Agreement on BCS playoff structure reached

George Schroeder
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/bowls/2012/11/12/bcs-playoff-presideness-meeting-college-football-denver/1700455/

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Beginning in 2014, there will be a four-team, seeded college football playoff
Academic performance of teams will be factored into revenue distribution
Television broadcast rights and revenue have yet to be determined

November 12. 2012 - DENVER – College football's new playoff system will feature only six marquee bowl games, but will guarantee access to a team from the five non-power conferences, the BCS' presidential oversight committee decided in a brief meeting Monday afternoon.

The presidents also approved the general framework for revenue distribution and gave conference commissioners the go-ahead to secure a TV rights deal.

The smaller conferences known as the "Group of Five" – Big East, Conference USA, Mid-American Conference, Mountain West and Sun Belt – had pushed for addition of a seventh bowl beginning in 2014, when college football moves to a four-team playoff. The Big 12 and Pac-12 also were in favor of the extra bowl, which would have allowed a second guaranteed slot for those conferences' teams. But with little interest from potential TV partners, commissioners ultimately decided against the idea.

"It was a possibility up until the end," said Big East commissioner Mike Aresco of the seventh bowl. "But this was a better plan for us. It gives us the same guaranteed access for our conference champion. We'll work out the revenue. We'll be fine."

The commissioners were also given approval by the presidential oversight committee to secure a TV rights deal. Current rights-holder ESPN is in an exclusive negotiating window that ends later this week, according to BCS executive director Bill Hancock. Sports Business Journal reported last week the network was close to a deal worth as much as $500 million annually and perhaps as much as $7.3 billion over the life of the 12-year contract. But there was at least some sentiment to test the value with potential bidders like Fox, NBC or Turner.

Navigate Research, a Chicago-based firm that measures the value of marketing and media rights, originally estimated the package might be worth from $400-450 million annually. On the open market, Navigate's director of analytics Jeff Nelson estimated the annual value could reach $550-600 million.

"It's clearly very, very valuable," Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said Monday.

The current BCS TV deal pays $180 million a year.

Ten percent of total revenue will be tied to teams' academic performance rates (APR). If a team's APR falls below an undetermined threshold, it would lose that portion of the revenue. Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman said the portion is expected to be designated for academic purposes.

The question of how the revenue will be distributed has apparently been settled, at least in broad terms. Though presidents and commissioners at the Hyatt Regency would not discuss the terms because they hadn't been finalized, CBSSports.com reported Sunday the "Group of Five" would split at least 20 percent of the overall bowl revenue.

"There will be plenty of money for everybody," BCS executive director Bill Hancock said. "The bottom line is 'more.' "

Northern Illinois president John Peters, who represented the Mid-American Conference, said the vote on revenue distribution was unanimous.

"We think it's fair," Peters said. "It does recognize that some conferences contribute more in a revenue way. … From my point of view for my conference, what it means is more."

Said the Big East's Aresco: "The fairness aspect is definitely there."

More important, according to Peters and Aresco, was the guaranteed access to the six games that will make up college football's upper-tier bowls. Big East senior associate commissioner Nick Carparelli tweeted: "It wasn't about a 7th bowl. It was about a guaranteed spot. It is better for everyone if there are 6 bowls. Mission accomplished! "

Counting future members of "Group of Five" conferences, the Big East champion would have qualified in seven of the past nine years.

Meanwhile, the Big 12 and Pac-12 had pushed for the seventh bowl as a way to secure another guaranteed slot for their teams, like the SEC and Big Ten secured in a recent deal with the Orange Bowl. But Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby noted that in 11 of the past 14 years, the Big 12 had two or three teams ranked in the top 12 of the BCS standings. And Scott said: "It's no longer about access. It's about a four-team playoff."

All six bowls will rotate as semifinals for the playoff. The postseason will feature three "contract" bowls – meaning games with tie-ins to conference affiliations (Rose, Sugar, Orange) – and three "host" bowls – games without tie-ins. Those games will be played New Year's Eve and New Year's Day; the championship game will be played a week later, on a Monday night.

The "host" bowls have not been determined. Hancock said bids would go out sometime after the TV deal is secured and would be finalized by spring 2013, but conventional wisdom is the slots will be filled by the Fiesta, Chick-fil-A and Cotton bowls.

Next on the agenda: finalization of a selection committee – it probably won't happen until next spring – and at some point, a name change:

"Anything," Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman said, "but the Bowl Championship Series!"

Fiesta Bowl Scandal

From the SF Chronicle:

The Fiesta Bowl will be investigated by the Bowl Championship Series after organizers for the Arizona game fired president and CEO John Junker on Tuesday for "an apparent scheme" to reimburse employees for political contributions and "an apparent conspiracy" to cover it up.

The reimbursements, according to an internal report released by the bowl, total at least $46,539. The BCS will investigate to "consider whether the Fiesta Bowl should remain a BCS bowl game."


The upshot: the Cotton Bowl, which is at the gigantic Cowboys Stadium and is backed by billionaire Dallas owner Jerry Jones, will likely replace the Fiesta Bowl as the fourth major bowl in 2014 when the current BCS contract expires...


BCS to investigate Fiesta Bowl
March 29, 2011
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/29/SPGM1IL349.DTL

Death to the BCS

From Amazon.com :

Death to the BCS: The Definitive Case Against the Bowl Championship Series
Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter, Jeff Passan

List Price: $20.00
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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

A team of award-winning sports reporters takes down the Great Satan of college sports: the Bowl Championship Series.

Every college sport picks its champion by a postseason tournament, except for one: Division I-A football. Instead of a tournament, fans are subjected to the Bowl Championship Series, an arcane mix of polling and mathematical rankings that results in just two teams playing for the championship. It is, without a doubt, the most hated institution in all of sports. A recent Sports Illustrated poll found that more than 90 percent of sports fans oppose the BCS, yet this system has remained in place for more than a decade. Built upon top-notch investigative reporting, Death to the BCS at last reveals the truth about this monstrous entity and offers a simple solution for fixing it.

Death to the BCS includes findings from interviews with power players, as well as research into federal tax records, Congressional testimony, and private contracts, revealing:

•The truth behind the "Cartel"-the anonymous suits who run the BCS and who profit handsomely by protecting it

•The flawed math and corruption that determine which teams participate in the national championship

•How the system hurts competition by perpetuating "cupcake" schedules

•How "mid-major" teams are systematically denied a chance to play for the championship

•How a comprehensive sixteen-team playoff plan can solve the problem while enhancing profitability

The first book to lay out the unseemly inner workings of the BCS in full detail, Death to the BCS is a rousing manifesto for bringing fairness back to one of our most beloved sports.

About the Author

Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter, and Jeff Passan write for Yahoo! Sports, the most read sports site on the Web. Wetzel has coauthored four books, including the New York Times bestseller Resilience: Faith, Focus, Triumph with Alonzo Mourning, and lives in Michigan. Peter is an award-winning investigative journalist who has earned national attention for his reporting on the Bowl Championship Series. In 2005, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a series on race and high school football in the South. He lives in Los Angeles. Passan has won multiple Associated Press sports editors awards and lives in Kansas.

Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Gotham (October 14, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1592405703
ISBN-13: 978-1592405701

Ohio State vs. LSU

Below is a great article by King Kaufman of Salon that pretty much says it all about this season's travesty ending...

http://www.salon.com/sports/col/kaufman/2007/12/03/monday/

King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Ohio State vs. LSU: The BCS's answer to a wild, unpredictable year is a couple of usual suspects. Sorry, Hawaii.

Dec. 03, 2007 After all those crazy upsets and all that churn in the rankings, after a year when anything could happen and most of it did, the Bowl Championship Series has rounded up a couple of usual suspects for the Championship Game.

With almost a dozen teams able to make a claim for a shot at the title without laughing into their sleeve, the title game will be Ohio State vs. LSU. Oh, the topsy. The turvy. It has been months -- months, I tell you! -- since we've seen the likes of these two in the big one.

Ohio State earned its spot with a brilliantly played bye. The BCS voters and computers really admired the way the Buckeyes did nothing this week. These guys make Maynard G. Krebs look like Thomas Edison.

LSU played its way in by losing to an unranked team at home last week instead of this week. Losing to an unranked team this week would have been bad, not a championship-caliber move. Just ask West Virginia, which lost at home this week to Pitt. Losing to an unranked team last week? Not so bad.

Hawaii didn't lose to anybody, ever. The Warriors started the season ranked No. 23 in the Associated Press poll, No. 24 in the USA Today poll, went 12-0, and finished the season No. 10. They'll play Georgia in the Sugar Exhibition Game on New Year's Night in New Orleans.

Here's a list of the teams that passed Hawaii at some point this year in the three polls -- AP, USA Today and Harris Interactive -- and the BCS standings, all without the Warriors ever losing a game: Georgia Tech, Tennessee, Boston College, Clemson, Oregon, South Carolina and Texas A&M.

Hang on. Just catching my breath. That was all in the first two weeks of the season.

Here's the rest of the list: Alabama, South Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Cincinnati, Arizona State, Missouri, Kansas, Kentucky (again), Virginia, Georgia (again), Connecticut, Michigan, USC, Virginia Tech, Florida, Texas, Clemson (again), Virginia (again) and Boston College (again).

Hawaii was passed 20 times in the AP poll and 19 times in the USA Today poll without ever losing a game. The Warriors were passed 10 times in 10 weeks in the Harris Interactive poll while going undefeated. They were leapfrogged 10 times in eight weeks in the BCS standings, winning all the while.

Last week, the 14th week of the season, was the first time all year that undefeated Hawaii was not jumped by at least one team in the USA Today poll. It was also the first time the Rainbows weren't jumped in any of the four rankings.

I could go into some eye-glazing detail about things like the three-week stretch at midseason during which Hawaii went 3-0 and didn't gain an inch in the polls, then had a bye week and moved up a little, pounded mediocre New Mexico State and moved up a lot, then had another bye week and dropped down.

I'll spare you. The point, though, is that a lot of what goes on in the polls is pretty random, but one thing's sure: There was a glass ceiling for Hawaii somewhere around No. 10. No matter how much everybody else lost and no matter how long Hawaii kept on winning, the Warriors weren't going any higher.

There were always teams that could be vaulted ahead of them. Kentucky lost five games but still found time to jump Hawaii in the polls on two separate occasions.

If there were ever a year when a team like Hawaii, a team from a smaller conference, would get a shot at the title game, this was that year, with not even one squad from a big conference having an unchallenged claim to a berth.

If Hawaii had no shot at the Championship Game this year, then no team from a smaller conference will ever have a shot at it unless it can muscle up its schedule with nonconference wins against BCS powers, who would sooner encourage their players to major in astrophysics and never miss a lab session just because of a silly old thing like practice than schedule teams like Hawaii or last year's model, Boise State.

The five smaller conferences in what's now known as the Bowl Subdivision -- it used to be Division I-A -- got together a few years ago and forced the six BCS conferences to toss a little more dough their way and give them a slightly better shot at big bowl berths, but what they ought to do now is form their own subdivision, or subsubdivision.

They're suckers in the meantime. They're the only teams in the NCAA that literally have no chance at a championship. Teams in the lower divisions play a tournament. Even traditional big-conference doormats like Vanderbilt, Northwestern and Baylor would get a crack at the title if they managed to put together a good enough team some year and didn't lose any games.

But teams from the WAC and the MAC, Conference USA, the Mountain West and the Sun Belt, they should have gotten the message loud and clear this year when it was delivered to Hawaii: You need not apply.

What a numbskull of a system. On ESPN's bowl selection show Sunday, host Rece Davis debriefed a guy named Brad Edwards, whose bio on ESPN.com describes him as a "college football researcher." Davis called him "our BCS guru."

BCS guru? That poor man! What a pathetic thing to be an expert on. It's like being the world's foremost authority on "Charles in Charge."

I used to know every ZIP Code in Oakland, Calif. It was the byproduct of a job I'd had. Tell me an address in Oakland, I could tell you the ZIP Code. I never got it wrong. It was a not-very-impressive parlor trick, occasionally good for 30 seconds of moderate amusement for someone who had moved around a bit in Oaktown, but otherwise useless.

It dwarfed encyclopedic knowledge of the BCS for usefulness and significance.

Well, let's let the guy speak. He has evidently devoted way too much of his life -- anything north of 10 minutes -- to the study of something so asinine it's scarcely worth learning what order the three letters go in. Why let that go to waste?

Davis asked him for his gut feeling on what would happen with the BCS after this absurd year. "Is the formula where they want it or do you expect more changes?"

This is kind of like asking if you expect daylight in future days. Of course the BCS formula is going to change. It changes every three weeks or so, every time someone notices how ridiculously stupid some aspect of it is.

"In reality, this is what the BCS was set up to do," Edwards said. "There's a season when you have a bunch of teams that all have similar records and similar résumés, and the formula was put together in order to take two teams out of that bunch and say, 'These are the best two.' Now, you can debate all day whether it got the right two, but the point of the BCS is to take two out of that group and say, 'These are the two that are going to play.' And they did that."

What's funny about that is that you can replace "the BCS" and "the formula" in that paragraph with something like "the system of having monkeys fling their poo at pictures of NCAA logos" without changing the meaning. That system would also be able to identify two teams to play in the Championship Game. And we would be able to debate whether the system got the right two, as if that were some kind of side consideration, beside the real point of the thing.

Shall we try?

In reality, this is what the system of having monkeys fling their poo at pictures of NCAA logos was set up to do. There's a season when you have a bunch of teams that all have similar records and similar résumés, and the monkey-poo-fling system was put together in order to take two teams out of that bunch and say, "These are the best two." Now, you can debate all day whether it got the right two, but the point of the monkeys flinging their poo is to take two out of that group and say, "These are the two that are going to play." And they did that.

Good going, monkeys!

Robalini's College Bowl Plan

Robalini's College Bowl Plan
Robert Sterling

If the 2007 college football didn't settle that the current NCAA Bowl Championship Series is a joke, it's because it pretty much had already been settled long ago. Until now, the most egregious foul occurred in 2003, when USC, the best team in football, was left out of the championship game due to a dubious computer ranking of #3. (Did Diebold make the computers?) But this season, the general conceit of the BCS championship, that at the end of the year two teams would clearly set themselves apart from the rest of the pack, has been proven a fraud. Indeed, the only team to even indicate it could theoretically be unbeatable was Hawaii, and they still were snubbed from the championship due to the inferior conference they play in.

The biggest change in recent years was to increase the BCS to five games rather than four, giving viewers the four traditional major Bowl games (the Rose, Fiesta, Orange & Sugar) near New Years and a championship game a week later. Though it certainly increased college football television revenues (at least in the short term) by adding the game, rather than improving the system, it made it worse, making the big four bowl games nothing more than glorified exhibitions.

Out of this chaos comes my modest proposal, which is (among millions of others) a plan to create a true playoff system for an NCAA college football championship. Like every other one out there, it has one decided virtue: it is better than the system currently in place.

With this plan, I had a few goals:

1. Respect the traditions of the big four bowl games as much as possible, even more so than the current system does;
2. Make sure that the big four bowls actually were a central part of crowning the championship;
3. Allow bowl games with notable histories of their own to be included in the mix; and, perhaps most important:
4. Create a playoff system that produces an actual season championship.

Taken this together, here are the basics of the plans...

Sixteen teams make the playoffs, consisting of the following:

Automatic bids:

* The top two teams from the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-10 and SEC;
* The top team from the Big East;
* Notre Dame if it is in the top 16 of the AP poll;

The other four or five spaces will be filled by the following:

* Any of the other five conference champions who are in the top 25 of the AP poll;
* Any other team that is in the top eight of the AP poll;

The priority of the above will be according to their AP ranking. If this total does not equal sixteen teams, then the rest of the spots will be filled according to AP ranking.

(Granted, the AP has refused to be included in the current system, but in this theoretical example, the AP would agree simply because it would be less controversial.)

With this system in place, there wouldn't have been much controversy over the sixteen teams picked this season. In fact, the only team that would have qualified before this last Saturday that wasn't in the AP top sixteen would be number 21 BYU, who would've replaced number sixteen Clemson. (I think teams should be rewarded for being conference champions.)

Why did I say "before" this last Saturday rather than after? Because many of last weekend's games would be redundant under my plan, as five conference championships would be part of the playoffs.

That's correct: instead of being played the first Saturday in December with the Army-Navy game, The ACC, Big 12 and the SEC championships would instead be played the second Saturday of December, as part of the opening round of playoff bowl games. Under new banners as the Peach Bowl (ACC), the Cotton Bowl (Big 12) and the Liberty Bowl (SEC), these games would be joined by two new conference championship games: the Gator Bowl (Big Ten) and the Holiday Bowl (Pac-10.) A sixth bowl game, the Florida Citrus Bowl, would be hosted by the Big East champion. Two more bowl games, the Independence Bowl and the Sun Bowl, would round out the "Super Saturday" of eight bowl games that would knock off eight teams.

Under this scenario, here's how the matchup would've looked this coming weekend, trying to respect rankings where possible and historical traditions in which team goes to the Independence Bowl and Sun Bowl:

Cotton Bowl (Dallas) Big 12 - Missouri (1) - Oklahoma (9)
Florida Citrus Bowl (Orlando) Big East Host - West Virginia (2) - Brigham Young (21)
Gator Bowl (Jacksonville) Big Ten - Ohio State (3) - Illinois (15)
Holiday Bowl (San Diego) Pac-10 - USC (8) - Arizona State (13)
Independence Bowl (Shreveport) - Georgia (4) - Hawaii (11)
Liberty Bowl (Memphis) SEC - LSU (5) - Tennessee (14)
Peach Bowl (Atlanta) ACC - Virginia Tech (6) - Boston College (12)
Sun Bowl (El Paso) - Kansas (7) - Florida (10)

Let's pretend the only upsets this coming weekend are Oklahoma beating Missouri (which they did last weekend) and Hawaii upsetting Georgia (which may not really be an upset, since Hawaii is undefeated.) That would lead to the four traditional big bowl games on January 1st and 2nd, with the traditional teams tied to them:

Rose Bowl - Ohio State (3, Big Ten Champion) - USC (8, Pac-10 Champion)
Fiesta Bowl Oklahoma (9, Big 12 Champion) - Hawaii (11)
Orange Bowl Virginia Tech (6, ACC Champion) - West Virginia (2, Big East Champion)
Sugar Bowl LSU (5, SEC Champion) - Kansas (7)

On the Thursday and Friday before the NFL divisional playoff weekend (January 8-9 to January 14-15), two semifinal game would be played between the four big bowl champs, with the top seeding facing the bottom on Thursday night and the other two on Friday night.

This would lead to the college football championship game, which would happen a week later on the Saturday before the two NFL conference championships. Imagine what a weekend of football that would be: the college football title game followed by the two matchups leading to the Super Bowl. Be sure to stock up on beer!

The only possible glitch in the system is continued snubbing of the five minor football conference teams. Hawaii and BYU would make it in my system, but it would be good to include a clause that any undefeated team gets an automatic bid so a team like Hawaii this year wouldn't be snubbed.

But otherwise, this system really works well. It strengthens the value of the traditional big four bowls. It strengthens the value of eight traditionally noted bowl games. It ensures the five major conferences have a place on the New Years Day bowl games. And it ultimately creates a playoff system that would likely boost college football television revenues substantially. That's probably the biggest key of all, and why I think my proposed system would be a smashing success.