The Real House of Cards

 

If ever there was a doubt there can be no more. The house of cards that is the NCAA and the satellites that orbit around it are on the verge of collapse.

A money-printing operation, their very existence these days is wholly dependent on the revenue streams from a few key functions they sponsor, like March Madness and football as played in the bowl subdivision. There are television and radio fees, jersey sales, sponsorships, you name it and the NCAA, the major conferences and the member schools have found a way to make money off it. Boy have they, to the tune of billions, a year.

The reason this house of cards is now closer to collapsing than ever stems from the foundation on which its existence is built—the myth of the so-called student/athlete. Without the thousands of students working in the service of these the two big revenue sports, football and men’s basketball, for a pittance of the revenue they generate, these groups could not muster enough revenue opportunities on their own accord to sustain a corner grocery let alone the hierarchy it has built for itself. Indeed their raison d’etre would cease.

The latest blow came in a case in which the NCAA wasn’t even a party. A couple of those wiseacre football players at Northwestern found enough time away from their football obligations to use the student part of the student-athlete equation to take their grievances to the National Labor Relations Board in a quest to unionize. Their hope, I guess, is that if successful Northwestern officials will be forced to bargain with them over what, exactly? Better food? Less work hours? Beer Pong tables in the players’ lounge?

I give those Northwestern kids a lot of credit. This is a war they can’t win but because they’re kids they’re just dumb enough to believe otherwise. What their lawyers, or more accurately, their sponsors at the United Steelworks probably didn’t tell them is that the NLRB’s decision finding them to be “employees” as defined under the National Labor Relations Act and hence eligible to unionize likely won’t survive all the years of appeal it will take to bring the case to an end. The Board’s regional director in Chicago issued an incredibly flawed decision, speaking legally. Speaking practically, however, the regional director’s decision is another hard wind threatening to tumble the NCAA for the sin of exploiting the concept of student-athlete for their own financial gain.

To summarize what happened without getting into all of the legalese, senior Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter got the bright idea (or had it implanted in him, more likely) to go about trying to unionize his fellow teammates. The theory was that given all the time and trouble they go to in the service of Northwestern’s football team and the “compensation” they receive from that service in the form of scholarships makes them employees under the law and thus eligible to form a union, their scholarship serving as an employment contract and their showing up for practice and games being the work performed in exchange. What exactly they’d do once they became a union hasn’t exactly been clear but that’s beside the point. The quest is for a recognition of their status as a key cog in the NCAA’s sports machine.

The NLRB regional office in Chicago agreed. In a 24-page ruling, Regional Director Peter Sung Ohr essentially agreed with the argument, at least as it pertained to scholarship players, that they function as employees of the university. The walk ons that dot the back end of Northwestern’s roster, on the other hand, are out of luck. Ohr said that they play “for the love of the game” and not the compensation that the scholarship players get. That makes them more in the nature of volunteers and not employees. No union for them.

Here’s where it gets tricky for the student/athlete/employees. The appeals process in labor actions like this is almost unending. There’s a long history in this country of employers using labor laws to avoid having to collectively bargain and the way those laws are set up, the appeal process can and usually does take years.

For example, the first step is for the NCAA to appeal the regional director’s decision to the full NLRB in Washington, D.C. That’s simple enough. But if they’re unsuccessful there, Northwestern has no immediate appeal to court. Instead, the convoluted process requires first that an election be held among the players. Rare is the union election that goes off without a hitch, which means that Northwestern will object to some aspect of it. That’s just more grist for the mill.

If the union wins the election, it will require Northwestern officials sit down and bargain with them. The university can and will refuse, setting up the inevitable court battle. Once the university refuses to bargain, complaining that the student/athletes aren’t employees and/or that the election process was flawed, that same regional director in Chicago will issue an unfair labor practice complaint. That will lead to a trial which then will get further appealed landing, eventually, in front of a Federal court of appeals. Once a decision has been reached by that court, the losing party can appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

If you have the sense that this process I just described might takes years or, stated differently, another 6 or 7 years of losing seasons for Northwestern football, you’d be correct. If you have the sense that at least the process has an end point, you’d be wrong.

Let’s say that after all this time and all these trials and appeals and elections that the determination that the Northwestern football players are indeed employees under the National Labor Relations Act, the university has more cards to play. Given how long that initial determination ultimately will take, every person who originally voted for the union will long since have graduated and left the university. This will give the university the opportunity to next argue that the original vote is no longer valid because it doesn’t reflect the desires of the current group of students and that a new one should be held. They’ll take that complaint to the NLRB And on and on it will go.

Maybe this gets resolved in a decade, maybe not.

Then of course is an entirely different issue to contend with: the application of this decision to other schools. This decision is specific to Northwestern, a private college. It has no application to, for example, public institutions like Ohio State, which aren’t even covered by the National Labor Relations Act. Student-athlete/employees at those schools will have to resort to a patchwork of state labor laws to try and form a union. Let’s just say that public schools in the south have nothing to worry about. Those states have a distinguished history of being unfair to organized labor. Just check out what’s been taking place in Tennessee and the United Auto Workers if you don’t believe me.

In other words, this decision has no impact if the goal of these players at Northwestern at this moment have any realistic hope of sitting down with the president of the university and hammering out a collective bargaining agreement.

Where the decision does have impact is further exposing the fraud of big time college athletics. Again, though not a party to the NLRB action, Ohr’s decision spells out in rather dry but stark words the enormous commitment the NCAA allows schools to impose on a college football player, particularly one at a FBS school, in order to keep the NCAA’s money machine going.

During the season, playing football even at Northwestern, is a full time job requiring somewhere between 50-60 hours commitment per week. Academics consume about 13-18 hours of class time per week plus whatever homework or labs are required. That’s a pretty taxing schedule for anyone, let alone a young adult. It was this disparity, more than anything, which seemed to catch the eye of Ohr in his decision.

On the surface that does look like the work dominates the academics so to that extent Ohr has it right when football is in season. But one of the flaws in the decision is that Ohr only considered the time commitment during the football season. These so-called employees are on campus for the rest of the school year, indeed the majority of the school year, when their time commitment to the sport is significantly less. Eventually the balance between what they provide to the university trends back toward the rather mundane existence of just being students.

No matter. The real issue is not these players anyway. This comes down to the gross inequity between what those who control the system receive and what those who fuel the engine get. The student-athletes, a term the NCAA simply made up to avoid other legal consequences decades ago, are starting to get the rather uppity idea that a free four year education is hardly enough. There are millions of damning examples but just consider one from last week: Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith got an $18,000 bonus because one of the wrestlers at the school won a national championship. The wrestler got nothing except the glory of having achieved a goal.

Wherever you come out on that issue is bound to change because the disparity literally grows every day and until there is a meaningful way to address it, the disparity will continue to grow and the protests will grow even louder.

The NLRB case, in truth, is a loud but minor distraction at the moment. The real case threatening the financial underpinnings of the NCAA and hence its very existence is that which is heading to trial filed by former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon. It seeks a cut of the money the NCAA is getting from exploiting the likenesses of former players on such things as video games. It’s a massive class action lawsuit that also includes as its defined class current players. It’s what we call in the legal business “bet the company” litigation because if the company doesn’t prevail in court it doesn’t prevail at all. If the NCAA loses it will owe almost everything it has to pay for damages. Beyond that, though, the NCAA will find that it can no longer exist.

What’s fascinating to me in this whole debate is how utterly helpless the NCAA and the member schools seem to act as if they have no choice but to conduct business the way they do right now. They further that narrative under the guise that their most important guiding principle is preserving the myth of the student-athlete.

For the NCAA to actually reform will require that it and its member schools face the more complicated reality of all the intended and unintended consequences flowing from the system they cherish. In business terms, the NCAA needs a new paradigm and they’re the only ones that don’t seem to accept that reality. A key tenant of that new paradigm has to be the recognition, financially, of the players that keep this train running. A great education is worth plenty but it is hardly enough.

The system is headed for collapse if it remains on its current course. The NCAA can spend literally millions in legal fees to fight every skirmish like this one but doing so only threatens its ability to survive even further. Far better now to confront the damning unfairness of the system and fix it. That may not be easy but it is, after all, only money and there's enough of it to go around and make everyone happy instead of just a relative few. If they can't find to work through this most high class of problems themselves then someone, a court, maybe Congress, will do it for them. And if that happens then the house of cards is unlikely to ever rise again.

 

 

Posted by Betsy

Fixing College Football

Never underestimate the power of victory to push the demons away.

Ohio State's win over Akron may have righted the ship for its fans just as each win by Miami, Oregon, USC, Auburn and the like will buoy their fans.

But no single win itself is going to do much to right the ship of college football generally. College football is in very serious trouble. It's not the kind of trouble that can be easily fixed and even if it could, there's no will to do so at the moment. But it's foolish to ignore the red flags flying over the sport and wish its problems away. Ignorance is not bliss.

At what point, for example, do we all stop citing to every instance involving every school caught doing something and then try to make the rather pathetic case that these are a series of isolated incidents? And if we're using the words “series” to explain away what we'd like to believe are isolated incidents then aren't we just being our own worst enemies by not admitting that all of it is really a rather disturbing trend.

Maybe the situation in Miami will be the flashpoint for college football, but I doubt it. It's just the latest egregious example. Oregon is wrestling with its own shady behavior as is Boise State. Auburn's resurgence brought with it the predictable NCAA scrutiny and the stink over how exactly Cam Newton got there is never going to quite leave the program. There's also a convincing argument that the flashpoint really should have been USC bringing in Lane Kiffin to fix their problems. Kiffin is nothing if not the poster child for college football opportunism as he left a Tennessee program in shambles and cleaning up its own NCAA mess that he caused as he headed to USC.

And these are only the situations that the average fan is familiar with. Less known are all the literally hundreds of issues that come each week in nearly every program around the country. The NCAA rule book and the method in which it is (must?) be interpreted has become nearly impossible for professional compliance officers. The NCAA would love to upgrade its technology and replace its antiquated fax machine but they never get a chance. It hums with compliance reports 24/7/365.

So, yea, compliance with the rules is an issue but it isn't the problem. The rules are just the NCAA's way of trying to treat a disease, the billions of dollars that have infected college football, that has no cure.

The money grab at the college level is the tsunami that is destroying the very essence of the game itself. With public college budgets strained by state legislatures with their own budget problems is it any wonder why college presidents look at the money generated by big time football and rub their hands in glee like they're Nucky Thompson in Boardwalk Empire?

Football, as practiced at the highest levels, throws of money like Angelina Jolie throws off pheromones. Ohio State and Texas and a handful of others are the tease for all the other schools looking to cash in. The money becomes the siren song that lures otherwise decent thinking and acting human beings to do some pretty ridiculous things. Just saying no is hardly a viable option when there's a whole in the budget the size of Montana.

All this money of course is the byproduct of an amoral media machine that needs these games for its own survival. And of course the machine wouldn't have all these millions to toss about so indiscriminately if not for the various advertisers who just have to get their product in front of all those eyeballs watching all those games.

Leading the pack of course is an increasingly more corrupt ESPN whose organization is so rife with conflicts of interest and self-dealing but likely will escape any real government scrutiny because of a misguided tea-party sentiment that rules and regulations are for suckers and socialists. But ESPN is most certainly helping to bring about the ruination of the sport that right now is a substantial revenue item on its balance sheet. ESPN gets in bed with Texas on the Longhorn Network. It gets in bed with the SEC on its network. And then it spends its time talking down any other team that could possibly overshadow, not to mention devalue, the investments its made in those other teams and conferences. How else to explain Mark May?

With the significant help of outfits like ESPN, college football hasn't just become a cesspool. It's become an untreatable cancer. The funny thing is, everyone associated with college football knows it has the disease but believes the best cure is simply not to go to the doctor.

When you stop to consider college football below the current Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), where championships are actually decided on the field and television money is nearly non existent, you start to more fully understand how thoroughly corrupted the FBS has become from the money.

At schools not worried about winning some mythical jerry-rigged BCS championship, there is a certain retained purity about the sport. The time devoted by the athletes to their sport at those levels isn't quite all consuming, mainly because the participants enter college knowing that there path to later success will be laid not by their ability to punt, pass or kick, but by their performance in the classroom.

No one should have faith in the NCAA's ability to legislate away its problems, either. More rules on what can be served at a players' only pre-game breakfast is surely not the answer. Besides, the NCAA is merely a feel-good creation of and beholden to the member institutions that can, at any time, throttle back its influence.

Real reform will come only when the presidents of the top universities take the problem by the scruff of its neck and demand a real solution in the form of ridding the sport of the corrupting influence of money. And the only way to do that is to stop giving individual schools a financially-based incentive to get a leg up on any other school.

If the key college presidents want to something positive for the sport, something that will really bring about reform, here's a modest but very workable solution.

First, establish one “super” conference of schools willing to pay a five million dollar entry fee each year. That will force every college to decide whether or not it's worth the price. Many won't pay and it will be better off for it. So will their budgets and by proxy their students. They can go back to lower divisions that won't have an entry fee.

For every school willing to pay the entry fee, make them then live with a fixed football budget, a “salary cap” of sorts. Every school would have the same budget. To support it, each team in the super conference will share equally all revenue generated by their sport (and I mean all revenue, without exception). Finally, abolish the BCS in favor of a legitimate playoff system. This will provide the performance incentive that every school that remains in the super conference to want to compete at the highest level.

Under this construct, the NCAA rule book would necessarily get skinnier and the compliance process would be simplified, although it would never disappear completely. Let's face it, being declared “national champions” is still a powerful incentive for some schools/individuals to cheat. Human nature can never be fully anticipated or controlled.

That still leaves one issue to deal with and that's the athletes. Right now they are the fuel that powers the engine and while there is no question that a fully paid education is a pretty decent payment, they should share in more. Grad students are paid a stipend to help teach. Athletes should get a stipend to play and it should be equal across all of the super conference.

Of course this idea won't work because it would require the dismantling of the current system. But the truth is that the current system is being dismantled piece by piece and isn't worth saving anyway. It's just a choice over whether the college presidents want to do it in a proactive way as a means of coming up with something better or want to have it simply tumble down around them when it's too late to rebuild.

Maybe big time college football is not fixable at this point or maybe it's not even worth trying. But left to its own devises, it will implode and that's guaranteed. And when that happens, the right question will not be “how did this happen” but instead “how did this not happen even sooner?”
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A Stopped Clock

It is said that even a stopped clock is right twice a day and so it is with the Bowl Championship Series as well. The fact that it worked out this year as the strong consensus number one and number two teams are playing in the national championship game doesn’t mean the BCS is a perfect system or even the right system. It’s just a jerry-rigged fix that gets it right once in awhile.

I’ve railed against the BCS in the past because of what it is and what it isn’t. My point is simple. Either go back to the way things used to be or go to a full-blown playoff. This middling approach causes middling results.

Maybe the BCS is the best that can be done. That’s because a playoff system, whatever merit it might have, is far more of a problem then most people believe, suggesting that the BCS is with us like a crazy aunt. The current bowl system, the real impediment to a playoff, is far more intertwined into the fabric of Division I college football than most people appreciate. It’s easy for the media to take an etch-a-sketch approach to damn near anything. You don’t like what the current picture looks like? Just shake and start over, simple as that.

Well, it’s not that simple.

According to a report on ESPN.com, at a recent IMG Intercollegiate Forum that featured a lengthy discussion among the athletic directors of the major conferences, a healthy debate ensued on the merits of the current BCS system. Lest anyone think that there isn’t a case to be made for the current system, they should listen to what Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany had to say.

Delany makes the obvious but important point that much of the debate starts from the premise that teams and fans alike are conditioned to think about playoffs. Indeed, playoffs are the fabric of virtually every sports league from 8-year old T-ball to the NFL. Thus, the natural inclination is that the only way to arrive at a true national champ is through a grinding system of post-season games that leads to a winner take all final.

It’s way too late to try to condition fans otherwise but Delany’s point, subtly made, is that no one stops to consider challenging the conventional wisdom of the underlying premise. You could dissect the playoffs in virtually any sport and find an unworthy champ. It’s often the case that teams with the best regular season record don’t end up winning it all for any number of reasons.

So it is a valid point to make that even a playoff system doesn’t necessarily do any more to guarantee the “right” team was crowned national champ. But the counter to it is that when it comes to NCAA football, where the disparity between conferences can be far more dramatic than the disparity between divisions in professional sports, there is a better chance that the theoretical “right” team will be the national champ after being tested through a playoff system.

But the far more salient point that Delany makes is to point out the difficulties inherent in a playoff system given the current bowl system and conference affiliations. Those who scoff at these as mere parochial concerns really do miss the larger issues.

As Delany notes, the automatic bowl bid conferences like the PAC 10 and Big 10 gave up some of their access to, for example, the Rose Bowl, traditionally the most lucrative bowl game of all, in order to serve the greater good which, in this case, means teams from lesser conferences like the Mountain West, which is sending TCU to the Rose Bowl this season against Wisconsin.

Whatever else you might think about TCU and the level of competition it plays, no one much argues that a Wisconsin vs. Stanford Rose Bowl would be a far more desirable match up from just about every angle. In the context of college sports, the sacrifice that the Big 10 and the PAC 10 made in order to allow the Wisconsin v. TCU game to happen instead is significantly underappreciated by the playoff advocates.

Stated differently, as Delany points out, a playoff system of virtually any configuration comes at the expense and financial sacrifice of the schools at the top for the benefit of the middling schools and conferences, like the Mountain West and the Big East, who give up virtually nothing.

It may all be just money, but it’s real money you’re taking out of one school’s or one conference’s pocket to put into the pockets of lesser schools or conferences. In a different context, say a tax increase for millionaires to provide more benefits for the poor, we’d rail against it as a socialistic redistribution of wealth. But since it’s football, this is all just fine.

Another point that Delany doesn’t much get into but is still worth noting is the premise that a playoff system creates even greater wealth for everyone. Yet I’ve not seen one model, one study, one proposal from one network that actually supports this premise.

The working assumption is that there is no limit on the money that the networks will spend for the rights to televise NCAA playoff football. That simply isn’t true. More to the point, whatever money the networks would spend would eventually impact what amount, if any, they’d be willing to pay for all of those minor bowl games featuring teams not good enough to make the playoffs.

And before you say good riddance to those bowl games, remember that these lesser teams are never going to give up those opportunities. If nothing else, it gives them more weeks of practice, giving them a head start on the next season.

If you don’t think, for example, that the Michigan Wolverines suffered some the past two seasons because they weren’t bowl eligible the previous year, you aren’t paying attention. That extra game and those extra practices are akin to an early start on spring football.

What really emerges from this entire debate is that the true advocates for the BCS, meaning those colleges with the most to lose economically through a more democratic playoff system, actually have a point. I suspect they understand that the BCS isn’t perfect or even very good. It’s as if they’re trying to scratch an itch knowing that the back scratcher isn’t quite long enough to reach the whole problem.

There are some that predict a regular playoff season within 5 years and they may be right. But every playoff proposal that someone has concocted has the same thing at its core: forcing the big schools to forego the potential millions that their current bowl affiliations tend to yield. That is why virtually every playoff proposal has been dead on arrival.

These big schools, be it Ohio State, USC, Oklahoma, or Alabama, have budgets they need to balance and that isn’t going to happen if their most lucrative sport, football, is put in a position of potentially foregoing millions just so that the occasional TCU or Boise State can run with the big boys for a few years.

No one seems to relish a return to the old days and the chance that there might be disputed national champs based on the vagaries of pollsters. Fine. But if a playoff system is going to happen, it won’t be until someone steps forward with a proposal that addresses the big schools fundamental interest. They aren’t going to go along until they are compensated for the sacrifices that are being asked to make. Since no one has come forward with that kind of proposal, we all better just get used to this do-loop of bitching every December about the stopped clock that is the BCS and get comfortable that at least every once in awhile it gets it right.

Suffering Through the BCS

There is a new champion in college football and hardly anyone outside of Gainesville, Florida seems all that thrilled about it.

Certainly there is always going to be a little jealousy creeping in anytime someone other than your favorite team wins something of consequence. Thus a little bashing of the Florida Gators, or whoever else might have found themselves in their position, is expected. But this season, just as the season before it and the season before that, the din has grown louder for a playoff system for Division I football. And this season, just as the season before it and the season before that, the folks who bring about the Bowl Championship Series could care less about your concerns.

What most people forget, however, is that Division I already has a playoff system so arguing about creating one is misplaced. The real problem that never gets articulated is that the current playoff system is too restrictive. It’s basically a two-team playoff with those teams picked by a confusing amalgamation of polls.

At some point, the critics of the BCS will get their way. In the current economic environment almost anything that at one time seemed unimaginable is likely to happen. It is easy to envision a collapse of the sacred bowl system on a purely fiscal basis, which would eliminate the major obstacle to a more expansive playoff. But even if that doesn’t happen, eventually those who really control sports in this country, the broadcast networks, will force a comprehensive playoff system on the naysayers and protectionists that refuse to budge to logic and reason.

But until that happens, the best way to fix the BCS is to simply abolish it. On pure merits, a one game playoff will always yield far more controversy than it will solve. There simply is no way to satisfy the number of teams with a claim on one of two slots and far too many variations and lack of comparators to ever insure that those voting in these polls will get the top two teams correct.

This season is instructive but nearly any season in the past 10 would do. To my eyes, USC was the best team I’ve seen this season. I understand they lost to Oregon State, which lost to Penn State. I understand, too, that their head coach, Pete Carroll, keeps finding a way to underprepare his team at least once a season which leads to them being on the outside looking in more often than not. But having watched USC dismantle both Penn State and Ohio State this season, it was easy to see that this is a team with far more talent from top to bottom and side to side than any other team in the country.

Maybe you’re one of those that believe that wins against Big Ten teams are meaningless. But having watched Ohio State do everything right but win against, first Penn State and then a Texas team that was far more highly ranked convinced me that Ohio State wasn’t nearly the patsy that many believed.

The SEC had their share of good teams, including the national champion, again this year. Florida is clearly a very good team. But is it just another good team made better because of the presence of college football’s best player, Tim Tebow? Oklahoma seemed unstoppable heading into the game with Florida, despite its one loss. But a team averaging 50 points a game or more for a good part of the season couldn’t get more than 14 on Thursday night. Florida, too, was having its way with every team prior to Oklahoma, almost scoring at will against them, and yet only managed 24 points against a highly suspect Oklahoma defense.

And let’s not forget about Utah. They dominated Alabama, a number one team for a healthy part of the season.

The point, though, is not to trash any of these teams or to argue against Florida this year. It’s simply to note that the outcome of the Florida-Oklahoma game solved nothing. Florida is still a one-loss team, just like USC and Texas. Utah is still undefeated. Each has a legitimate argument for why it’s better than the other, even if you don’t share their viewpoint.

It’s not as if anyone outside of those with a vested interest in the BCS system thought that the outcome of the Florida-Oklahoma game would solve anything going in. Thus it’s not a surprise they still feel that way coming out. In other words, it’s pure fantasy to say that whoever wins the BCS national championship game is an undisputed champion. It’s not designed to yield that result, no matter its claims.

Given what’s undeniable, why play the game at all? If a playoff in major college football is too logistically complicated for this nation to solve, a nation that solved the logistics of landing men on the moon and getting a package from Anchorage to Poughkeepsie overnight by the way, then stop trying. Stop acting as if the worst thing in life is different polls crowning a different teams number one.

The argument against the BCS is all the more compelling when you consider the unintended consequences this convoluted system has created. Essentially, the BCS system has chosen to sacrifice the value of a winning a conference championship in its quest to bring relevance to one game being played later and later each January. At the same time it’s also rendered meaningless every other bowl game except the self-titled National Championship game.

From a fan’s perspective, there simply is nothing meaningful about winning the Big Ten anymore, as an example. All it does is get you in the Rose Bowl. It doesn’t necessarily get a team a leg up on getting into the BCS title game. Indeed, given how little respected the Big Ten is these days, being the Big Ten champ carries all the prestige of being the prettiest girl in shop class.

The same goes for the Pac 10. If any major conference is less appreciated than the Big Ten it’s the Pac 10. USC is almost always a good team and the rest are almost always not. USC has its way in that conference every year, well in every year in which they take each game seriously anyway. It wasn’t the loss to Oregon State that kept USC out of the National Championship game, it was the lack of respect pollsters have for the conference.

But if there was no BCS at all, and it’s not hard to remember when that was the case, winning the conference carried not only prestige but a real chance to be crowned number one by someone, even if not by a consensus. This year’s Rose Bowl would have taken on far more meaning for both Penn State and USC and would have carried far greater implications if it had been on equal footing with all of the major bowl games. But since there was a BCS National Championship game looming with two other teams, it carried all the significance of a Randy Lerner press conference. The same is absolutely true of the Sugar Bowl game between Alabama and Utah. While it may have been sort of fun to watch Utah dominate a SEC team, it carried no meaning.

What I miss most are the days when there was a compelling reason to watch the Orange Bowl, the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl. Now those games are just pictures at an exhibition with the added benefit to the teams of a lot of cash to keep them wedded to the current system.

When the presidents of the major conferences and their surrogates at the BCS say they aren’t interested in a playoff, they really are saying they aren’t interested in bringing certainty. Fine, then it would be great if they’d stop pretending they are by foisting a compromise on the public each year that is actually makes the problem worse, not better. Jettison the BCS games as the failed experiment they have become and really restore meaning to the bowl games you claim to you’re trying to protect in the first place.