University of Georgia President Michael Adams is pitching an eight-team football playoff:
Adams voted against a playoff proposal offered by fellow Southeastern Conference champion Bernard Machen last spring. But a loss of control at the presidential level and increased competitive parity have changed Adams’ position.
As chairman of the NCAA executive committee, he will advance his proposal at the organization’s annual convention next week.”I find it interesting that our most high-profile sport is the only place where we as presidents have turned the end game over to another group,” Adams said. “There has been a concentration of power among the conference and bowl commissioners. I believe it is time to take the ultimate power out of their hands.”
Adams’ position obviously has less to do with concentrations of power than it does with his university’s football team finishing third in the polls, with no hope of contending for a title, even though they finished the season with seven straight wins (including four over ranked opponents). Over its last seven games, UGa went 7-0 with an average score of 35-20. Eventual champion LSU went 6-1 with an average score of 39-27 (aided greatly by a 58-10 thrashing of in-state patsy Louisiana Tech). In basketball, Georgia may well have received a higher seed. In the BCS, they had no hope. They didn’t win their division, didn’t play in their conference title game, and LSU beat both of the teams that beat Georgia. The Bulldogs’ season was over the minute the clock hit 0:00 in the Tennessee game.
All cynicism aside regarding Georgia’s deathbed conversion, Adams is (a) absolutely right and (b) tilting at windmills. The plus-one idea Myles Brand will pitch next week is the best you’re going to get. It would probably have helped Georgia, assuming that they would face LSU in the plus-one game. But it’s still not the answer, because who is to say that it should be LSU vs. Georgia in that game and not USC or Missouri, West Virginia or Kansas or Oklahoma? No other sport decides its champion based on an opinion poll, and there’s no reason football should either, other than the big piles of cash at the end of the BCS rainbow.
P.S. Save your garbage about a playoff making the regular season meaningless. Are the regular seasons in other sports meaningless? Tell that to fans in the Bronx, where the Yankees will play a meaningful series against the Sox in mid-April. Or tell that to Bill Self, last seen chewing out his 14-0 Jayhawks in the first half of a game against Loyola (Md.). A playoff doesn’t make the regular season meaningless. The current system does make the rest of the season meaningless for teams losing early. This year was a bit of an aberration with the top six teams having two losses, but in most years, Georgia’s season would have become meaningless on September 6, USC’s on October 6 and Missouri’s on October 13 when they lost to South Carolina, Stanford and Oklahoma, respectively.
In 1988, the KU football team went 1-10 in Coach Glen Mason’s first year. That campaign featured losses of 56-7 to Auburn, 63-10 to Nebraska, 63-14 to Oklahoma State and 55-17 to Missouri. Overall, the team was outscored 496-189. That year, of course, the basketball team finished 27-11 in Larry Brown’s final season, defeating Oklahoma 83-79 at Kemper Arena to win the national championship. The 1988 Jayhawks held both Nebraska and Oklahoma State to fewer points in basketball than in football.