Collegiate Till

Apparently last night's BCS National Championship Game was so bad (Q: Did you hear the LSU team bus is still stuck in the parking lot? A: Yeah, someone painted a 50-yard line across the exit) that even people involved with the system think it will be different next year. Tampa Bay Times writer Michael Kruse, in a piece at Grantland, suggests the awful game will make the creation of four 16-team "superconferences" and an actual playoff system that much closer to reality.

Ordinarily I disagree with people who suggest a playoff system would create a "real" national champion, because the suggested systems would boot the problem of arbitrary team selection from the top two teams down to the top eight or ten. However, Kruse hits on several ideas that would help overcome that problem.

And most importantly, he acknowledges that the superconference idea -- which would sort collegiate football teams into groups of haves and have-nots and leave the have-nots out of the discussion of who got to play for the title -- would pretty much bring to an end the fiction that collegiate athletics is a non-profit operation that shouldn't have to pay taxes. So what, Kruse says? That's almost certain to happen anyway, so why not bite the bullet and set the circumstances under which it does? I think here he overestimates the ability of NCAA officials and college sports folks to accept the reality that Uncle Sam is sniffin' the fine scent of greenbacks on the ol' quad, and Uncle doesn't let you play with his money unless you let him wet his beak a little. I think the superconference move will happen after the NCAA loses some future legal fight to maintain its nonprofit fairy tale.

Kruse also addresses the matter of the have-nots by saying that may wind up being the best thing for them. Too often schools without Division 1 NCAA athletic programs try to make the jump to that level and spend money they don't have in doing so, with dismal results. Snake-oil salesmen in the administration somehow convince university trustees that within five years of becoming a D-1 program, it'll be their school logo on the jerseys surrounding the national trophy and one of their own SAT-challenged "students" flashing his three-quarters of a degree in interpersonal communications in the first round of the draft. At the college where I used to work, the university president's wife always told people she wanted to see us "the best" in everything, including moving from NAIA competition to NCAA. The immense costs involved were one of the many things she didn't understand, and that idea was one of the unfortunately-not-as-many things on which she was ignored.

As Kruse points out, if you say from the get-go that these 64 teams (whichever ones they are) are the only ones who'll have any chance to play for the national title, then you keep schools below that level from spending themselves into the "world lit only by fire" status they'll be forced into when they sell all of two season tickets and have to choose between paying off the loan on the Jumbotron or lights in the library after 8 PM.

In the end, we'll see how it happens, whether Kruse's higher opinion of university athletic officials' intelligence or my pessimism about the same is warranted. But I'm right behind him on the fact that it will happen one way or the other, as all the school colors bleed into one -- deceased presidential green.