The NCAA News - Comment
November 4, 1996
Guest editorial -- I-A on a perilous path with new bowl alliance
BY RICK BAY
San Diego State University
The August 5 issue of The NCAA News began its coverage of the new "super alliance" arrangement with the headline "Bowl alliance lauded." Since then, I have been trying to reassure myself that the story was not as threatening to Division I-A college football as it first appeared.
However, after talking with many of my colleagues and attending the annual meeting of the Division I-A athletics directors, I am more alarmed than ever. It is evident that, as one Division I-A president has said, "The alliance has created a national football championship game outside the jurisdiction of the NCAA."
First, for the record, it should be clarified that the organizations praising the new alliance are limited to those who will benefit directly from it -- namely some members of the Southeastern, Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big 12, Big Ten and Pacific-10 Conferences and the University of Notre Dame.
As a major conference that has been excluded from automatic qualification, the Western Athletic Conference will suffer irreparable damage from our omission, and the other Division I-A conferences (Conference USA and the Mid-American Athletic and Big West Conferences) also will be diminished. The arrangement partitions Division I-A football, is ominous for the bowl games left out of the "super alliance" and reserves almost all postseason football revenue to the six participating conferences.
If the two "at-large" berths in the new arrangement are thought to be any consolation, let's be realistic. In most years, Notre Dame will be touted for one of the slots , and the other is much more likely to go to an alliance conference runner-up than it is to one of the four conference champions that do not qualify automatically.
In short, as few as 62 of the 111 Division I-A schools could claim virtually all postseason college football revenue beginning in 1999. And some reports put that number at more than $600 million for the first seven-year contract between the "super alliance" and ABC Television. Those of us outside the alliance
will be hard-pressed to maintain Division I-A
football, not to mention comprehensive athletics programs in general.
In fairness to the "super alliance," it should be noted that the new arrangement is at least, in part, a creative solution to the challenge of crowning a national champion without the benefit of a full-scale playoff. I am not certain that it is essential for the health of college football to absolutely identify a national champion, but if the "super alliance" is the best alternative we have to accomplish that goal, then it is time for the NCAA and the Presidents Commission to establish a 16-team playoff that will include every Division I-A football conference and provide badly needed revenue for all of Division I-A, just as the Division I Men's Basketball Championship does for all of Division I.
To allow the "super alliance" to proceed is a repudiation of the philosophical ideals that guided us in the development of the NCAA Division I basketball tournament. The basketball tournament offers representation to almost every conference, and virtually all Division I schools receive some tournament revenue. By contrast, the "super alliance" is essentially an elitist concept that in most years will benefit only the six major football conferences and perhaps Notre Dame.
In 1994, the NCAA Joint Policy Board scrapped any plan to determine the Division I-A football champion on the field. With the emergence of the "super alliance," however, it is time to reconsider.
A 16-team playoff would generate important revenues for the NCAA Division I-A membership and would not unduly lengthen the traditional season. Many Top 20 teams already play (or will be playing) at least 13 games, counting conference championship and bowl games. If conference championship games gave way to first-round playoff games, in most cases, 16 teams would be playing 12 games, eight teams 13, four teams 14 and two teams 15. (Incidentally, last year the two teams that squared off in the Division I-AA championship game each played 15 games; this year, Brigham Young University could play 15 games in Division I-A if it reaches the Western Athletic Conference championship game and plays in a bowl game.)
By playing on consecutive weekends, a Division I-A playoff could be over by early January, with most games occurring during the traditional winter break. In any event, there would be little lost class time (Friday afternoons for those traveling) and the competition would be far less disruptive to finals and other academic concerns than the NCAA basketball tournament.
This scenario shares the wealth, keeps many Division I-A programs in business and is far better than the evolution of a super league with only four bowl games and perhaps limited to only six conferences. Further, as currently structured, only the NCAA can maximize the potential television revenue from a football playoff because it can package it with basketball and command an Olympic-sized contract.
The merits of a playoff aside, however, the bowl alliance will prove harmful to nearly 50 Division I-A football programs by reducing both their potential revenue and their ability to fund Division I sports and opportunities for many student-athletes.
Have we really studied the long-term consequences of the "super alliance" on Division I-A college athletics? Is the Presidents Commission involved? Are the presidents of the "super alliance" schools themselves fully informed? Is the apocalypse upon those schools that are outside the "super alliance"? Is this the beginning of Division IV? The break-up of the NCAA? Who is running college football?
As athletics administrators who are concerned about increasing opportunities for a wide range of young people at the highest intercollegiate level, we must sustain and nurture an expanded Division I-A, not reduce its numbers by reserving new revenue sources for less than 60 percent of its membership.
In discussing this issue with other Division I-A athletics directors, I know that some of my colleagues even at the "super alliance" schools themselves do not believe that the new bowl alliance is in the best interests of college athletics. The "super alliance" train may already have left the station, but the ramifications of its journey are enormous, and we need to slow it down and examine other productive alternatives.
It is our moral responsibility to do nothing less.
Rick Bay is director of athletics at San Diego State University.
Comment -- In the '90s, decency sits on the sidelines
BY JAN GLIDEWELL
St. Petersburg Times
I was in a gloomy gymnasium at Kinston High School in Kinston, North Carolina, one night in 1968 when I heard something I had never heard before.
"We are No. 1!" the crowd cried, raising index fingers and taunting the players from New Bern. "We are No. 1!"
If I had done that on a football field six years earlier, one of my coaches would have obligingly snapped the finger off, handed it to me and told me to clean out my locker on the way to the hospital.
If I had ever opened my mouth to an official to say anything other than "We'll kick, sir" or "We'll receive, sir" or "We'll take the penalty, sir," I would have been tossed out of the game and, given what would have been waiting for me on the sidelines, I would have probably headed in the other direction.
But times, my younger friends and colleagues will note, thinking I don't see them roll their eyes, change.
So what happened at a football game between River Ridge and Land O'Lakes (Florida) on October 11 shouldn't be surprising.
It may or may not have been a racial slur that sparked a violent confrontation at a postgame handshake ceremony.
What concerns me is that the potential was there at all.
I'm not about throwing blame on this school or that one or on this coach or that one. What can we expect from these kids?
Sportsmanship in the 1990s, and for decades now, is taunting your opponents when you are better than they are; chasing them with a bat when you aren't. It is doing a ridiculous celebratory dance every time you do something right, yelling obscenities at yourself and anybody nearby when you don't. It is the absolutely ridiculous concept that any adult anywhere playing a child's game can be worth more than $100 million while the cost of taking a family of four to a single hockey game at Tampa's new Ice Palace is more than half of what most workers earn in a week.
Sportsmanship today is hiring a hitman to break the leg of somebody who skates better than you, chemically augmenting your physiology to be able to block or tackle more aggressively, and, if your aggression gets out of hand for whatever reason, spitting on the official who takes you to task for it, making sarcastic remarks about his recently dead child and then having your punishment for it delayed until the cash register stops ringing for the year.
Professional sports today aren't sports, they are economics. They are clashes between multimillion-dollar corporations where purposefully maiming an opponent isn't anything personal -- it's just a means of depleting his or her assets.
They are a massive carrot dangled in front of poor kids at odds even more prohibitive than the Florida lottery in a system where college sports become merely a part of the rite of passage but where the dollar stakes are almost as high as in professional sports.
The world outside of sports isn't much healthier. Inside an edition of the paper where the football brawl was on the front page was a story that told how it took four teachers and aides to subdue a fifth-grade pupil after he punched his teacher at least six times in the stomach.
Blame violent movies, blame our permissive society, blame parents like the one who told me one day that her kid shouldn't be hassled for hijacking a school bus at gunpoint because the gun he was carrying had a broken firing pin. (The next time I heard from her was 10 years later, after the same kid hanged himself in the county jail.)
Blame people who simply won't take responsibility for their actions and those of their children. Blame parents who speak to educators and other authority symbols in terms that would shrivel the ears of a gangsta rapper.
I actually heard an adult interviewed after the football brawl criticize the Pasco County sheriff's deputy who used pepper spray to break up the fight.
I saw the video. The spray was used within seconds of a kid wading into the fight swinging his helmet -- at this point a lethal weapon -- by the faceguard.
The effects of pepper spray wear off. The effects of head and spinal injuries frequently do not.
If my kid or grandkid is on that field and somebody is that far out of control and there's a deputy around carrying pepper spray, I hope to God he uses it.
Opinions -- Paper gives credit to university for calling off game
Editorial
Hartford Courant
Discussing the University of Rhode Island's decision not to play a football game against the University of Connecticut after 31 Rhode Island players were suspended for their role in vandalizing a fraternity house:
"The suspensions were the right choice to send a message: Being an athlete doesn't justify violence. Star athletes must play by the rules both on and off the field.
"Those are important lessons at a time when incidents of violence by athletes seem to be escalating.
"Apparently angry because two of them had been expelled from a fraternity party, the players smashed windows and doors, kicked fraternity members and threw one down a fire escape....
"Although criminal charges should be filed, nothing less than suspension would have been appropriate. As for the forfeit, it came at a high price because every member of the team -- and perhaps also UConn -- paid a price, not just the offending players.
"Details have yet to be worked out on how the forfeit-win will affect UConn's chances of getting into divisional playoffs or how URI will compensate UConn for lost concession and ticket revenue.
"Such details are far less important than the lesson for all athletes that star quality doesn't excuse violence and that sportsmanship is a full-time goal."
Lew Freedman, sports editor and columnist
Anchorage Daily News
Discussing the difficult decision facing a local high-school coach who must determine if suspending a player is the proper thing to do:
"Innocence is long gone in professional sport, passed into history sometime in the last decade or so in big-time collegiate sport, and is slipping away by the minute in high-school sport. High-school coaches always had the power of the Supreme Court -- my way or the highway -- they just more often had to wield it to punish guys who broke curfew, not the law.
"In all cases, appropriate punishment must be weighed. Do the athlete's actions disgrace the team? Do the athlete's actions violate the coach's rules and precepts? A coach must be ever-vigilant that he makes a decision based on what's right, not on the likelihood of winning and losing.
"(The coach) may know of extenuating circumstances worthy of compassion. Or he may be so close to a situation that he can't see the wrong that others see.
"Only the coach knows where his heart is."
Tiebreaker rule
Paul Marshall, football player
University of Illinois, Champaign
Chicago Sun-Times
"No one likes a draw. The players work so hard, sweat their butts off on the field, and then it's a draw? The players want to know who won. They want to know whether they should go back to locker room cheering, or whether they should go watch tape and see what went wrong."
John Robinson, football coach
University of Southern California
Chicago Sun-Times
"I like it a lot. I've been in sudden deaths and they can go on forever. This was very exciting. You have to come up with something right away. I would not want to have played another 15 minutes (in an overtime loss to Arizona State University)....
"The 25-yard line is a little close. It seems to me that the 30, putting it a little out of field-goal range, might be better. That way, you'd have to get a first down, and not just kick a field goal."
Lou Holtz, football coach
University of Notre Dame
Chicago Sun-Times
"It gives us a winner and a loser, which you should have. It takes a lot of the decision-making that was unfair off a football coach late in the game. If you don't have overtime, you are almost forced to go for two, or you leave yourself vulnerable with all the second-guessers. More importantly, you have to face your football team if they feel that you played for a tie."
Athlete image
Joe Painter, lawyer
Roanoke Times and World News
"I've been involved in college athletics for more than 30 years ....It has been my experience that much of the criticism toward college athletics is racially and culturally based.
"The pundits like to point to minorities and the poor who have 'risen from their backgrounds' and 'overcome their adversities,' but they just don't want too many of 'those people' representing their school. 'Academic integrity' is a code word not too far removed from ethnic cleansing. In other words, it's acceptable to have some minorities, but only if they fit some ill-defined elusive mold."
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