Before we get started here, please answer a question, or at least ponder it as a warm-up:
What have Vanderbilt and Kentucky and Mississippi State and Minnesota and Illinois and Arkansas done in college football that should entitle them, should make them privileged, should give them greater opportunity and fill their pockets full of cash over programs like Utah and BYU and Kansas State and Oklahoma State and Clemson?
Just wondering.
This much is as factual as any truth can be made to be: We live in a world of bullies. Whomever holds the big stick makes the rules. As it is swung, honesty and equality and fairness are first casualties. That’s always been true, but it’s been reinforced even more of late. Pick your topic, any topic, of discussion — anything and everything from national politics to international land grabs to social issues to plain old sports.
Hitting the little guys has penetrated all of it, even our Saturday afternoon games.
Nothing new there in college football, tucked as it is in the hypocritical realm of higher education. But what’s happening now is as egregious as anything that’s come before, and that’s saying a whole lot. The SEC and the Big Ten, two conferences ordained holy by heavy television contracts from networks that have empowered them not just to the point of being immersed in greed, but to the point of enabling them to dictate and alter competition on the field, to determine who gets what in a college playoff.
No big surprise. We’ve all seen it coming from 500 miles away, those leagues demanding that they each should get four automatic qualifiers into an expanded College Football Playoff, be it made up of 14 teams or 16, regardless of how some of those teams actually perform during the regular season, while conferences like the Big 12 and the ACC get just two auto-bids, and the G5 leagues less than that. Notre Dame? According to a recent report by Yahoo Sports writer Ross Dellenger, the Irish would get in if they finish reasonably high in the CFP rankings, something pretty much bound to happen on the reg.
How can these powers that be do that? Here’s how: If the others try to block them or call their bluff, those P2 leagues just might walk away from the rest of college football and set up their own playoff. And who wants that?
On the other hand, how badly would the college game and interest in it be damaged if the Big Ten and the SEC pulled that power play, making it understood from jump that no football teams across a large portion of the country could be involved in a playoff? How would that affect the attention spans of a wide collection of fans from coast to coast whose eyeballs are windows to more cash, whose teams, as is, might have only fat chances of gaining a CFP slot, but suddenly now would have none at all?
This whole thing is stupid, born of hunger for power and greed, what’s best for the college game itself being both ignored and damned.
If the season starts, and teams from the Big Ten and the SEC know full well all they have to do is finish in one of their individual league’s top four spots, what poison will that spill across competition in those conferences? Who, other than league and school officials bound to benefit financially from that setup, thinks crowning in advance a full four is a good idea?
There’s been talk that the SEC and the Big Ten could feature nine league games in the regular season, with a few exclusive cross-conference games to fill out the schedule, unafraid that the better teams in each league will be hurt by any of that because pristine-to-perfect records won’t be needed, nor will they matter.
It’s clearly understood, alongside the question atop this column, that the SEC and the Big Ten also have some stellar football programs, such as Ohio State and Alabama and Georgia and Michigan and others. But what would be out of sorts about judging those teams fresh year by year, giving them advantage or disadvantage as they go, game by game, as well as judging surprise teams from the Big 12 and the ACC and the G5, rewarding them as they earn those rewards, as opposed to predestining teams from the leagues holding the big stick?
We get it. That’s not how the world works. The world works in a manner that gives opportunity to the already privileged. The Bullies are set up to win.
Folks from the SEC are still mad that Alabama didn’t get into the playoff this past season, despite the truth that the Crimson Tide lost to teams like Vanderbilt and Oklahoma. Besides also losing to Tennessee, Alabama ended up getting beat by Michigan in their bowl game. It had some nice wins, but that doesn’t erase the defeats.
But that’s what the SEC and the Big Ten — and some of their media mouthpieces, their sycophants who disingenuously shrug and wonder what all the complaining and commotion is about — want to do: make the records irrelevant.
They want to separate the conferences even more, delivering to those who already are given the most gold more of it, a lot more of it. That’s what’s good for the P2, it’s not what’s good for the college game.
It makes anyone objectively interested in that greater good actually hope that big-time boosters and private equity will get more involved in college football. The reason being that at least some schools outside the P2, schools like BYU and Utah and Texas Tech and Oklahoma State and Kansas and Clemson and who knows how many others have donors and investors who are filthy rich who might be eager for their own reasons — and that’s a whole other story — to help balance the ledger and help their teams gain a competitive edge. That, of course, would not be much help for the eager programs left behind. Which is to say, it could make matters better, but there’s a chance it might make matters worse.
Either way, it’s easy to believe that as the less-advantaged seek extra money, the SEC and the Big Ten will do likewise, and just who will have the highest stacks of cash to use as they wish, then? The guys who have the head start or the ones trying to catch up? And if there are a select few who devise ways to narrow the gap, will the P2 simply invite them into their exclusive club? Even the bullied wouldn’t mind becoming a bully themselves. Regardless, whoever gets additional resources is most likely to both win and have opportunities created for them, one way or another.
That might turn college football into an inferior version of the NFL, into a bastardized money game, into an unabashed arms race, but ….
But.
It already is.
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