Honest question here. How many of the schools that bitch about the cost of football are trying to make the move to D1 (FCS whatever)? If you’re happy with your 20k person stadium and your facilities (and willing to accept that you get a bunch of walk-ons and/or kids who were great students, but so-so players, why do you need to play Alabama? Why not adjust the program to the income? Offer fewer full-ride scholarships. Don’t upgrade the weight room every three years, etc.
Or creating a new division of football like was done before. Right now the power 5 are a different level of football maybe with a rare competitive school from the Mountain west or WAC.
When the BCS was in place one of the common conversations as about how much money the Mountain West was gaining from Boise State getting a BCS Bowl each year. With only 4 teams getting in that big money bowl those small conferences are going to get shut out and the money divide is going to be much greater then the 300K that they make for getting stomped once a year. Eventually there will be a D1A, D1AA, D1AAA, D2 and D3. Really we’re already there though.
It’s important to remember that there’s some other constraints on being Division I for other sports that can come in to play. Schools aren’t just picking divisions a la carte for individual sports. Conference affiliation for those other sports can be a driving factor as well. UAB wants to stay in Conference USA for other sports but their agreement requires football. Likely they just left Conference USA completely by cutting football.
First word out of my mouth when MSU locked up the championship game last year was “Roses!” During the BCS era, when the Rose Bowl wasn’t diverted from a traditional matchup, it was my most watched bowl. I was far more likely to watch it than the national championship game (which I rarely watched.) I get that we’re the outliers though.
I always liked that option during the transition to the BCS and then the BC championship game. It, by default, would have made the bowl games into playoff/elimination games for the championship. I also get that we’re not going back to something like that. Money pushes the other way, and that money exists because of what fans want.
Yeah, but I kind of also think that we had a 20 year period where the media kept harping on the absolute moral imperative of a playoff. I think the demand was, to an extent, created.
Why is a B1G/Pac12 Rose Bowl matchup considered sacrosanct among some people.
For the first 30 something years of the Rose Bowl existence, it was a not necessarily a B1G vs Pacific Coast school matchup. Sometimes yes, most of the time no.
Heck One year the Rose Bowl was played in Durham, North Carolina.
What we had for the last decade or so with the BCS was a playoff.
Yes, Two teams comprise of a playoff.
What was happening before the BCS was not a playoff where the SEC team went to Sugar Bowl, the Big 10 and PAC10 went to Rose, and Big8 Champ went to the Orange and the SWC went to the Cotton.
And no matter what format is being used…It is not going to stop the debates. At least one team is going to feel that it got left out.
I’ve said this before, and I realize my view is in the minority, but … what exactly was wrong with the pre-BCS system? So you had national champions crowned by a poll of writers and a poll of “coaches” (or ADs or SIDs or whoever actually filled out the poll). And sometimes those polls didn’t agree. So?
I don’t get why it was killing people so much that we didn’t have a way to “prove it on the field.” In my view, it helped keep interest and discussion going in the offseason about the merits of the different conferences and teams.
Again, I know this isn’t the popular view, and I realize those days ain’t coming back, but it wasn’t like college football was any lesser for not having a national championship game.
Yes, but the idiots have always been after a “real” playoff with 4, 8, 16 teams.
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I’ve said this before, and I realize my view is in the minority, but … what exactly was wrong with the pre-BCS system?
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1)Not enough money.
2) “It’s different from other sports, therefore wrong.” :smack:
Part of the glory of college football, at least w/r/t the national championship, was always that you don’t always know which games would end up being most important, therefore all of them were. We’re going to lose that.
Barely. You just can’t pick 2 teams from ranking systems very well. Frequently there was a 3rd or 4th ranked team that was pretty indistinguishable from the 2nd ranked team.
With the expansion to 4 teams, the chances that you include all of the “deserving” teams (subjective, I know) rises from about 40% to about 80%.
Lee Corso pointed out this morning on Gameday that a “Quality Losses” have become common lexicon this year. And he snarked that FSU might have been better off if they had a quality loss.
Suppose Clemson had beat FSU early in the year. It is entirely possible that they would still be ranked #4 in the FCS playoff. All other things being equal, Clemson would be 10-2 and ranked about 10th-12th in the AP Poll. Definitely a Quality Loss.
How many of them think that the increased cost of moving from Division II to FCS football will be more than offset by the Division I basketball money they will start receiving? (Even the worst team in the largest conference that has not won a tournament game in at least six years (Big Sky) got $122,000 in 2014, and is guaranteed at least a 2.3% per year increase each year, assuming the conference still has 12 teams.) There are also additional pools of money available only to Division I schools; for example, each school with at least 150 scholarships also got $147,000 plus $5900 for each scholarship above 150.
Keep in mind that a school can’t just say that it wants to be Division I; you have to be invited by a conference, and there’s a four-year “limbo” it has to go through (like UC-Davis did from, IIRC, 2003 to 2007). Even going from FCS to FBS has a two-year limbo period, which is why Georgia Southern and Appalachian State aren’t bowl-eligible this season.
Excellent point. Why is losing to a good team necessarily better than losing to a lesser team?
In the Baylor v. TCU debate, many people point to the fact that TCU’s only loss was to Baylor, on the road, and by a mere 3 points.
They also point out that Baylor lost to a West Virginia team not in the top 25.*
Why is it somehow better to lose to a good team when presumably everyone on the team is up for the big game and ready to play versus getting blindsided by a lesser team? Why does the former elevate you, but the latter goes against you?
One can’t help but think that TCU knew it was playing a good Baylor team, did everything it could to win, and simply wasn’t able. The same person could think that Baylor would beat West Virginia 9 times out of 10, but looked past that game. What do these losses really tell us?
*And dammit, we had TCU beat as well. WVU was up 9 with six minutes left to play, but we decided to try and run out the clock, punt into the wind and give TCU the ball back. TCU only beat WVU on a last second field goal. If that kick sails wide, TCU also has a loss to WVU. Do we judge a team’s entire body of work on a botched snap or a gust of wind?