VOLjlt
10-02-2006, 10:49 PM
Would love to see the thoughts on this from SEC fans.
Time has come for Big 12/SEC/ACC football challenge
By BERRY TRAMEL
October 1, 2006
College football has a dirty, little secret. Over the past 20 years, the game's culture has changed.
In the 1970s, few major schools dared play an inferior opponent. In the 2000s, few major schools dare not.
In 2006, every BCS conference is playing less than 50 percent of its non-league games against lower-status opponents.
The Big 12 is the worst offender, playing only 23 percent (11 of 48) of its non-conference games against fellow BCS schools. The SEC is at 29 percent, the ACC at 31 percent, the Big 10 at 32 percent, the Pac-10 at 43 percent and the Big East at 45 percent.
The culture must change. We must get back to competitive games and level playing fields.
And here's my idea to kick off such a massive change: a Big 12/ACC/SEC challenge series.
We have these series in basketball; they are needed in football. The Big 12, the Southeastern Conference and the Atlantic Coast Conference are obvious picks for the challenge because of their similarities: each has 12 teams, each has a league title game.
These are the leagues that can pull it off.
And the best news of all, some powerful people endorse the plan.
Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione said he could find no flaw in the idea. Sooners coach Bob Stoops and Oklahoma State AD Mike Holder both signed off on it.
"That's good," Holder said. "I like that idea."
Television would love the idea.
"Oh, yes," said Jeremy Langer, Fox Sports director of collegiate sports. "Anything that strengthens our non-conference inventory is something we'd be interested in."
The Big 12 already has kicked around a Big 12/SEC challenge weekend. Open the season over the Labor Day weekend, Thursday through Monday, with each Big 12 school playing an SEC foe.
The Big 12 athletic directors decided not to pursue such a plan, and Castiglione admits it's a tough sell to convince some of his peers to stiffen their schedules.
"The rub is to try to get enough votes in each conference," Castiglione said. "A number of schools have fought a notion of that type."
Heck, the Big 12 a couple of years ago merely requested that its members play at least one legitimate non-conference foe a year. This season, the Big 12 plays as many Division I-AA opponents (11) as fellow BCS league members.
So it is a tough sell. But it's worth it.
Here's the plan. Every Big 12 team would play an SEC foe and an ACC foe every season. Same with the SEC and the ACC.
The schedules would be properly constructed to give each superpower a game against another superpower (Texas-Miami, Oklahoma-Tennessee) and each rum-dum a game against another rum-dum (Vanderbilt-Baylor, Duke-Mississippi State). The other game for each team in the series would try to balance out the schedule difficulty.
Long-time rivalries would be preserved. Florida State-Florida. Clemson-South Carolina. Georgia Tech-Georgia. Old rivalries could spring up, like Arkansas-Texas. A school like Iowa State, which plays a doberman in Iowa every year, would be cut some slack in the challenge difficulty.
The challenge series works on every front, for a variety of reasons:
- Scheduling. Schools' hunger for victories and home games, plus the new 12-game schedule, have made it a seller's market. Lower Division I-A teams hold the big schools hostage for huge payouts, which now are soaring well past $500,000 and zooming quickly to a cool million.
"There is an increasing level of difficulty in finding teams that will come in and play," Castiglione said. "It's getting tougher and tougher and tougher."
- Television. Frankly, I don't know how the Big 12 keeps its networks from storming the league office. Many a September Saturday is void of even one decent matchup involving a Big 12 school, much less the three needed to satisfy the contracts.
"It's a concern," Langer said. "The Big 12 has made some strides. But as a whole, there tends to be a philosophy to schedule an easier game. From a television standpoint, it does make it difficult on us. People want to watch good games. It puts us at a disadvantage."
- Academics. Castiglione warns that stricter admission requirements are coming to the major conferences in a couple of years. Players that can't get into the Big 12 can still get into a Southern Miss or a Toledo. So those teams will be tougher to beat but will offer no greater reward when you do.
Playing teams most similar to you - in tradition, budget, academics - always is a better path.
- Cultural. The challenge could be a solid step toward a more equitable playoff than the one-and-done format we have today.
Everything about the current two-team playoff is geared toward a soft schedule. Strength of schedule was dropped from the BCS formula a few years ago; losses still are deducted from the point total. A team like West Virginia could reach the 2006 title game merely by winning one tough game.
Castiglione said he likes the general idea of the conference challenge "because I worry more about schedules going in the other direction."
Form this challenge, and pressure increases on poll voters not to rubber-stamp teams that win with weak schedules.
Form this challenge, and the message would be loud and clear that the true national championship goes through these three leagues.
Form this challenge, and college football's culture starts swinging back towards fair fights.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Time has come for Big 12/SEC/ACC football challenge
By BERRY TRAMEL
October 1, 2006
College football has a dirty, little secret. Over the past 20 years, the game's culture has changed.
In the 1970s, few major schools dared play an inferior opponent. In the 2000s, few major schools dare not.
In 2006, every BCS conference is playing less than 50 percent of its non-league games against lower-status opponents.
The Big 12 is the worst offender, playing only 23 percent (11 of 48) of its non-conference games against fellow BCS schools. The SEC is at 29 percent, the ACC at 31 percent, the Big 10 at 32 percent, the Pac-10 at 43 percent and the Big East at 45 percent.
The culture must change. We must get back to competitive games and level playing fields.
And here's my idea to kick off such a massive change: a Big 12/ACC/SEC challenge series.
We have these series in basketball; they are needed in football. The Big 12, the Southeastern Conference and the Atlantic Coast Conference are obvious picks for the challenge because of their similarities: each has 12 teams, each has a league title game.
These are the leagues that can pull it off.
And the best news of all, some powerful people endorse the plan.
Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione said he could find no flaw in the idea. Sooners coach Bob Stoops and Oklahoma State AD Mike Holder both signed off on it.
"That's good," Holder said. "I like that idea."
Television would love the idea.
"Oh, yes," said Jeremy Langer, Fox Sports director of collegiate sports. "Anything that strengthens our non-conference inventory is something we'd be interested in."
The Big 12 already has kicked around a Big 12/SEC challenge weekend. Open the season over the Labor Day weekend, Thursday through Monday, with each Big 12 school playing an SEC foe.
The Big 12 athletic directors decided not to pursue such a plan, and Castiglione admits it's a tough sell to convince some of his peers to stiffen their schedules.
"The rub is to try to get enough votes in each conference," Castiglione said. "A number of schools have fought a notion of that type."
Heck, the Big 12 a couple of years ago merely requested that its members play at least one legitimate non-conference foe a year. This season, the Big 12 plays as many Division I-AA opponents (11) as fellow BCS league members.
So it is a tough sell. But it's worth it.
Here's the plan. Every Big 12 team would play an SEC foe and an ACC foe every season. Same with the SEC and the ACC.
The schedules would be properly constructed to give each superpower a game against another superpower (Texas-Miami, Oklahoma-Tennessee) and each rum-dum a game against another rum-dum (Vanderbilt-Baylor, Duke-Mississippi State). The other game for each team in the series would try to balance out the schedule difficulty.
Long-time rivalries would be preserved. Florida State-Florida. Clemson-South Carolina. Georgia Tech-Georgia. Old rivalries could spring up, like Arkansas-Texas. A school like Iowa State, which plays a doberman in Iowa every year, would be cut some slack in the challenge difficulty.
The challenge series works on every front, for a variety of reasons:
- Scheduling. Schools' hunger for victories and home games, plus the new 12-game schedule, have made it a seller's market. Lower Division I-A teams hold the big schools hostage for huge payouts, which now are soaring well past $500,000 and zooming quickly to a cool million.
"There is an increasing level of difficulty in finding teams that will come in and play," Castiglione said. "It's getting tougher and tougher and tougher."
- Television. Frankly, I don't know how the Big 12 keeps its networks from storming the league office. Many a September Saturday is void of even one decent matchup involving a Big 12 school, much less the three needed to satisfy the contracts.
"It's a concern," Langer said. "The Big 12 has made some strides. But as a whole, there tends to be a philosophy to schedule an easier game. From a television standpoint, it does make it difficult on us. People want to watch good games. It puts us at a disadvantage."
- Academics. Castiglione warns that stricter admission requirements are coming to the major conferences in a couple of years. Players that can't get into the Big 12 can still get into a Southern Miss or a Toledo. So those teams will be tougher to beat but will offer no greater reward when you do.
Playing teams most similar to you - in tradition, budget, academics - always is a better path.
- Cultural. The challenge could be a solid step toward a more equitable playoff than the one-and-done format we have today.
Everything about the current two-team playoff is geared toward a soft schedule. Strength of schedule was dropped from the BCS formula a few years ago; losses still are deducted from the point total. A team like West Virginia could reach the 2006 title game merely by winning one tough game.
Castiglione said he likes the general idea of the conference challenge "because I worry more about schedules going in the other direction."
Form this challenge, and pressure increases on poll voters not to rubber-stamp teams that win with weak schedules.
Form this challenge, and the message would be loud and clear that the true national championship goes through these three leagues.
Form this challenge, and college football's culture starts swinging back towards fair fights.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)