SPORT: Buggered Constantly, Sir (or how to fix American Collegiate Football)

[shinydan]

American football may not be your bag. But it's enormously lucrative, holds the attention of fans worldwide pretty much all year round, and every year the Bowl Championship Series turns teenage boys into superheroic men. But there is one gaping flaw in how it is organised, and that flaw is at University - or, as Americans have it, collegiate level. It's so important that President Obama was asked about it during his campaign, and his answer could be filed under ha-ha-only-serious.

There are 120 colleges who play in the top division of the NCAA's football league - which is called the BCS. This stands for the Bowl Championship Series - but it might as well be what I've suggested above. Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of NFL players are hired directly from it, there is no official national champion. There never has been, mostly because too many people in the organisations involved are resistant to change, from inside or out.

The English Football Association is far from a shining example of organisational merit, but they have managed, for the last 30 years, to handle FA Cups with at least 5 times the number of qualifying teams. Yes, North America is enormous. Yes, there are traditions in collegiate football that should be kept to. But there is a way to erase these anomalies, and it's really quite simple.

At the start of the season - about this time next year - create two committees. One, the Selection Committee, should have 10 NCAA administrators on it who know the system inside and out. The second committee, the Grand Selection Committee, should be made up of between two and three hundred key opinion formers. These people should be the lifeblood of collegiate football - current and former coaches and players, senior referees, and journalists.

Do not, under any circumstances, meddle with the collegiate regular season - after all, it is not broken. This system has two main aims - to compare teams in each geographical area, and to showcase the talents of the players involved - and it succeeds admirably in both. The only thing that will be necessary is to ensure that all the conferences end their regular seasons on the same weekend.

On that weekend, have the Selection Committee meet, to choose the sixty-four best performing BCS-eligible teams. This will mostly be on win-loss records, but will also have enough flexibility to select good teams that have been unlucky with injury or dubious officiating. Print and send out a ballot, listing those sixty-four teams, to the members of the Grand Selection Committee. Give them a week, maybe two, to return those ballots.

The thirty-two teams which receive the most votes will qualify for the National Championship Series. Ties will be broken by the Selection Committee, using pre-agreed tie-breakers like season records, points scored, and other methods cribbed from the NFL. These tie-breakers will also be used to give Seeded Status to sixteen of those teams.

There shall then be a 32-team single elimination tournament to determine the National Champion. The winner of that tournament would be crowned National Champions.

The games will be scheduled to ensure that the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl and the Fiesta Bowl would comprise the quarter-final round, and would all still take place over the New Year's weekend and happen in their traditional stadiums. Virtually all the other traditional bowl games would still occur and be part of the tournament.

TV revenue would be split between participating teams based on how far they progress through the tournament. It is inevitable that the overall percentage of that revenue would decrease for some teams - but proper marketing of this New Year Madness would mean that actual revenue could easily increase.

It's not actually all that hard. Or have I missed something?

Comments

[caomhin.livejournal.com]

I may well be completely wrong since I find the Bowls a confusing mass I try to avoid learning too much about but the biggest flaw in your idea would possibly be the number of games played. As I understand it to get to a Bowl typical only takes a couple of extra games on the regular season, whereas a 32 team elimination system would be six games. I always thought the college season was fairly short (even when compared to the NFL) to limit the number of games students would need to worry about (i.e. to let them pretend to study).

So yeah, basically, unless I'm mistaken about the current number of post-season games (quite plausible) then that seems the biggest objection that would be raised. I'm not sure it's a real or valid one, but it would probably be raised.

[shinydan.livejournal.com]

Hm. Then I _suppose_ you might have to reduce the regular season by a game or two. Don't like that much, but I think it's a small sacrifice. And in any case, I'm sure new non-BCS bowl games would spring up to fill in the gaps for the weaker teams...

[cwol.livejournal.com]

This all seems to presume that having an overall College Champion is a desirable thing.... From what I've seen of the current organisation it is pretty much designed so that there is no such thing, but lots of Colleges get to win something to keep their allumni organisations happy.

[cosmolinguist]

In my (admittedly limited) experience, people who are in college might care about how their football team is doing but people who've left college, if they care at all, are probably as likely to care about teams local to them (which might be the same one but a lot of people have to move, and anyway if another nearby college is doing better they'll probably be more fun to watch anyway).

The people who care about who wins the bowl games are much more likely, as far as I can tell, to be sports journalists and other "insiders." If there is going to be any change like the one proposed here, it'll be people like them petitioning for it, rather than the college alumni population as a whole. It's almost certainly one of those who asked Obama if he was going to fix it, because it seems mostly of interest to people who are just sports anoraks in general rather than a fan of any team in particular. And like all anoraks, I think they'd like and prefer a system with transparent rules and hierarchies.

I see your point in that shinydan may here be trying to fix a problem that isn't there -- it wouldn't be the first time -- but I think an argument could be made that this is desirable. Compare the college basketball tournament, which does have a huge popular following, office pools and everything, partly because the tournament bracket is so simple even non-sports-fans can make sense of it and have fun trying to pick the winners. And there, the "final four" is well-thought-of enough that the teams that make it that far get a good measure of the prestige of the eventual champion itself, so it's like lots of colleges still winning something, as you say.