Obama Wants Playoffs

Think the BCS is just some faceless computer selection process hell-bent on angering and refusing to listen to college football fans who prefer a playoff system to a preordained No. 1 vs. No. 2 national championship game?

Think again. The BCS done gone social. And it wants you to know it’s here to listen.

On Nov. 17, the BCS announced it was promoting Bill Hancock to the title of executive director. That same day, it launched a Facebook page. Three days later, a Twitter account — Inside the BCS — launched. On Saturday, Hancock announced the BCS had hired Ari Fleischer Sports Communications, a public relations firm, to help highlight the positive aspects of the BCS. Fleischer is most famous for his previous role as the press secretary of former President George W. Bush. This week, the BCS launched a Web site spelling out the problems of a playoff system, aptly named playoffproblem.com.

Phew, that’s a lot. So why is it suddenly on the offensive?

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/thelife/news/story?id=4694320

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.”

For those of us who want a college football playoff, the Bowl Championship Series has an answer:

A new website called playoffproblem.com. Here, you can find all manner of reasons why a playoff is a bad idea. For starters, the BCS has listed some questions it believes cannot be answered.

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/sports_college/2009/11/you-want-a-playoff-thats-a-problem-bcs-says.html

Say you’re a college football fan who still can’t make up your mind. Then one day you discover your hair is on fire. When you pick up the phone, do you call:

a.) The nearest fire department; or

b.) your hairdresser?

If you chose b.), congratulations! The folks who run the Bowl Championship Series are dying to meet you.

Ever since hijacking college football’s postseason in 1992 by forming the Bowl Coalition, they’ve had a tough time making friends and influencing people. They’ve thrown money around, tweaked the rules a dozen times and twisted themselves into a stadium’s worth of pretzels trying to explain why the sport doesn’t need a playoff.

Yet almost two decades later, only one out of every 10 fans agrees – and the number of coaches and players is only slightly higher.

The fact is there’s no good way to sell a bad idea. But that hasn’t stopped the BCS from trying. And trying. Even so, this latest scheme might be the most hare-brained ever.

he Bowl Championship Series — everyone’s favorite organization to berate — has hired former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer in hopes that he can improve their image.

The 49-year-old served in the Bush administration from 2001-2003.

The move comes in part as a reaction to an anti-BCS group called Playoff PAC, which was founded by six politically-savvy college football fans and represents many pining for a playoff.

“Playoff advocates have had an easy ride where they have never been called on to explain exactly how they would create an alternative. There is tremendous division among playoff advocates,” said Fleischer. “While the BCS has its share of critics, once people see both sides of the issue, they will see why the system has its great support.”

Fleischer’s firm specializes in instructing organizations and athletes on how to deal with the media — expertise that he’ll have to draw on heavily when selling the wildly unpopular BCS. Of course, after serving as W’s PR guy, it might not be the hardest job Fleischer has ever had.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/sportsprose/2009/11/the_bcs_is_turning_to_ari_flei.html

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

BARACK OBAMA WANTED reform. It hasn’t happened yet.

Relax, this isn’t about health care, economic strategy or war stories.

“It is about time we have playoffs in college football,” Obama told a “Monday Night Football” audience on election eve last year.

Apparently there hasn’t been enough time to impeach the Bowl Championship Series. So we press on toward another controversial postseason, filled with enough bowl games to accommodate more than half of the Division I programs.

http://www.mercurynews.com/columns/ci_13784323?nclick_check=1

A congressional committee called in some of the keepers of the Bowl Championship Series for explanations this past spring. A Democratic congressman, Bobby Rush of Illinois, chaired the hearing. A Texas Republican, Joe Barton of Ennis, characterized the BCS as “like Communism: You can’t fix it.” A Texas Democrat, Gene Green of Houston, brought a Houston Cougars helmet to the proceedings.

“This,” Green said, “goes across party lines.”

The good news for those who would like the BCS to suffer an excruciating death is that members of Capitol Hill are asking hard questions about why the highest level of college football does not have a playoff system. The bad news for BCS detractors is that Rush, Barton and Green were the only ones who saw fit to attend that particular hearing.

To BCS administrator Bill Hancock, it sounded like echoes of seasons past.

“Politicians have discussed this many times,” Hancock said. “I guess in the real world, we wish everybody loved it. They don’t. Some people don’t like apple pie and motherhood.”

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/college/6712367.html

For years, college football’s commissioners and presidents have clung to their standard line about why the sport would not institute a postseason playoff model.

Those who oversee the Bowl Championship Series are so concerned by the thought of a playoff that at the B.C.S. meetings in Florida two years ago, they voted not to even discuss the issue.

Instead, they have continuously offered the idea that “every week is a playoff” and that college presidents are spooked by the notion of the sport becoming too commercial and, gulp, too professional.

But with a pedestrian Heisman Trophy field, no elite team that scintillates the masses and virtually no chance of a team outside the Big Three crashing the national title game, this college football season is sputtering to the finish.

As the regular season pushes toward its final three weeks, there does not appear to be a single competitive game left on the schedule that directly relates to the national title.

It is a three-horse race, with Texas, Florida and Alabama all running against claimers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/sports/ncaafootball/09colleges.html?_r=1

The dirty little secret of the much-reviled BCS — the part its keepers always boast but its haters refuse to accept — is that it’s helped make the sport’s regular season more compelling.

Case in point: Last Saturday morning in Eugene (which, incidentally, is now officially my favorite college town; be sure to eat at Beppe & Gianni’s), I sat in my hotel room watching the first half of the Indiana-Iowa game. A group of Oregon fans in the room next to me were apparently watching, too (the walls were thin). And there was no mistaking for whom they were rooting. Cheers went up every time Ricky Stanzi threw an interception. Shouts of “FUMBLE!” rang from the room when Amari Spievey coughed up a punt return.

In the old days, no one outside the Midwest would have given two hoots about an Iowa-Indiana game. And while 80 percent of the people reading this will be infuriated by what I’m about to say, that’d also be the case in an eight- or 16-team playoff where the Big Ten champ would get in regardless.

This is why, for the past three years or so, I’ve relentlessly campaigned for the BCS to adopt a plus-one format. Doing so would appease nearly all the big-wigs’ primary concerns — the bowl system and existing calendar would stay intact, regular-season stakes would not be impacted — while giving two more teams a crack at the title. Admittedly, some seasons are better suited for a plus-one than others (though far more than for the current system, under which two undisputed teams have emerged just three times in 11 years), but this particular season is shaping up perfectly.

Under the Mandel Plan, the No. 1 and 2 teams would host semifinal games in their regular bowl destinations. Just like today, two bowls would lose their host champions, only they’d be the No. 3 and 4 teams. A new bowl would be added to the lineup (most likely the Cotton) to maintain 10 BCS bids. And the championship game would take place a week after the last scheduled bowl. (Next year’s game in Glendale, Ariz. is scheduled for Jan. 10; mine would be on the 12th.)

To create my hypothetical lineup, I used this year’s existing schedule and the current BCS standings, dropping only Alabama — playing the role of SEC runner-up — from No. 3 to No. 5. The selection process worked mostly the same way, too: The bowls that lost champions got first choice of replacements, while the remaining at-large order went 1) Cotton, 2) Orange (whose champion was not in the top four), 3) Cotton. The two semifinal games appear in bold.

• Jan. 1 Rose: No. 8 Oregon (Pac-10 champ) vs. No. 11 Penn Sate (replacement)

• Jan. 1 Sugar: No. 1 Florida (SEC champ) vs. No. 4 Cincinnati (Big East champ)

• Jan. 2 Cotton: No. 5 Alabama (first at-large) vs. No. 6 TCU (third at-large)

• Jan. 4 Fiesta: No. 2 Texas (Big 12 champ) vs. No. 3 Iowa (Big Ten champ)

• Jan. 5 Orange: No. 10 Ga. Tech (ACC champ) vs. No. 12 USC (second at-large)

• Jan. 12 title game: Sugar Bowl winner vs. Fiesta Bowl winner

In addition to providing more clarity, the Mandel Plan would also allow greater access to the title game for non-BCS teams. Realistically, there will be fewer than four undefeated teams ahead of TCU and Boise State come season’s end (we’ve never had more than three from the Big Six, and even that happened just once, in 2004), and voters would be far more inclined to move the Horned Frogs or Broncos into the top four than they currently would the top two. (TCU is already No. 4 in the coaches poll.)

I’m sure I will now be deluged with 800 e-mails picking my proposal apart, but keep one thing in mind before you hit send: There’s at least a glimmer of hope the Mandel Plan could become reality (the SEC and ACC are already open to a plus-one), whereas any larger playoff proposal — no matter how many political action committees form to support it — still has a 0.0 percent chance of getting adopted any time soon.