Sports Business Digest » Blog Archive » ESPN loves the BCS, money

tagged:

ESPN loves the BCS, money

You know what? I’d like to see a college football playoff system before I die. Not the BCS. Not a stupid +1 game. A real live playoff. It can be 8 teams, it can even be 4 teams…I just want to see one. I’m 27 right now…and I’m not getting my hopes up.

Besides the fact that everybody is making too much money to even think about a playoff system, it did always seem a bit strange that the world-wide leader (ESPN) never really said much about a potential college football playoff system. At best they just had their “analysts” (Lou Holtz is senile, although no one seems to care) analyze whether or not the two teams in the national championship game were actually the best two teams. Why, oh why is that? Hmm….Oh! It might be because ESPN owns five of the bowl games; the Papajohns.com Bowl, New Mexico Bowl, Las Vegas Bowl, Hawaii Bowl, and the Armed Forces Bowl. Sports blog Signal To Noise states,

No wonder all its [ESPN] analysts are able to say with a straight face (much like Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit did on Sunday night) that the BCS and bowl system was able to do what it was intended to do: their employer has a hand in the low-level bowl pie to make money off of.

Anybody else see the very apparent conflict of interest? Why would the biggest network in sports even discuss the idea of a playoff when they’re making a healthy chunk of money from the current system? Simple answer? They Wouldn’t.

A playoff is the way to go, anybody with any common sense knows that. It’s unfair to penalize a team like Hawaii, who went undefeated, for basically getting screwed by the big schools back before the scholarship rules changed. Part of the reason Hawaii’s schedule is so easy is because big schools (i.e. Michigan, Florida, etc.) won’t play them because they aren’t “good or big” (i.e. like a Penn State, an LSU, etc.) but they aren’t a guaranteed victory either (i.e. Appalachian State, anyone?). So, Hawaii is left to play a weak non-conference schedule. In essence, college football leveled the playing field with the scholarship limits, but they “grandfathered” in the old mindset. The end result is that you’ve let teams get better, but those teams still don’t have any real chance to prove that they deserve to win the national championship.

On a side note? the fact that ESPN is becoming the Walmart of the sports world is starting to piss me off. I think people need a VIABLE alternative (no, I don’t count Fox Sports as viable…and don’t get me started on having to listen to Bryant Gumbel on the NFL network).

You stay classy, ESPN.

Signal To Noise: What A Nice Little Racket

Related –

Sports Business Digest: The BCS (Bowl Championship Series or Big Cash, Son!)

UPDATE: Don’t think a playoff could work? Check out The Beardown

Jason says:

December 3, 2007 at 11:22 pm

This is fairly specious reasoning – none of those bowl matchups would be changed by a playoff system.

emmettjones says:

December 3, 2007 at 11:53 pm

The whole point of a playoff would be to clearly determine the best team in football…Whether the current bowl games would be the first round game in a playoff system is irrelevant because the winners would keep playing until there was only one winner. My whole point is that having one game determine a national champion (regardless of how everyone finished at the end of the regular season) is not the way to determine the best team in football, therefore, you have a playoff. As an example, how often does the best team record-wise in the NFL not win the Super Bowl? (Chargers last year, and the Colts the year before that)