does March Madness. “If they had,
I don’t think college athletics would
be in the place it is now—a place
of disaster,” says Chuck Young, the
former UCLA president who chaired
the 1994 committee. “I think it’s all
coming apart.”COLLEGE SPORTS are mired in
one of the more volatile eras of their
existence. Rulings on name, image
and likeness have changed the
landscape, and Congress is expected
to tackle legislation regarding the
rights of college athletes. And the
NCAA is rewriting its constitution,
with the expectation that conferences
will be given more authority.
The contention that college sports
would be in better shape if the
NCAA had been allowed to oversee
a football postseason is probably12 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED | SI.COM
SCORECARDa stretch. But it definitely says
something that there are people in
the game who regret not turning a
playoff over to what is not exactly
the most respected bureaucracy
in the world. “Who knows what
it would have looked like if the
FBS football championship
had been under the NCAA
umbrella?” asks Mountain West
commissioner Craig Thompson. “We
[commissioners] work collectively,
but realistically we are in our own
silos. We do what is best for our
leagues. I don’t know as stewards
that we do enough for the good
of the game.”
So FBS football remains the
only fully sanctioned sport whose
postseason is not managed by
the NCAA. For a quarter century,
since Young’s failed 1994 playoff
study, conference commissioners,
specifically from the five richest
leagues, have called the shots. Any
future expansion of the current
system, the College Football Playoff,
will not involve ceding power to theNCAA but simply allowing more
teams into the mix. The current
four-team CFP grants access to 3%
of the 130 FBS teams, the smallest
postseason of any NCAA sport.
However, growing comes at a
cost to a bowl system that has been
preserved for decades, for historic
and financial reasons. Before college
football raked in dollars through
TV contracts, the bowls supported
the game. The argument—bowls vs.
playoffs—has hovered over the sport
ever since the first exploration into
the postseason, in 1976, when bowl
executives, fearing a playoff ’s impact
on their industry, inf luenced school
officials to stymie a vote. Many
coaches were also pro-bowl. USC
coach John McKay explained, “We
have eight or 10 teams who win their
conferences, win bowl games, have
great seasons. Ten winners instead
of one. Everybody’s happy.”
Indeed, the 1994 proposal was
undone largely by the Pac-10 and
the Big Ten and their commitment
to their year-end showdown
at the Granddaddy of Them All.
“We didn’t want to give up the
Rose Bowl to the NCAA and their
efforts to get their arms wrapped
around the postseason,” says
Jim Delany, then the commissioner
of the Big Ten. Tom Hansen, then
the commissioner of the Pac-10,
described the Rose Bowl as a
“dividing point politically.”
So college football ended up with
two systems—the Bowl Alliance
and Bowl Coalition—in the 1990s
designed to force a meeting of
the top two teams, so long as
they didn’t come from those two
conferences. That became an issue
in ’97, when No. 2 Arizona State
played in the Rose Bowl instead
of the Sugar Bowl, the Bowl
Alliance championship.
The Bowl Championship Series
came along a year later, but as BCSPASS-ADENA
Arizona State declined a chance
to play for the title in 1997 out of
allegiance to the Rose Bowl.JED(^) JA
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