By RON HIGGINS
Scripps Howard News Service
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Every football season, Southeastern Conference commissioner Mike Slive witnesses the gnashing of teeth over the Bowl Championship Series.
From talk radio columnists to the average fan, the BCS is an easy target to rip. Will the two best Division 1-A college football teams really end up in the national championship game?
"There's an annual nervousness that exists throughout the fall," said Slive on Tuesday during the first day of the annual SEC spring business meetings. "There's a different set of issues that arises almost every weekend. But the last couple of years have had a lack of relative controversy in the end."
Yet Slive, who's also serving the second of a two-year term as coordinator of the BCS, is pressing his 12 school presidents in the SEC on their suggestions about a future playoff. Such a playoff wouldn't happen until at least 2010 and beyond because of current bowl and TV contracts.
"Instead of using the 'P' word, I like to think whether the question should be is No. 1 vs. No. 2 enough?" Slive said. "We won't start future bowl and TV negotiations for a couple of years, but I don't think our conference needs to wait to think about it. I want our presidents to be prepared."
In the current system, the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the BCS ranking meet in the national championship game. Eight other teams play in the four BCS bowls _ the Rose, Sugar, Orange and Fiesta Bowls. The SEC, Pac-10, Big Ten, Big 12, Big East and Atlantic Coast Conference champs all automatically advance to BCS bowls or national-title game, and those conferences have the majority of tie-ins to the 32 bowls.
There are several roadblocks to getting a playoff system. The largest problem is that the Rose Bowl has seven years remaining on a contract with the Big Ten and Pac-10 conferences. Those two conferences have their champions committed to that bowl, unless they are No. 1 or No. 2 in the BCS and released to play in the national championship game.
But can't such an obstacle as the Rose Bowl contract be removed with an obscene amount of money, a mind-staggering payout so large that it would be hard to pass up?
"Remember several years ago when a big Swedish company, ISL, came in and offered a billion dollars for the rights to a college football playoff?" Cotton Bowl president Rick Baker said. "Everybody looked at that and said, 'Look at how much money we're leaving on the table.' Six months later, they went bankrupt.
"So do you put something as valuable and as tradition-laden as college football in the hands of someone who has no skin in the deal other than a lot of money?"
The majority of the SEC football coaches want some form of a playoff while making sure the tradition of the bowl system is untouched.
Some coaches like the idea of a plus-one system, a game in which the winners of the BCS bowls would be re-ranked, with the top two advancing to the national championship game.
Other coaches prefer a four-team playoff, seeding the top four teams in the BCS poll, and using two BCS bowls to play the two semifinals and another BCS bowl for the national championship. The fourth BCS bowl would be left out of the equation but would rotate into the three-game playoff system the next year.
Slive won't say which system he likes the best, but he does believe college football doesn't need anything as extended as the NFL playoff system.
Arkansas coach Houston Nutt has mixed emotions.
"I've grown up going to bowl games, and I know how hard it is to get to those bowls," Nutt said. "From where I sit in Fayetteville, it's very, very tough. It's a reward for each team, and I'd hate to lose that. But I can see where you get down to the final four to six teams, you'd want a plus-one to get it played out on the field."
Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer said presidents and coaches are close to finding the right playoff formula, yet he doesn't want to stretch the season past an extra game.
"When you get to that position of being in the national championship game," Fulmer said, "it means you've already come through an SEC regular season and won the East and then through the SEC championship game.
"There's a lot of physical pressure and attrition by the end of a long season. Who's playing for you and who's not? If you lose two great players near the end of the year, are you one of the best teams at that moment?
"The regular-season conference schedules we play in the SEC are very difficult. Maybe some of the other conferences have teams like Michigan that play just two or three tough conference games a year. Maybe a plus-one playoff concept would make sense."
Slive agrees with Fulmer that the season doesn't need to be any longer.
"College football is still a part of higher education, and we have exams in December," Slive said. "College football has always been a one-semester sport, and there's an interest in keeping it a one-semester sport."
Florida coach Urban Meyer sweated when there was a question of whether his once-beaten SEC championship team would qualify for the BCS national championship game. The Gators did, leapfrogging to No. 2 after beating Arkansas in the league championship game, and then hammered Ohio State, 41-14, for the national title.
"The BCS needs to get the human element out of the decision of what teams gets in the (national championship) game," Meyer said. "For people who stand behind a microphone (TV announcers) to have an impact on who's going to play in the game is mind-boggling to me.
"I think there's ways to decide something like that, like a team has to win a conference championship before it is even considered for it (the BCS national championship game). The BCS needs to clean that up, and it came back (from its annual meeting) saying 'everything is as is.'"
LSU coach Les Miles said he feels some of the polls that are included in the BCS computer equation, such as the coaches' poll, should be called into question.
"Certain coaches don't take their (voting) responsibility seriously," Miles said. "So in the absence of voting one week, not voting the next week or declining the opportunity, I'd rather go with a playoff, maybe an eight-team playoff."
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