If you can’t beat ‘em, change the rules!
Posted by UFreak in 
College football seems headed for Plus-One
SEC Commissioner Mike Slive is in charge of a conference that’s now won six straight BCS titles.
It was SEC Media Days, the annual gathering of hundreds and hundreds of people wandering around the Wynfrey Hotel in Hoover, Ala., with credentials (some of them even journalists) and the requisite visit to the ballroom with the media guides for each school.
There, each media member was handed a gift bag that included mostly stuff that was left in the hotel room for the maids. But there was a nice T-shirt that should have come with a glass of expensive wine and some brie.
It read — “SEC: We Are College Football.”
The subtitle could have read, “It’s our world and everybody else is just playing in it.”
The conference won its sixth straight national title Monday night and will be favored to win a seventh. But you know where the SEC really flexed its muscles?
It got the BCS off its collective rear ends.
They’ve seen enough. They’re tired of hearing, “S-E-C! S-E-C!” at the end of every championship game. The conference commissioners not named Mike Slive have announced that the BCS doesn’t work. Why? I can give you six straight reasons.
So they met in New Orleans not with the idea of tweaking their system, but of changing it drastically. They cannot assure that the SEC won’t have a seventh straight champion, but they can at least make it more difficult.
At least that’s the theory.
When we get to 2014, it seems likely there will be a Plus- One in place, which would mean a national semifinal, probably to take place at two of the current BCS sites. It would be followed a week later by the championship game.
The commissioners have fought the move ever since it was proposed by the SEC in 2008, but they didn’t know the SEC planned to hoard the market on crystal balls.
They have argued that a Plus-One system would lead to a true playoff with eight or 16 teams, and we have always replied, “So what?” They have argued that any kind of playoff would hurt the other bowl games, but the other bowl games continue to decline.
Ratings and attendance were down this bowl season. Some of it was caused by matchups, some of it by the economy, some of it by geography.
They have argued that fans can’t pick up everything and spend the money to travel to numerous games, but the Orange Bowl and Fiesta had 17,000 empty seats combined with only one game for the fans of the respective schools to attend. You’re telling me that semifinal games at those two sites wouldn’t have drawn more fans, better ratings and, most importantly, bigger bucks from television and sponsors?
They have argued that it would be tough on the student-athletes, as if they really care. And while making that argument, they ignore that school is not in session when those games would be played while school is in session when they’re traveling five times a year to distant locales brought on by conference expansion.
But in the end, they would have continued those arguments in the face of facts if the SEC hadn’t created a monopoly on confetti.
Would LSU and Alabama still have met for it all? Probably. But there would have been another step.