Anything preventing that? I read a suggestion that Boise St. should decline their crummy bowl invite and schedule a game against USC. Couldn’t that potentially be a much better draw than the Las Vegas bowl?
Or maybe Boise fans should actually buy tickets to the Las Vegas Bowl. Boise is a lousy draw. Christ, they can’t even fill their home stadium half the time.
Yes, of course; the NCAA restricts how many games its member institutions can schedule. You can’t just add games willy-nilly.
Bullshit.
http://harvardsportsanalysis.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/the-2010-college-football-attendance-rankings/
For 2010, Boise state had attendance average of 103.96% of capacity. Boise State does not get better than the Las Vegas Bowl because it is from a lightly populated part of the country and its recent growth has not allowed it to establish a traveling fan base in the manner in which older schools have.
The Bowl games are generally setup by local bowl committees who want to bring people to their city. They have no interest in the most interesting TV matchup. Quick, what is the most exciting bowl game in the last ten years not involving a school you are directly connected with? The Fiesta Bowl with Boise State is going to make the top three in most lists.
But you go ahead and make up stuff about how they don’t fill their own stadium. Yeah, they came up short in 2009 - http://bleacherreport.com/articles/398843-ncaa-football-attendance-figures-down-how-did-your-team-do. By 1,000 seats a game. Of course that average attendance beat out the average attendance for all of Conf. USA, WAC, Sun Belt, and the MAC.
False - bowl games want to balance local attendance as well as television viewership, since they get a piece of the audience share pie. Otherwise, Boise St. would get completely shut out of bowls.
USC would have played one more if they’d been eligible for a bowl. So what’s stopping them from scheduling a non-bowl exhibition game?
And couldn’t a well-promoted USC-Boise St. game potentially get monster ratings? Wouldn’t NBC jump at the chance to televise that?
What is stopping them is that NBC, or any other broadcaster, wouldn’t touch the game with a ten-foot pole (or poll) for fear of pissing off the NCAA, and more importantly the legion of sponsors/local boosters who have already paid ridiculous sums of money to have bowl games on pretty much every day for a month.
By doing so, USC would also be seen as thumbing its nose at the NCAA sanctions, and could be in line for further penalties. They are much better off taking their 2 year ban and getting on with life. Also, they lost 30 scholarships - the NCAA could take away more, gutting the program for years.
How do you know that? Under what authority could the NCAA impose further sanctions? The penalty is being paid, they couldn’t play in the PAC-12 championship or a bowl. Why couldn’t they schedule a non-bowl exhibition?
And what makes you think any network cares about pissing off the NCAA? The television rights go to the highest bidder, not to the friendliest network.
NCAA sanctioned teams may play a maximum of one post season game (conference championships don’t count). USC may not play any due to prior infractions.
If USC violated this, I’m sure the NCAA would be happy to hit them again with sanctions.
This is slightly a tangent, but I wonder how Mark Cuban’s “bracketbuster” idea fits into this. (In a nutshell, Cuban has recently been making noise about putting up boatloads of money to put on a game between two teams which either didn’t qualify for their conference championship, or whose conference doesn’t have a championship game, on the Saturday before the BCS final standings are announced. I don’t know if he’s set this idea aside now that he’s planning to buy the LA Dodgers.) That game, too, would seem to fall afoul of NCAA regulations for most of the same reason as the “exhibition bowl” concept…but, as we know, money talks.
I’m scanning over the voluminous NCAA bylaws. They do limit participation to the postseason games that are licensed by the NCAA. So I imagine that in order to schedule a postseason game without the NCAA’s approval, there needs to be litigation first. I don’t believe the NCAA has an antitrust exemption, so an antitrust suit would seem like the way to go.
So I guess no exhibition games by teams under NCAA sanctions unless a Mark Cuban decides to press the issue in court.
That would be a hard line to argue. The NCAA doesn’t itself make any money on bowl games. That goes straight to the Bowls themselves and the participating schools/conferences. The funding for the NCAA comes from the basketball tournament, and there was always the NIT, at least until 2005 when the NCAA bought it out.
And as the NCAA doesn’t officially sanction a championship game, the situation gets hairier (yes, the BCS game is a de facto national championship, but it’s not an official NCAA one).
The NCAA limits participation in postseason games. Whether they make money or not is immaterial, it’s the restraint of trade that’s key. USC wouldn’t be fighting to participate in one of the approved NCAA postseason game, they’d be fighting to participate in a game not sanctioned by the NCAA.
Ask yourself: what interest does the NCAA have in forbidding teams from participating in games outside of the system?
Technically, it would be Mark Cuban, as USC wouldn’t have a legal dog in that fight.
Well, there’s definitely the cynical answer that they’re protecting the bowls that already exist.
But there’s also issues of protecting the athletes, as you don’t want them playing that much, especially near Finals period. And if you get 1 unsanctioned bowl, why not 2 or 3 for the same team? After all, there’d be no NCAA oversight to prevent it. Or maybe just a powerhouse with an off-year. Why not a 5-7 Alabama vs a 4-8 Texas? There’d still be massive fan interest.
Why not open the doors all the way to making the NCAA semi-pro? Do it for baskbetball, too. It’ll just lead to an arms race in scheduling unsanctioned “exhibition” bowls that even the schools themselves probably don’t want.
Sure they would. They could stand to be paid by willing sponsors and a network for participating in an exhibition, but are prevented from doing so by the NCAA.
But if USC hadn’t been sanctioned, they’d be participating in a bowl game. So if they participate in a non-bowl game, they’d still be playing anyway.
They’re pretty much there in football and basketball.
NCAA Bylaw 17.9.4:
“A member institution’s last contest (game or scrimmage) with outside competition in football shall not be played after the second Saturday or Sunday in December, except for the following:”
(a) a scrimmage against alumni and/or students at the end of spring practice;
(b) a bowl game;
© games in an NCAA or NAIA championship tournament;
(d) a foreign tour, during the summer.
“Contest” includes any “exhibition game” or even “scrimmage” against another school.
Also, Bylaw 17.9.5 limits an FBS team to 12 games, with the exceptions of:
(a) A spring game;
(b) A conference championship game, if the conference has 12 or more teams;
© A bowl game;
(d) A foreign tour, during the summer;
(e) Games played in Hawaii, Alaska, or Puerto Rico “under the sponsorship of” an NCAA school (except that the sponsoring school counts it against its limit)
To take your second point first, so they beat a bunch of conferences that also didn’t get great bowl invites. Your point is? Christ, East Carolina put damn near 50K in the seats during that same time frame.
Now, back to your first point, interestingly, that article claims 103.96% of capacity at 33,269 per game. But Boise’s own web site puts Bronco Stadium’s capacity at 33,500! Granted it’s close to full and not 1,000 per game (you looked at the same article I did by the way), but it’s still not over 100% of capacity unless somebody has the wrong numbers…
But that’s not the NCAA profiting from it. Preventing somebody else from profiting is not sufficient to rise to the level of violating the law. Read up on the Sherman Act. The NCAA might be walking a fine line in some cases (and the BCS probably right over it), but it’s very questionable the NCAA itself actually violates trust law.
I assume you meant:
“They’re pretty much there in BCS football and Division I men’s basketball.”
That’s part of the problem - the NCAA represents Division II and III schools as well.
I have a theory: the reason the major conferences don’t leave the NCAA and form their own association is, the schools are not in it just for football and men’s basketball, and there are too many schools that would be left out that are competitive in other sports (and there’s no way the NCAA would allow its champions to play the other organization’s champions).
(Case in point: do you honestly think Butler would be invited? How about North Dakota State or Fullerton State? What happens if they win the NCAA (men’s basketball, men’s ice hockey, baseball) championship? It’s the whole “which of the two national champions is the best team?” argument again, and they absolutely don’t want this with men’s basketball.)