Are You Ready For Some Football?

I certainly am. As longtime readers will know, I have a special place in my heart for hockey. It's a sport for which I have a better-than-average understanding and passion. But in terms of time spent watching it, college football probably takes the title as my favorite.

Not that college football isn't without its problems, one of the largest of which is the ongoing financial and competitive imbalance between schools in the "power conferences" and the so-called "mid-majors". Teams playing in the six BC$ conferences—the ACC, Big East^*, Big Ten, Big XII, Pac-10, and SEC—are generally considered better than teams from the other Division I-A conferences. Consequently, they get more TV exposure, which leads to increased revenues for the program and better recruiting opportunities. Why are these teams better? Maybe because they have bigger budgets and more visibility in recruiting—which is the natural result of having more TV exposure. And so the cycle continues. When a mid-major team like Utah has a great season and crashes the BC$ party, it's national news—for a few weeks. Now, at the start of the new season, the Utes aren't even ranked in the Top 25.

It will be interesting to see how Utah does this year. There are high expectations after last year's rather amazing season. People on campus are excited about the team. But the team's lost its best player (Alex Smith, who's in the NFL now) and its coach (Urban Meyer, who's at Florida now). A repeat of last year's Cinderella story seems unlikely, but I suppose we'll see.

I'm also interested to see how BYU will do. I was in the Cougar Marching Band for three seasons, and I still hold a special place in my heart for the Y. But the last few years haven't been kind to Cougar fans. After Gary Crowton replaced LaVell Edwards as head coach, he opened his BYU coaching career by winning his first twelve games and making a small bit of BC$-breaking noise. But alas, his team then got blown out in the final game of the season and got badly beaten in their bowl game. Three losing seasons later, Crowton is out and Bronco Mendenhall is now in. Apparently he's a disciplinarian like LaVell was. This should help, as the team seems to have lacked focus the past couple of years. We'll see. It'd be nice to see BYU as winners again.

And I'm also interested to see how Weber State will do. They have a new coach in Ron McBride, who used to be the coach at Utah (before he was driven out in favor of Urban). The man knows how to coach football, and he should make the Wildcats a better team. Of course, considering they had their worst season in school history last year, they could hardly do worse.

And now it's time for another complaint. For the past few years, the winner of the Mountain West Conference—of which Utah and BYU, as well as hometown favorites Colorado State and Air Force are members—has been eligible to play in the Liberty Bowl. That was cool. The Liberty Bowl has a long and glorious history, and the game always featured the champion of Conference USA, so we'd get to see two pretty good teams in action. Sadly, that is no longer the case.

The MWC champion for the next few years will be going to the Las Vegas Bowl. Ho hum. And they'll be playing either the 4th- or 5th-place team from the Pac-10. That's just wonderful. I can just hear the conversation now: "Congratulations on winning your conference championship! As a reward, you'll be playing a 6-5 team from the second most overrated conference in the NCAA^** in a bowl game that drew 18,000 people to a 30,000 seat stadium last year." Yee-haw!

I can understand why the MWC and the Liberty Bowl went their separate ways. Geography was a real problem; not a lot of fans from Salt Lake City, Provo, and/or Fort Collins were thrilled about going to Memphis for a bowl game. But at least the MWC champion got to play another conference champion, not some also-ran who probably had to beat Idaho just to become bowl-eligible. What I would really like to see is a bowl game matching the MWC champion against the champion from the Western Athletic Conference.

There's a lot of history between these two conferences. Back in the day, the WAC consisted of eight teams, of which BYU was usually the best. After a few years the conference added Fresno State, making nine members. This arrangement worked out pretty well for all involved. Then, in an effort to grab more national market share, the WAC expanded to 16 teams in the late '90s. This resulted in a conference spread over five time zones, with teams ranging from Honolulu to Tulsa and from Laramie to Houston. After three years, the WAC collapsed under its own weight. Eight of the teams (seven long-time WAC members plus UNLV) defected and created the MWC. Much bad blood resulted, especially from long-time members Hawaii and UTEP, neither of which was invited into the new conference.

Today's WAC looks almost nothing like the 'Left Behind' WAC—only 3 of those 8 teams are still in the conference. But I still think a bowl game between these two conference champions would be fantastic. Their geography and level of play are very similar. And there are plenty of bowl sites convenient to both conferences: San Diego, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Fresno, and Honolulu come most readily to mind. Sigh. I can only dream.

While we're on the subject, why are there so many bowl games? And why do so many mediocre teams get to participate?^*** Take, for example, the Big 12 (or Big XII) conference. A brief look at this year's bowl schedule shows that the Big 12 has seven guaranteed bowl tie-ins, plus an automatic birth in the BCS. So two-thirds of the teams will be playing in the postseason. All they have to do is finish with at least six wins. This means that two teams who finish in the bottom half of their conference will be going bowling, as long as they can beat all the preseason pasties they usually schedule (see: Kansas State) and win three of their eight conference games. That's ludicrous. Teams in mid-major conferences can't get away with that. What a farce.

And that brings us back to the BC$, or Bowl Championship $erie$. It's the biggest farce of all. The stated athletic goal of the BC$ is to pair up the two best teams in the country to play for the national championship of college football. The financial (real) goal is to make as much money as possible for teams in the six above-mentioned conferences. It succeeds tremendously in fulfilling the second goal but routinely fails in the first. The Byzantine combination of polls and computer rankings the BC$ uses to determine who should get into the Big Game usually produces controversy rather than consensus. Teams get into the championship on reputation as much as performance, and as a result, the Big Game is as often as not a blowout.

But the BC$ is more than just a 'championship' game. It's a series of bowl games with ridiculously high monetary payouts to members of the six anointed conferences and the occasional^**** mid-major party crasher. It's four games, eight teams, and, statistically speaking, a 1-in-56 chance for a non-BC$ school to get in. But that's not all. According to CollegePlayoffs.com, in 2001, 38 of 50 bowl births (76%) and $150.75 million of $160.9 million of bowl game revenues (94%) went to BC$-conference teams. Of course, the NCAA doesn't object to this imbalance between its members—it makes the NCAA a buttload of money.

The logical solution to the BC$ problem is a playoff system. It allows for the issue of a national championship to be settled by players, not reporters and computer programmers. It gives mid-major teams a shot at the big boys on the field. And it allows for a more equitable distribution of the big NCAA money pie. And for all of these reasons, it's never going to happen. The BC$ schools have too much to lose by giving up the status quo.

So another college football season begins, problems and all. But I'm still excited. So much can happen over the course of a season. Good teams can stumble, unexpected teams can soar, and every Saturday brings a wealth of exciting games and surprises. I'll be watching to see how several teams do: BYU, Utah, Weber, Colorado State, Northern Colorado, and Doane College are the main ones that come to mind. But you never know. Last year, Colorado School of Mines (where I almost went to college instead of BYU) went to the playoffs for the first time in the school's 131-year history. And I guess that's why I like college football. As heavily stacked as the system sometimes is in favor of the big guys, every so often one of little guys does something special. Hope springs eternal on the college gridiron.

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^* I'm sorry, but the Big East is not a legitimate BCS conference and hasn't been since Miami and Virginia Tech left. Louisville, who just moved over to the Big East from Conference USA, was probably in a better conference last year than it is in this year.

^** The most overrated conference, of course, is the Big East (see above).

^*** Naturally the answer is "Money".

^**** 'Occasional' meaning 'Once in the seven-year history of the BC$' (Utah, last year).