Everyone's
going to be talking about the brackets and college basketball over the
next few weeks, and while college football can't really have a December
Madness, it doesn't have to be that long. Remember, people don't really
care about the college basketball Final Four as much as you think. Of
course the real sports fans do, but the casual fans don't. Don't believe
me? Quick, who was in last year's Final Four? No, everyone cares about
the first two rounds of the tournament, when their brackets are still
intact and they get a diversion from their daily work lives.
While March Madness holds everyone captive for a month, it actually
loses steam by the very end. All college football has to do is have a
big two weeks, starting in late December and going through January 8th,
to have an eight team tournament that would give a whole new meaning to
the brackets. The exposure would be through the roof, and it wouldn't
kill the bowl system.
Of course, there won't be a playoff any time soon. With that in mind,
there needs to be a better selection process for picking the BCS teams
beyond just the polls and computers. There needs to be a committee who
puts together the matchups, including the national championship, that
goes beyond the self-interest of the BCS bowls. The BCS formula needs to
be involved, but it should be up to humans, not bowl people in yellow
jackets, who decide the final showdowns. We would've had Georgia vs. USC
in the Rose Bowl had cooler, neutral heads been involved.
For college basketball, there has to be a way to make the college
basketball regular season matter again. Yeah, there are bubble teams who
need the regular season, but if you're a fringe tournament team, you
probably don't belong. While there's a movement to make the NCAA
tournament much bigger and expand the field, the sport would be better
if the tournament ditched about 17 teams and get down to around 48. Keep
the automatic bids for the little guys, but keep the mid-range big
conference teams out. It's not right that a team can theoretically be
the seventh best in its league yet still have a shot in the national
title tournament. College football has it right, for the most part,
needing to win your league, or finish near the top, to get in the BCS.
Q: What can college
football learn from the college basketball post-season and March
Madness, and vice versa?
A: Three things college football can learn from March Madness.
1. George Mason.
More teams vying for a championship equals more fun. Sorry, BCS lovers,
but a playoff system works for every party involved. Now, I’m not
suggesting some 16 or 32-team bracket that eliminates the bowl games and
any shred of the sport’s tradition. Eight or even four teams would work
swimmingly at lighting a fuse under a bowl season that’s become
increasingly bland and bloated.
2. Marketing. From Selection Sunday to One Shining Moment,
no sport on the planet does a better job of marketing its postseason and
creating a national stir. Capital One Bowl Week? Nice try. Of its 32
bowl games, college football generates non-local interest in one-quarter
of its games, at best. In March Madness, all but the 1 vs. 16 games are
must-see events.
3. The Selection Committee. Hey, it may never be perfect, but I
love the concept of an appointed selection committee, a star chamber of
some of basketball’s best minds. The BCS process is too convoluted for
the average fan to follow and too inconsistent on a year-to-year basis.
Forget the polls and the pollsters, which are unreliable, and too often,
uninformed. Put a bunch of football junkies in a room don’t let them
out until they get it right.
Three things March Madness can learn from college football.
1. There can be too much of a good thing. Do we really need 65
teams to determine a champion, while still giving the little guy a
chance? March Madness ought to strongly consider scaling back the
number of teams, leaving the ACC’s eighth-place team at home. Think of
how much better it would make the NIT.
2. The regular season matters, giving every weekend a playoff feel.
As the college basketball regular season comes to an end, the games can
get somewhat tedious, as anticipation for conference tournaments and the
Big Dance grow. Save for a handful of bubble teams, three-quarters of
the post-season teams are already known. In college football, the
opposite is true, with schools needing to avoid a slip up in November
and December to land a BCS bowl berth.
3. The Bowls (especially the January ones). March Madness is
good clean fun, but nothing tops the pageantry, tradition, and overall
experience of a New Years’ Day bowl game. The Rose Bowl in Pasadena vs.
the Final Four in Minneapolis? In terms of pure sports enjoyment, it’s
not even close, especially if you’re fortunate enough to do it in
person.
Q: What can college
football learn from the college basketball post-season and March
Madness, and vice versa?
A: College football definitely has
more to learn from hoops than the other way around.
The only thing hoops needs to learn from football is that if you
stage big events (namely, conference tournaments), they need to mean
something. The conference tournaments in basketball are good
for generating excitement, and in theory, they're supposed to separate
NCAA teams from NIT teams. However, an analysis of the past several
years suggests that these postseason conference clashes are woefully
undervalued by the selection committee.
Just a few examples:
2001: Georgia, barely over .500 (with a worse overall record than
Arizona this year, 16-14), lost in the first round of the SEC Tournament
against LSU, but still made the field... AS AN EIGHT SEED!
2006: Air Force loses prematurely in the Mountain West Tournament, not
even reaching the final at a time when its bubble status was very
uncertain. The Falcons get an invite anyway, as a 13 seed, the last
at-large in the field of 65.
2007: Kansas State wins a classic "battleground game" against Texas Tech
(a 4 seed vs. 5 seed quarterfinal) in the Big XII Tournament, but still
isn't invited to the Big Dance.
These examples are off the top of my head. Give me the bracket sheets
for past NCAA fields and the conference tourneys that preceded them over
the past decade, and we could come up with many more cases in which the
committee viewed a conference tournament result as irrelevant.
In just about every other respect, though, the basketball
postseason outshines college football. Three reasons only begin to tell
the tale.
First, basketball offers significant cross-pollination of
matchups. To make the NCAA Tournament, you need to beat good
teams inside and outside your conference. To win the NCAA Tournament,
you have to beat teams outside your conference to make the Elite Eight,
after which it's possible (though still not likely) that you'll
encounter a conference foe. Hoops always gives its fans the satisfaction
of knowing that a national champion really is a national champion, a
victor over various kinds of teams from all corners of the country.
Football needs to demand that BCS hopefuls have more demanding
non-conference schedules, and work to create such matchups if possible.
Second, basketball is willing to play a full month of postseason
games, whereas football is only willing to play one postseason game per
team.
The NCAA Tournament and the BCS are both huge money grabs for college
sports. The difference is that basketball doesn't pretend to limit the
amount of games based on a hypocritical appeal to athletics. Hoops is
willing to stage a monthlong extravaganza, a sports carnival, because
fans love it. If you're going to have a carnival, you might as well make
it honest, pure and fan-friendly. Hoops gets this; football doesn't. As
Martin Luther once said, "If you're going to sin, sin boldly."
Third and finally, basketball has the Final Four, the best
championship event in all of sports. This simple concept, if adopted by
football, would create a TV powerhouse that would please millions of
college football fans.
There's nothing quite like the Final Four among major sporting events.
Even if football wanted to imitate the Final Four, it couldn't quite
duplicate every single aspect of college basketball's championship
weekend.
There's no other high-profile sport in which four teams gather in one
location to play back-to-back games for a shot at a championship. There
have been some occasional whispers and mumbles--never with any real
substance or weight--in favor of the NFL having neutral-site conference
title games, but until that happens, the Final Four has something
entirely unique.
The very notion of having "National Semifinals" gives the Final Four a
level of stature, significance and size that other events just can't
match. The presence of four teams with distinct identities gives the
Final Four annual flexibility as an entertainment product. Some years
(1993, 2007), the Final Four is a heavyweight gathering. Other years
(2000, 2006), it's a showcase of surprises. In most years, it's
something in between. All things considered, the Final Four remains
fresh, relevant, interesting, and free of politics, all things that have
destroyed the BCS over time. Sure, a football Final Four would involve
plenty of politics, but the mere act of staging three more games in a
TV- and fan-friendly way would reduce (not eliminate, but reduce)
complaints about college football. That's something worth doing in this
day and age.
