Analyzing ‘Death To The BCS’ : Chapter Six

Our ‘Death To The BCS’ series continues, even though the college football season is in the rearview. Days back we focused on Chapter Five : High-Paid Blazers. Today’s entry, Chapter Six : Presidential Problem.

– Harvey Perlman is chair of the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee, which means that for playing puppet to The Cartel, Perlman earns a title that appeals to the “gridiron-mad Cornhusker state”.

Perlman is an accomplished lawyer and chancellor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, yet laughed at the notion and viability of a playoff with on-campus games. Perlman scoffed at the notion of home games in Lincoln in December or January, even with a rabid fan base that all but sells out for the spring game a few months later.

– As a Cartel puppet, Perlman doesn’t acknowledge the benefit that students and faculty would receive from an on-campus playoff game, as well as the city of Lincoln, which would earn millions as a host. Out-of-town media. Higher ticket prices. A hyped atmosphere. Hotels, restaurants, bars, grocery stores, parking garages and the university would all reap the benefits.

“We would love a [playoff] game here,” said Wendy Birdsall, president of the Lincoln Chamber of Commerce. “I’m an economic developer. I’m all for looking for opportunities for the community and bringing in revenue.”

– Perlman blames the weather, despite cold and snow being true football weather as the best game day experience in the NFL takes place at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, WI. The 1967 “Ice Bowl” was a game between the Packers and Dallas Cowboys where the wind chill was 48 degrees below zero at kickoff.

– Rather than looking into the BCS himself, like so many others, Perlman bases his opinions almost exclusively on the very people who profit from the flawed system.

“The presidents rely on being briefed principally by the conference commissioners,” said Bill Martin, Michigan’s retired athletic director.

– Why does this happen? Because someone like Perlman has a university to run. Presidents ask their conference commissioners and listen to the bowl reps that wine and dine them every December and, armed with the party line, fight blindly. This is why Perlman trusts the Cartel and became a stooge for the system.

– The presidents are simply against a playoff because no one will present them with a viable playoff option. Someone like Perlman, an attorney whose career is rooted in the logic of argument, would in no way believe that Lincoln was truly unworthy of hosting a playoff game unless he were truly a sold out stooge.

The Cartel doesn’t educate educators, instead it looks for naive university leaders like Perlman to serve as the spokesman of its brilliant idea.

– “The ones who get involved aren’t reformers,” said Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist and expert on college athletics. “They’re jock-sniifers. They’re passionate about their sports and have fun. They’re not going to push for any major change. They’re representing conferences, and the conferences wouldn’t let them sit there if they thought they were going to change the system.”

– In 2003 The Cartel formed the Presidential Oversight Committee, in effort to spread some blame around as the masses were calling for change.

The 120 school presidents and chancellors offered authority, credentials, and brainpower. They were set up as academics who would ensure athletic departments served their schools but instead became pawns, happy to swallow The Cartel’s talking points, regurgitating them.

– Their biggest go-to reason for no playoff system; missed classes – despite the fact that the three lower divisions of college football have a playoff system, while posting graduation rates higher than Division I-A.

Perlman’s statement before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust issues; concerns about a playoff “interfering with the academic calendar or impinging on the academic missions of our universities”.

This takes place while Perlman and other presidents cash checks from college basketball, which requires exponentially more missed class time.

In other news, the University of Alabama closed the entire school for three days due to the 2012 BCS title game. Yes, the entire school.

– The flaw with Perlman’s stance – the fact that organizers could conduct an entire sixteen-team playoff in the current time span it takes to put on thirty-five bowl games. Most, if not all, games would take place during semester break.

– “The academic effect, it’s not just a credible argument,” said Big Ten commissioner and Cartel head honcho Jim Delany. “I think some of the arguments that have been advanced against the playoffs have not been credible.”

Of course The Cartel authors these arguments, remains a moving target and makes sure that no one person or group is ever responsible for the failures of the BCS. The presidents. The bowls. The athletic directors. The computers. The voters. The Cartel always creates a new scapegoat. It’s Bureaucracy Survival : 101.

– The more people who oppose the on-campus playoff game option, the better for The Cartel as the logistics of staging a four-week, neutral-site tournament would cause prohibitive travel costs and, consequently, half-empty stadiums.

Of course a playoff doesn’t have to use bowl games as neutral sites. Play the first three rounds on campus and let the bowls operate on their own outside the system.

– By keeping playoff games on campus, every game would sell out. Home fans would gobble up unused tickets by the visiting team and revenue would grow exponentially. z

– The Cartel has taken Lenin’s old edict – a lie told often enough becomes the truth – and in this case, a like told often enough by a Ph.D. sounds even more truthful, which is why so many proposed playoffs by fans and media still include using bowl sites.

– Look at the 2010 AFC Championship game, please in Indianapolis where Colts fans assured s sold-out, multimillion dollar gate. The Colts owned the state of the art building, pocketed the parking and concession money and allowed the league to control all sponsorship rights and television revenue.

Conversely, anyone who suggested moving a NFL Playoff game to the Citrus Bowl, where a promoter in Orlando gets up to 60 percent of the money, putting the NFL on the hook for travel costs – that idea would immediately get thrown out by commission Roger Godell, yet this is what The Cartel considered a positive arrangement, regarding the fleecing as “tradition”.

– Next up; Chapter Seven : Myth Of The Dead Bowls.

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