Obama Wants Playoffs

The new decade begins this week, and since it’s never too early to be wrong, here is a prediction:

By the end of the decade, college football will have a playoff system — or at least, a timetable to install a playoff system.

It seems both inevitable and impossible. It seems like it should have happened by now, which makes it seem like it never will.

But it will. The tide has shifted. It has shifted so subtly that it is truly amazing that it has taken so long. The 2000s (or whatever were supposed to call them) brought us so many innovations that we didn’t know we needed: HDTV, Facebook, the Red Zone channel, Twitter, quarterbacks killing dogs in their free time (OK, so we didn’t need some of this stuff).

But a college-football playoff — everybody wanted one of those, right?

Not exactly. This is hard to believe now, but at the start of the decade, a lot of people liked the BCS. Well, OK, perhaps “liked” is a strong word. It is more accurate to say that people did not complain about the BCS as profanely as they do now.

HAMDEN, Conn. — A majority of college football fans want to scrap the current Bowl Championship Series and replace it with a playoff system that’s similar to college basketball, according to a new national poll released Tuesday.

The Quinnipiac University survey shows 63 percent favor getting rid of the current system, while 26 percent want to keep it. When asked how much they liked the bowl game process, the poll showed fans are mixed.

“College football fans are not in love with the current system in which two teams that play for the national championship are picked by computers, sportswriters and coaches,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “Settle the question on the field, voters say more than two-to-one.”

While more fans may favor a playoff system, they don’t necessarily want Congress to get involved. The poll shows 48 percent believe it is a bad idea if federal lawmakers force college football to start a playoff system; 45 percent say it’s a good idea.

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=4779279

A group dedicated to creating a college football playoff system has filed a complaint against the Fiesta Bowl for allegedly violating election laws.

Playoff PAC, a federal political action committee created by six college football fans with political expertise — including Matthew Sanderson, former campaign finance counsel to Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign — filed a complaint with the Arizona secretary of state’s office Tuesday after the Arizona Republic reported that five current and former Fiesta Bowl employees were illegally reimbursed after making political contributions.

Utah became a central character during the 2000s in the volatile debate over the way college football decides a national champion.

The debate smoldered throughout American culture even during a painful recession at the end of the decade. If college football, now in its own second century, evolves from a bowl system into a playoff system, people of the Beehive State will have their fingerprints all over the ground-breaking shift of the status quo. If the Bowl Championship Series — disliked by 85 percent of Americans in a Gallup Poll — is toppled, America can thank key Utah figures and events for doing a chunk of the work.

This testy fight involves billions of dollars and pits traditional storied bowl games and six elite athletic conferences in a fight to keep a firm grip on money, prestige and the road to national titles away from leagues like the Mountain West, of which Utah and BYU are charter members.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705354693/2000s-The-First-Decade-2-Utah-at-front-of-BCS-battles.html

Georgia head football coach Mark Richt was once asked why he supported the Bowl Championship Series instead of a playoff. “I think college football has the most exciting regular season of any sport because there is not a playoff system,” he answered. “The whole season is a playoff system.”

Perhaps the best reason for supporting the BCS can be summed up in three words: Every game counts. Since teams know they have to fight during the regular season for a spot in a bowl game, there are no games off. One loss and postseason chances are diminished. Every play and every game count every year.

As a result of this emphasis on the regular season, college football is more exciting, more popular and more successful than ever.

http://www.star-telegram.com/1021/story/1853019.html

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

(12-10) 20:13 PST — There was a time when the college football bowl system had a rhythm, nice and easy, leading to a very proper conclusion: the four most important games in one glorious, New Year’s Day package.

LAKE BUENA VISTA — If Texas quarterback Colt McCoy was the king of college football for a day, he knows the first thing he would do: Scrap the Bowl Championship Series and implement a playoff system.

“I’ve thought about it a lot,” McCoy said. “I’d have to say eight-team playoff and maybe cut the season one game short. I don’t think you would lose that much money because the playoffs would generate a lot of interest and ultimately you could find out who the national champion was for sure.”

That’s an interesting perspective, considering McCoy will play for the BCS National Championship on Jan. 7. But will McCoy really be playing for a true national title?

Even he has doubts. When one of the guys benefiting the most from the BCS system is not a proponent of it, then the system is broken. McCoy knows it. Fans know it. Even President Barack Obama knows it.

http://www.miamiherald.com/sports/colleges/story/1376697.html

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – Count Colt McCoy, the Texas quarterback and two-time Heisman Trophy finalist, among those in favor of a playoff system in college football.

McCoy and the Longhorns experienced decimal-point devastation last season that kept them out of the BCS national championship. This season, Texas came up on the right side of the system and will play Alabama for the championship Jan. 7 at the Rose Bowl.

“There’s going to be two or three teams that are undefeated,” McCoy said. “It’s going to be hard not to argue that there should be a playoff system. That’s not my call, but I’d be all for it.”

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spt/colleges/texas/stories/121009dnspoawsards.3c604c0.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/