Student-athlete life

Gerald Gurney, associate athletics director
University of Oklahoma
USA Today

"(Demands on student-athletes are) much tougher because of the pressure to win and the year-round responsibilities that are placed upon them, in terms of constantly training or competing. It is very difficult for a student-athlete to experience learning for learning's sake.

"In my career and life-planning class, which is a life-skills class largely for athletes, I had the former center on our basketball team talk about career development and how to graduate in four years and those kinds of issues. And he said when he was an athlete, all they looked forward to was their next day off, which they would largely spend sleeping. Just catching up. That's a very good description of their current plight."

Division I-A postseason football

Grant Teaff, executive director
American Football Coaches Association
USA Today

"There is no discomfort (among coaches) at all. Everything (this year) has worked out, under the circumstances, the best possible way. Honestly, if you'd planned it, it probably couldn't have worked out better. Somebody, the other (pre-BCS) way, would have been totally left out."

Loren Matthews, senior vice president of programming
ABC
Biloxi (Mississippi) Sun Herald

"You don't hear us complaining. (The controversy) just adds to the spice of it. I don't know how it could be much better for ABC or the college football fans. ...

"Would ABC be opposed to a playoff? Absolutely not. But we're told a playoff is not in the cards."

Roy Kramer, former commissioner
Southeastern Conference
Chicago Tribune

"I think (the BCS) has been enormously successful because it has added a whole new flavor of life, so to speak. I don't know what the call-in shows would have done without it. People in California are interested in what happened in Oklahoma, and people in Louisiana are interested in what happened in California. It's had a kind of nationalization effect. ...

"One of the things that had happened was that the bowls had gotten so competitive that we were making choices for the bowls in mid-October. One of the things we wanted to do was to slow down that process by creating a system that would select the four major bowls, and the other bowls would have to wait.

"When we started this, we were going to use the two (human) polls, but the people at Associated Press and the football writers came to us and said they wanted to cover the news, not create the news. They wanted to be a factor in it, but they didn't want to be the sole factor. We didn't want to go with one poll, the coaches' poll. We thought we'd have some philosophical problems."

Pay for play

Idris Moss, football student-athlete
University of California, Los Angeles
Alameda (California) Times-Star

"You have to be grateful because you're getting a free education, but we should be getting more out of our scholarship checks. What we get is not enough."