Well, we know what the dominant topic at next month's SEC Football Media Days in Hoover, Ala. will be.
Tuesday night's announcement that college football will decide its national championship through a seeded four-team playoff starting in 2014 shook the industry, but wasn't totally unexpected.
It's a 12-year deal, so the playoff structure agreed upon will be around until 2025. But there's no turning back. The playoff is here to stay. In the future, the only things that will change are the number of teams involved or how the participating teams are decided.
However, lots of unanswered questions are left in the wake of the New World Order in college football.
Right now, here's what we know about the newly enacted four-team playoff:
-- The two semifinal games will be played on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day within the bowl framework;
-- The two semifinal games (No. 1 seed v. No. 4; No. 2 v. No. 3) will rotate among six bowl sites, guaranteeing each bowl the opportunity to host a semifinal game four times within the 12-year period;
-- The four teams will be chosen and seeded by a selection committee.
-- The factors the selection committee will take into consideration in determining the four teams include strength of schedule, conference championship and head-to-head results.
-- The neutral site for the national championship game will be awarded to the highest bidder.
-- The national championship game will be played on a Monday night, the first Monday in January that is six or more days after the second semifinal game is played. Hence, the title game will be played no earlier than Jan. 8.
Why now? Easy. The SEC has dominated college football in recent years with six straight national championships, and watching two teams from that conference compete for the national title was simply too much for some conference commissioners and presidents to stomach.
So, once divisional rivals LSU and Alabama were decreed as the two most deserving teams, the wheels were quickly put into motion, and the sixth months of delicate negotiations among men with powerful egos led to Tuesday's announcement.
Ironically, despite the significant volume of anti-SEC hatred out there, the most powerful conference won the playoff battle over the Big 10 and Pac 12 because there will be no automatic qualifiers. The four best teams will be picked.
As an Associated Press story stated, "If it's college football, the Southeastern Conference must be winning." Indeed.
If that means two or three SEC teams make the playoff, so be it. But the same is true for the Big 10 or Pac 12, both of which advocated automatic qualifiers. As Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said, the new playoff format will be an "open marketplace for all schools."
Good.
Essentially, the four-team playoff is open to everybody, meaning programs like Boise State, the favorite underdog of the national media for the past few years, have a shot to make it as well. Certainly, their "access" into the playoff is better than the current BCS system, which has two more years to run.
Hey, there's already a diagram of the 2014 playoff bracket making the rounds on the internet showing the SEC champion facing the fourth-place SEC team and the SEC's second place team squaring off with the third-place team.
.
The aftermath of Tuesday's announcement of the agreement for a four-team playoff has been filled with too many questions for one blog. Some of the important questions are these ones:
-- Who will sit on the selection committee? Geographic diversity allowing each region of the country to be represented will likely be a mandate. Their job is expected to be very difficult, particularly in selecting the final team.
-- How many people will sit on the selection committee? Eight? 12? 16? 24? How high do you go to make sure everybody's voice is heard?
-- How much weight will each factor be given? For example, will a conference championship outweigh strength of schedule or ranking?
-- What six bowl games will be involved in the rotation for the semifinal games? Look for the Sugar, Rose, Fiesta, Cotton, Orange, Chick-fil-A, Outback and Capital One Bowls to make bids. And what about the Champions Bowl, a new partnership between the SEC and Big 12?
-- How will the gobs of money generated from the playoff be distributed among the conferences? Will the payouts be based on the success of a particular conference's teams or will everybody get an equal amount?
-- How will the bidding process for the national championship game work? Cities like Atlanta and Jacksonville have already expressed interest. You know Jerry Jones is licking his chops at the prospect of bringing the title contest to his billion dollar palace in Dallas. Is it possible we could see the final site at a cold weather site? Yes. It's more likely, however, the game will end up in the Southeast (Atlanta, New Orleans or multiple cities in Florida), Southwest (Dallas, Houston or Phoenix) or West Coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle).
-- How does the Rose Bowl fit into the playoff equation? The folks in Pasadena, Calif., the Big 10 and Pac 12 have always viewed that traditional New Year's Day game as sacred territory beyond the parameters of any bowl structure. Thursday, ESPN announced a new 12-year agreement to televise the game. This sentence from the press release is sure to raise eyebrows: "Whatever is determined to be the exact post-season bowl rotation as part of the future format, ESPN will have the rights to the Rose Bowl Game each year."
Of course, another important question is how long will it take before pressure mounts to expand the playoff to eight teams? My guess is not long. By 2017 or 2018, the clamor for a biggest playoff pool will be ear-shattering.
What we do know is the money, of course, will be staggering. The presidents know what they're doing (I think), and they wouldn't have made the huge leap to a four-playoff without the promise of a lucrative financial windfall.
Right now, ESPN pays $155 million per year for the television rights to the BCS bowl games (four major bowls and championship game). Analysts who are supposed to know such things contend TV rights could double, or even triple, to $300 million or more per year.
Yowza.
ESPN has an exclusive negotiating window to get a deal done, but look for the networks to jump into the fray with proposals that could match or surpass what the four-letter network is willing to pay.
What happens then? The outcry to pay college athletes will only grow louder. Both the $2,000 "full cost" stipend shelved by the NCAA because so many schools objected and Steve Spurrier's controversial proposal to reimburse football players and their families for game-related expenses such as travel, lodging and meals in the amount of $300.00 per game suddenly seem inadequate.
The belief behind Spurrier's proposal is that the money involved in college football has multiplied countless times over what schools received 45 years ago when he was playing for Florida, yet athletes get exactly the same thing as Spurrier did: a scholarship covering tuition, room and board, books and other reasonable expenses.
Unfair? Hard to argue otherwise when conferences are awash in cash from TV networks eager to televise the three biggest games of the year, and financially benefit from the huge national audiences the games are sure to attract.
Thus, the schools lucky enough to be members of one of the big five conferences that run college football (SEC, Big 10, Big 12, Pac 12, ACC) will receive millions from their conference's individual TV deals (SEC has contracts with CBS and ESPN) AND whatever the payout from the upcoming TV deals relating to the playoff will be in a couple of years.
Time to overhaul the system? Yes.
What the entire process leading to the four-team playoff - and the expected TV pot of gold sure to follow - has confirmed is the NCAA and the schools in the major BCS conferences are entrenched in the entertainment business.
Good luck getting a single conference commissioner or school president to admit it though.
Remember, it's all about academics.
LINK: http://southcarolina.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1380200
Tuesday night's announcement that college football will decide its national championship through a seeded four-team playoff starting in 2014 shook the industry, but wasn't totally unexpected.
It's a 12-year deal, so the playoff structure agreed upon will be around until 2025. But there's no turning back. The playoff is here to stay. In the future, the only things that will change are the number of teams involved or how the participating teams are decided.
However, lots of unanswered questions are left in the wake of the New World Order in college football.
Right now, here's what we know about the newly enacted four-team playoff:
-- The two semifinal games will be played on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day within the bowl framework;
-- The two semifinal games (No. 1 seed v. No. 4; No. 2 v. No. 3) will rotate among six bowl sites, guaranteeing each bowl the opportunity to host a semifinal game four times within the 12-year period;
-- The four teams will be chosen and seeded by a selection committee.
-- The factors the selection committee will take into consideration in determining the four teams include strength of schedule, conference championship and head-to-head results.
-- The neutral site for the national championship game will be awarded to the highest bidder.
-- The national championship game will be played on a Monday night, the first Monday in January that is six or more days after the second semifinal game is played. Hence, the title game will be played no earlier than Jan. 8.
Why now? Easy. The SEC has dominated college football in recent years with six straight national championships, and watching two teams from that conference compete for the national title was simply too much for some conference commissioners and presidents to stomach.
So, once divisional rivals LSU and Alabama were decreed as the two most deserving teams, the wheels were quickly put into motion, and the sixth months of delicate negotiations among men with powerful egos led to Tuesday's announcement.
Ironically, despite the significant volume of anti-SEC hatred out there, the most powerful conference won the playoff battle over the Big 10 and Pac 12 because there will be no automatic qualifiers. The four best teams will be picked.
As an Associated Press story stated, "If it's college football, the Southeastern Conference must be winning." Indeed.
If that means two or three SEC teams make the playoff, so be it. But the same is true for the Big 10 or Pac 12, both of which advocated automatic qualifiers. As Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said, the new playoff format will be an "open marketplace for all schools."
Good.
Essentially, the four-team playoff is open to everybody, meaning programs like Boise State, the favorite underdog of the national media for the past few years, have a shot to make it as well. Certainly, their "access" into the playoff is better than the current BCS system, which has two more years to run.
Hey, there's already a diagram of the 2014 playoff bracket making the rounds on the internet showing the SEC champion facing the fourth-place SEC team and the SEC's second place team squaring off with the third-place team.
The aftermath of Tuesday's announcement of the agreement for a four-team playoff has been filled with too many questions for one blog. Some of the important questions are these ones:
-- Who will sit on the selection committee? Geographic diversity allowing each region of the country to be represented will likely be a mandate. Their job is expected to be very difficult, particularly in selecting the final team.
-- How many people will sit on the selection committee? Eight? 12? 16? 24? How high do you go to make sure everybody's voice is heard?
-- How much weight will each factor be given? For example, will a conference championship outweigh strength of schedule or ranking?
-- What six bowl games will be involved in the rotation for the semifinal games? Look for the Sugar, Rose, Fiesta, Cotton, Orange, Chick-fil-A, Outback and Capital One Bowls to make bids. And what about the Champions Bowl, a new partnership between the SEC and Big 12?
-- How will the gobs of money generated from the playoff be distributed among the conferences? Will the payouts be based on the success of a particular conference's teams or will everybody get an equal amount?
-- How will the bidding process for the national championship game work? Cities like Atlanta and Jacksonville have already expressed interest. You know Jerry Jones is licking his chops at the prospect of bringing the title contest to his billion dollar palace in Dallas. Is it possible we could see the final site at a cold weather site? Yes. It's more likely, however, the game will end up in the Southeast (Atlanta, New Orleans or multiple cities in Florida), Southwest (Dallas, Houston or Phoenix) or West Coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle).
-- How does the Rose Bowl fit into the playoff equation? The folks in Pasadena, Calif., the Big 10 and Pac 12 have always viewed that traditional New Year's Day game as sacred territory beyond the parameters of any bowl structure. Thursday, ESPN announced a new 12-year agreement to televise the game. This sentence from the press release is sure to raise eyebrows: "Whatever is determined to be the exact post-season bowl rotation as part of the future format, ESPN will have the rights to the Rose Bowl Game each year."
Of course, another important question is how long will it take before pressure mounts to expand the playoff to eight teams? My guess is not long. By 2017 or 2018, the clamor for a biggest playoff pool will be ear-shattering.
What we do know is the money, of course, will be staggering. The presidents know what they're doing (I think), and they wouldn't have made the huge leap to a four-playoff without the promise of a lucrative financial windfall.
Right now, ESPN pays $155 million per year for the television rights to the BCS bowl games (four major bowls and championship game). Analysts who are supposed to know such things contend TV rights could double, or even triple, to $300 million or more per year.
Yowza.
ESPN has an exclusive negotiating window to get a deal done, but look for the networks to jump into the fray with proposals that could match or surpass what the four-letter network is willing to pay.
What happens then? The outcry to pay college athletes will only grow louder. Both the $2,000 "full cost" stipend shelved by the NCAA because so many schools objected and Steve Spurrier's controversial proposal to reimburse football players and their families for game-related expenses such as travel, lodging and meals in the amount of $300.00 per game suddenly seem inadequate.
The belief behind Spurrier's proposal is that the money involved in college football has multiplied countless times over what schools received 45 years ago when he was playing for Florida, yet athletes get exactly the same thing as Spurrier did: a scholarship covering tuition, room and board, books and other reasonable expenses.
Unfair? Hard to argue otherwise when conferences are awash in cash from TV networks eager to televise the three biggest games of the year, and financially benefit from the huge national audiences the games are sure to attract.
Thus, the schools lucky enough to be members of one of the big five conferences that run college football (SEC, Big 10, Big 12, Pac 12, ACC) will receive millions from their conference's individual TV deals (SEC has contracts with CBS and ESPN) AND whatever the payout from the upcoming TV deals relating to the playoff will be in a couple of years.
Time to overhaul the system? Yes.
What the entire process leading to the four-team playoff - and the expected TV pot of gold sure to follow - has confirmed is the NCAA and the schools in the major BCS conferences are entrenched in the entertainment business.
Good luck getting a single conference commissioner or school president to admit it though.
Remember, it's all about academics.
LINK: http://southcarolina.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1380200
