What's the Payoff, with no Playoff...

As I watched Florida’s domination of Ohio State last night I couldn’t help wondering if the result would have been different had the game been played last year, you know, when Ohio States season ended. This isn’t to disparage Florida in any way. They are deserving champions after coming to Arizona and dominating the Buckeyes in every facet of the game. Despite some questioning their involvement in the championship, they proved that they were the better team (and perhaps that the SEC was the better conference), but seriously, when did Ohio State play its last game?

I’m not certain, the memory’s hazy, but I think it was before Britney Spears had opened her legs for public viewing, I believe that American turkeys still had their heads, Donald Rumsfeld was still defending the United States against Terrorists, and Michael Richards was still just Kramer. Why the long layoff? Well, in part it’s because the Big Ten insists on ending its season on the third Saturday of November, with the Ohio State – Michigan game. Tradition is great and everything, but that decision translated into an extra two weeks without competition for the Big Ten’s top two teams. It would be naïve not to think that the extra time had something to do with them being blown out in their bowl games by a combined 41 points. But college football’s governing body is also to blame. It would have been difficult for the NCAA to have made their Championship game any more irrelevant. Fans just no longer cared with the same fevered passion as they would have seven days before. It might seem like only a week, but in this case a week’s all the difference in the world. Once the NFL starts its playoffs, college football, for its own sake, needs to be finished. It’s that simple. New Years Day is about college football. There should be bowl games all day, they should culminate that night in the national championship game. A game which concludes a three week playoff.

The NCAA, in all their brilliance, has said that there will be no changes to the current system until at least 2010, but that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be. Boise State supporters (and there seem to be a lot more of them after last weeks insane victory 43-42 overtime victory against Oklahoma) are clamoring that their team deserves a shot at Florida, and of course they’re absolutely right, but the game I really want to see is Florida-USC. Yes, USC lost to their rival in their last game, but after dominating Michigan, I’d love to see them have a crack at the title. A simple playoff of the six conference champions and two at large bids would maintain the importance of the regular season, while satiating our need to know who truly is the best. The technicalities aren’t really as important as the overall idea, but the at large bids could be awarded to the top ranked teams who failed to win their conference. Clearly, there would be some caveat for an undefeated mid major to automatically gain entry. The seeding would be simple: base them upon the rankings of the Associated Press poll. The coaches have shown this season, above any other, that their involvement in the voting process is a farce. Even if they bother to vote themselves, which many of them don’t, then they often vote for personal reasons, because of someone’s politicking, or for whimsy. The press isn’t perfect and they certainly aren’t always objective, but they’ve shown themselves to be a much more neutral barometer of the rankings, if for no other reason than at least they actually fill the form out themselves.

A playoff under this system would have been:

1) Ohio State v. 8) Wake Forrest
2) Florida v. 7) Boise State
3) Michigan v. 6) USC
4) Louisville v. 5) Oklahoma

Wake Forrest is the only lemming in the group, but how often will the ACC be won by the Demon Deacons and not Miami, Florida State, or Virginia Tech. The only team with a gripe about being excluded is LSU, who might be as good as Michigan, but lose out on the second at large bid based on ranking (although Michigan likely would have been ranked lower without the uproar for a re-match with Ohio State in the title game). That only intensifies the importance of September to December. With or without LSU, the playoff would have shown just how good Boise State is, it would have told us all we need to know about USC, it might even have produced better results from a rested, but not complacent, Ohio State and Michigan. Most importantly though, we’d have a true champion… it might even have been those wild, ballsy, go for the win with a two point conversion, Broncos.

What’s the Payoff, for the Player:

The other thought I had as I watched the extravagant pageantry of the game was, how long will it be before some pioneering student-athlete goes Curt Flood on the NCAA? There is such an exorbitant amount of money being earned for their schools by football players (and to a slightly lesser extent basketball players), that their coaches are now being given contracts in excess of 3 million a year. The two coaches in last night’s game combined to earn 5 million this season. Last week, in an attempt to get itself back to BCS prominence, Alabama gave Nick Saban a 40 million ten year contract. If he succeeds, he’ll take his team to a championship in which the school earns an automatic 17 million from the television contract alone. Then there’s merchandising money, the automatic and free advertising, and the endowments generated by big time athletic success. The players that Saban uses to get there, the young men whose names are on the back of the jerseys being sold? They get a first rate education (if they choose to treat it as such), they get exposure to the professional ranks (if they’re good enough to warrant it), and they get a pat on the buttocks and a couple thank you(s).

Now, I am no civil rights lawyer, but it seems to me that clearly there is some extreme exploitation happening here. School presidents will preach about the integrity of amateur sports, but no intelligent person can seriously put any credence in such horse-wash. Keeping money away from student athletes has nothing, absolutely NOTHING to do with integrity. It has everything to do with greed. There is a monster legal case here; a case which, given the color of most athletes playing in BCS and March Madness games, would be rife with racial sinews and political agendas. A case, which given the formidable strength of the NCAA’s legal machinery, could quite possibly be defeated at the highest levels of judicial court, but then Curt Flood’s 1969 anti- trust case against baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn wasn’t successful either. Instead it was ground-breaking, precedent setting, and change inducing. A case against the NCAA would have a similar effect, for in a country so doggedly determined to publicly propagate civil rights, there is an injustice here awaiting