Everyone's champion

College football is an economic anomaly. Between hiring staff, providing financial assistance through scholarships or academic grants, and coordinating travel, uniforms, and training, subsidizing it takes up much of athletic departments' budgets. Yet, few schools with football programs profit from having the sport. Under Title IX, the statutory provisions regulating proportional financial outlay for men's and women's collegiate athletic programs, it has no counterpart. Consequently, some schools have cut certain sports to conform with this legislation. The University of Miami cut men's and women's golf as well as swimming and diving to accommodate its football program, typically one of the best in the country. Why do colleges, many of them state institutions, fund football when the costs of operation of and of participation in higher education increase every year at a rate much higher than headline inflation?

Many parts of the country regard its status as religious, as iconic. Student pride and campus morale are often cited as reasons why universities have continued their football programs. Such justifications seem to stretch the logical link between the presence of a football team and raising a school's profile, and only deep cultural entrenchment supports the validity of those claims. Would the benefits of eliminating football or 'privatising' it in state schools result in a better allocation of resources?

 

The structural shortcomings of college football economics further exacerbate atavistic clinging to the status quo in all aspects of the sport, particularly in determining a national champion in formerly Division I-A, now known as the Bowl Subdivision (FBS). The Bowl system itself is an anachronism. When rail travel was the norm, teams that could not play each other because of transportation logistics met during the winter holiday break for one last hurrah. 

 

Presently, technology makes getting across the country fairly cheap, and schools from different geographic regions routinely meet during the regular season. Hence, the old bowl system, which has grown to a level where roughly half of the teams in FBS compete in a postseason game, rewards mediocrity rather than pair two regional superpowers that could not face each other due to academic and technological constraints. When bowls were few, schools and fans could take pride, but few savvy fans and students will boast about participating in the Outback Bowl or any other game with a corporate title sponsor. However, bowl games are the fruit of a high priced gambit: sponsors pay money into a school general fund for getting to a bowl.

 

The Bowl Championship Series (BCS), a cartel of the heads of the major football conferences and Notre Dame, have co-opted the system further where teams that play in the BCS receive the largest payouts, national television exposure, and establish football supremacy. The BCS was touted as the solution to the arcane method of selecting a national champion through media and coaches' polls. Since its inception in 1998, the BCS has been fraught with controversy over which teams qualify. The BCS also failed to produce a consensus champion in 2003. One of the advantages of the BCS was to eliminate a split title, yet no consensus champion emerged that year. Arguably, since the BCS limits eligible teams to the power conferences and Notre Dame, no true consensus national champion emerges. The BCS only determines the winner of its series which might not necessarily represent national consensus. The computer formula will take input data from national polls and mathematical rating systems, but it has an inherent bias towards the conferences which stand to benefit most. If a school from a lesser conference went undefeated, scheduled perennial powers for its non-conference schedule and took them down in the process, it might not factor into the national championship equation. 

 

The lack of a college football playoff in former Division I-A and the proliferation of the bowl system diminishes the product that is supposed to instill pride in the student body and attract national and international attention. The following is a suggestion to the NCAA over how to solve the playoff problem and simultaneously restore the game to schools rather than to render that unto a money machine:

1. No preseason polls. First poll will come out after every team has played four games. Preseason rankings are subjective conjecture at best. The absence of a preseason poll will not impact how teams play or prepare. If anything, the first few weeks of the season are a good time for teams to prove themselves and vie for coveted spots.
2. In the first year of the system, any conference with 10 or more teams will be split into an Upper and Lower Brackets rather than on geographic lines. The five or six best will occupy the Upper Bracket. To be considered title eligible, each UB team has to play all the other UB teams. To complete a seven game conference schedule, each UB team will play two or three of the Lower Bracket opponents. This part of the schedule will be determined by athletic directors. After the end of Year One, the UB will relegate 2 teams. The LB will promote 2 teams. This will eliminate the need for a conference title game. Though a lesser team upsetting a favorite makes for good drama, it makes consensus - the much sought after purpose - impossible under the present system. Since there will be fewer regular season games, bracket games will have the same import as division games in professional football.
3. Given the prospect of relegation, a team which would like to compete for the national championship will have to schedule worthy non-conference opponents. If Oklahoma had an off year in the Big 12, non-conference games against SEC, Big 10, and ACC powers might salvage a season when its in-conference schedule is soft. The current system disproportionately favors teams lucky enough to avoid the toughest competition in its own conference. Wisconsin once skated through the Big 10 without having to play Michigan or Ohio State. Albeit rare, such phenomena would not occur with the bracket format.
4. No Cupcake Rule - Scheduling lesser competition for glorified scrimmages encourages bad sportsmanship and needlessly pads the statistics. Glorified scrimmages help no one. Scheduling Florida or Nebraska might look nice on a small school resume. It might get a recruit. However, no student, fan or alumnus can be proud of a 73-0 pasting. Any school scheduling an FCS opponent ought not to be considered for a national title.
5. Maintain a computer formula, but eliminate the incentive to run up the score. Including margin of victory in the ranking formula also encourages bad sportsmanship. Margin of victory is borderline irrelevant in the NFL, a league with much more parity amongst its clubs than even the top 32 college teams. Tie breakers will come down to bracket record, overall conference record, and head to head record. In a five or six team bracket, it is unlikely that three team will have the same conference record if they would share more common opponents than they do now. Moreover, multiple loss teams seldom merit national championship consideration.
6. An eight team playoff at the end of the season will determine a national champion. Seven of the marquee bowl venues will host the playoffs. The title game can rotate among the oldest established bowls, but few would quibble if the Rose Bowl hosted the last college game of the year. Moreover, a playoff system would not fragment the season between two academic terms. If the first weekend in December were to be the last in the regular season, then two weeks of playoff games following final examinations would make sense. The national championship could take place New Year's Day. Eight teams suffice for logistical purposes, and regression analysis using the BCS formula will show huge drops between the rating of the eighth and ninth teams each year. Also, elimination games produce great drama; the NCAA basketball tournaments provide good evidence of that.

The one argument against incorporating a playoff system is ironically an economic one. Demand for football is high, so why kill the cash cow? Decreasing the total number of games played would be economically unwise because demand is high and relatively inelastic. Therefore, limiting the total number of games played by each school reduces the value of future television contracts. However, demand and clamor for a playoff system to determine a champion are high as well. When observers and coaches find that the current system distorts competition, then change is appropriate.

Since the pressing need is to find consensus, perhaps protecting vested economic interests ought to matter less. College football does provide tangible and intangible benefits for even loss making teams. A model which would compel incumbent powerhouses to behave more competitively is in every one's interest. Though first person participation and the number of televised games would decrease at first, consistently good match ups each week would drive up the value of each game, and hence the price. If revenue for a good albeit flawed product is high, would revenue for an improved version though sold in slightly less quantity be higher? In principle, the answer is yes. Until one can prove that the status quo would continue to generate more interest, higher returns, and protect the integrity of the game, then the NCAA, the networks, and the schools themselves must review all possible ways of abandoning an anodyne, inefficient approach to determining a winner.