NCAA 2014 College Primer

Well I guess it’s time to hitch up the wagon to another NCAA college football season. Hi everyone, and welcome back!

This is going to be one of the most tumultuous seasons since the advent of Bowl games. No more tirades from the underprivileged, unbeaten schools – now we have a gosh darn tootin playoff system in place! We have further conference re-alignment, with Maryland leaving the ACC and Rutgers leaving the American Conference to partner up with the Big Ten. Also Louisville moves over to the ACC and a bunch of teams from the Sun Belt, C-USA and some newcomers slot themselves in new homes, just to keep the confusion factor intact! Geography be damned, re-alignment is messy!

2014 College Primer

Just recently, the powers that be at the NCAA allowed the five power conferences their autonomy. What this means in layman’s terms is no more Cinderella! No more underdog. Teams like South Alabama, Georgia State and Old Dominion who had fulfilled the mandate to become Division I schools have now had the door slammed firmly in their faces and become members of Division II or FCS (formerly Division I-AA). Conferences like the Mountain West, American and MAC, along with C-USA and the Sun Belt, are going to have to become pretty creative to be able to recruit decently and to remain competitive within the new framework. What super-talented high school kid is going to want to go to North Texas or Toledo knowing he has zero chance of ever competing for a National Championship? Through some rite of passage, the smaller schools will have to prove they are worthy of an invite to join the Big Five, or slink off into mediocrity. Hopefully, some trickledown effect will allow the smaller schools to bring in some decent recruits.

Now of course the pundits will argue that the Boises and Hawaiis and Central Michigans didn’t belong anyway, and there is some credence to this comment. However, it made the games fun and gave some relevance to the Bowl selections and match-ups we were able to view over the last 14 years. The other part of the argument will be, what happens to Wake Forest, Vanderbilt, Colorado, Indiana? Those schools are already at the bottom of the big conferences, and it will be interesting to see if they get stronger through the higher profile available when recruiting.

You have the possibility of union representation, as Northwestern University voted for players rights, whilst large power conferences have struggled with the “pay players for more than being athletes” scenario. In this new billion-dollar industry (and don’t kid yourself, this is exactly what it has become), you have student-athletes playing to fill the coffers of the universities and being compensated only by a college education that the athlete may or may not be prepared to take advantage of. Also the huge amount of money being brought in by schools and/or conferences selling television rights to their games has created individual networks that broadcast games that are only relevant to a particular conference (Big Ten Network, SEC Network) or, in the case of Texas and BYU, their own school’s network that shows a variety of sporting events throughout the year (with the majority of the programming revolving around football). It’s obvious that there is lots of money to go around, it’s just the distribution of it that seems less-than-equitable.

The playoff games and the system it replaced will be under constant scrutiny throughout the season, as those four spots up for grabs will create an incredible amount of posturing among coaches, boosters, and athletic directors before this is all said and done. It is impossible to have all five power conferences represented within the current framework and also allow for one conference to possibly send two teams to this final solution. The BCS was not perfect, that’s for sure, but it did allow for all 120-plus schools to see a sliver of opportunity, rather than some big money-making machine to slam the door so tight that daylight would never be forthcoming. As a purist, it sometimes makes me wish that we could go back to the early days of the established bowl season and it’s theoretical champion- and there, of course, is the dilemma of the 2014 season. We will continue this poor approach into its first beta version and hopefully make changes, or we will have the five power conferences create a new division for themselves and be the only ones eligible for this incredible chunk of NBC/ESPN/Fox network money. Somehow in basketball it has worked reasonably well with everyone involved. For the football fan, this is going to be a real test !!

Hopefully the catcalls and posturing will be kept to a minimum as the athletic directors and conference commissioners tweak the system to create one undisputed champion. That could be elevated to new heights if more than five teams go undefeated or we have powerhouses go 11-1 with a quality loss to a highly ranked opponent. The one constant throughout this fall will be that every weekend will become a microcosm of the entire season. Every game will become the next most important opportunity for multiple schools to participate in. Becoming bowl-eligible will no longer have the luster of previous campaigns. Thankfully, many of the schools are scheduling games with tougher non-conference opponents to enhance their resumes in future seasons. That could become the new litmus test for the Power Conferences.