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Monday, January 14, 2008
Adams has right idea, poor execution
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Michael Adams wasn’t aiming just to spur erudite discourse before settling back into the overstuffed status quo. He believed the time had come for a change and he was in position to effect that change. He was, not for the first time, politically wrong.
It took the NCAA’s board of directors, of which Adams is the chairman, all of seven days to deposit his grand scheme in yonder trash can. That tells us much about Adams’ fellow presidents, upon whom he believed his cutting insight would not be lost, and even more about the massive might of the bowls.
Say what you will about Adams, and I’ve pretty much said it all, but this time he was on the side of the angels. The BCS is a travesty, the bowl matrix a bloated joke. Adams might have been politically wrong, but there’s no sin in being politically wrong on the right side of an issue.
Maybe he misread the desires of NCAA chief Myles Brand, who in the days after Adams made his proposal — an eight-team playoff incorporating the four BCS bowls, the teams to be chosen by an NCAA selection committee — sought to remain agnostic. Maybe Adams misread his fellow presidents, who are, by definition, supposed to be smart and reasonable folks. Maybe he simply misread his own station, glossing over the incongruity of the president of the school that had been shut out of the BCS title game being reborn as a playoff crusader. It wouldn’t be the first time the former politico has fallen victim to both naiveté and hubris.
But this is different than haggling with Vince Dooley over a half-year’s extension. That was simply a hissing match between men of ample egos. This was something greater, something worse. Adams’ basic premise was and is correct: Big-time football does need a playoff, and it remains a source of embarrassment that the NCAA seeks to control everything else but chooses to wash its hands of the biggest moneymaker in collegiate sports.
Instead the board of directors chose to dump the matter in the laps of the conferences, which is where it rested already. (You only had to see the anger in SEC commissioner Mike Slive’s face the morning after Adams revealed his intentions in this newspaper to know how seriously the conferences take any threat to their sovereignty.) Handing the issue back to the leagues is tantamount to asking a public official to impeach himself.
The BCS was created by Roy Kramer, then the SEC commissioner. It exists to preserve conference ties (and payouts) to the bowls while giving the impression — but not nearly the reality — of a national championship game. The Plus-One model that’s suddenly the rage is essentially BCS 2.0 — someone picks who goes to what bowl, and then someone picks who’s No. 1 and No. 2 after that and those teams get to play for the mythical title. It’s better than the existing system, but it’s still not what’s needed.
What’s needed is a playoff. Adams’ proposal nailed it on every count: Sixteen teams would be too many, four too few. The established bowls shouldn’t be abolished, but they should stand for something more than a New Year’s Day parade. But that’s what happens when the silliest of sports sees its moneyed institutions challenged: It reacts by stonewalling, by refusing even to acknowledge that there might be a better way.
“I don’t think there’s a desire on the part of the board to do anything other than what the current structure would yield,” Clemson president Robert Barker told reporters Monday, and there you have it. The NCAA takes all of one week to quash the best idea anybody is apt to have. And you wonder why — actually, you probably don’t — almost every football season drags to such a messy end.
“I know [the NCAA] to be willing to help on this issue,” Adams said 11 days ago. He learned otherwise Monday. His proposal got the gate. The BCS emerged unscathed. And everyone who cares about the sport was just handed another reason not to care.
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