a deal breaker, going forward, in the coaches poll’s inclusion in the BCS. The poll is one of two human components in the BCS. The Harris poll is the other. There are also six computer indexes that are factored in.

http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/story/11970999