Sports Illustrated - USA (2021-12)

OR NEARLY 14 years,

Charles Bloom has kept a

secret. On the campus of

the University of South Carolina,

inside his office, buried within

a cabinet, tucked beneath some

old newspapers, are handwritten

relics of one of his career’s most

important—and clandestine—

missions. The 13 pages of white

easel paper are proof of the

secret five-person committee

charged by a group of conference

commissioners in 2007 with

exploring a College Football Playoff.

Bloom, 59, a longtime athletic

administrator who is now the

Gamecocks’ executive associate

AD, sifts through the papers.

“Some of this looks like chicken

scratch,” he laughs. “Hey, it’s not

my handwriting!” Then he comes

to a line reading, does a playoff

make the rest of the bowls

less relative? “Some of the

issues brought up today, I look at

them and say, ‘We talked about this

15 years ago,’ ” Bloom says.

Indeed, as college football

launches into the latest effort to

revamp its postseason, the people

who have led the previous endeavors

are quick to remind us of something

important: We’ve been here before.

And in every previous case, a

playoff proposal ended in rejection.

In 1976, the first instance of

serious deliberations, the 17-member

NCAA Playoffs Feasibility Study

Committee presented two- and

four-team proposals. They were

never even put to a vote. In ’88,

DeLoss Dodds, the former Texas

athletic director, chaired a playoff

subcommittee that saw a one-game

playoff voted down by a 98–

margin. In ’94, as a member of

a 25-member NCAA committee

exploring a playoff, John Sandbrook,

a former UCLA administrator,

authored a 300-page tome arguing

for an eight-team playoff. The

proposal failed due to an old-

fashioned power play. “There was

a significant number within the

membership that resisted the NCAA

having control of the playoff,” recalls

Cedric Dempsey, the NCAA executive

director from ’94 to 2002.

On those occasions, schools could

have granted the NCAA authority

to manage a football playoff as it

F

AS THE POWERS THAT BE CONSIDER (AGAIN) AN

EXPANDED PLAYOFF, A RECENTLY UNCOVERED

ARTIFACT REMINDS US THIS IS NOTHING NEW

SAME OLD STORY

BY ROSS DELLENGER

DECEMBER 2021 11

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