Published: September 04, 2007 11:24 pm            

VALVANO: College football is a fraud

There are plenty of situations in life that seem to call for posing. You can’t go to an art gallery and simply blurt out, “I don’t get it.” You can’t listen to the obscure references of a Sheryl Crow or the late Jim Morrison of a generation ago, and openly point out that the lyrics make no sense.

And so it is that people like me, who make their living talking about sports, must fear that what I am about to say is regarded as heresy. Blasphemous. Unpatriotic even, especially in this part of the country. I feel like I am taking a shot at apple pie, motherhood and the American way of life.

Oh well, here it goes.

College football is the biggest fraud perpetuated on the American sports public since they found out the 1919 World Series was fixed. It is just maddeningly absurd. It is as pretentious as lyrics or art that is foisted upon us and about which we are told we must rave.

It’s just so artificial that it’s infuriating. And year after year I see example after example of it and have to bite my tongue, lest I be lumped with the Morrison haters or artistic ignoramuses.

Here is what provoked my latest outrage: Michigan lost its first game of the season to a Division I-AA team (a term the NCAA doesn’t use anymore for reasons that are equally preposterous as everything else in this discussion). It was the first time that a I-AA team has ever beaten a nationally-ranked I-A team.

It has people screaming for coach Lloyd Carr’s head, and that is their business. This isn’t an “apology piece” for Carr or for Michigan. The loss was a terrible one for them, made worse by their reputation as an arrogant institution that goes beyond just being committed to “let’s do what’s right” to “let’s do whatever the heck we want.”

I admire the former, but despise the latter.

But that is not the point. The point is there is no other sport where a championship that will be decided in January sees a team eliminated on September 1.

That is what has happened to Michigan.

They can run the Big Ten table and go unbeaten the rest of the way, only to have no chance to play in the national title game and all because of one horrible day four months before the championship is decided.

Are you kidding me? If this sport didn’t exist and you created that as your championship framework, you would be laughed out of town. A championship is a season-long test that ultimately exists to see which team has been built over the course of the season to be the best. How can you determine that this team, or any team, playing a first game with no preseason games and no scrimmages, is not worthy of that chance right now?

The NFL, which has grown men who only play football and who have no classes, or weekly limits on the number of hours they spend on preparation, get four preseason games. If they lose in week one, they are not eliminated from anything.

The argument that college football apologists make is that “every week is an elimination week.” Well, maybe so, but does that make it right? Suppose next year there was a baseball rule installed that said if the Red Sox lose a game to lowly Tampa Bay in May they are eliminated from any chance of the postseason. Would people watch?

Of course they would, but that doesn’t mean it creates a valid process to determine a champion.

College football doesn’t make sense. Everything about it has been set up to do one thing and one thing only — make sure that the very small handful of institutions that control the sport, the BCS teams, control the money in the sport.

Trevor Mattich, a former NFL player and current ESPN analyst remarked when I asked him about this, “[The current system] makes no sense in determining a champion. But that is not its purpose. Its purpose is to reward those institutions who have developed a ‘brand,’ a major football ‘brand’ and they intend to milk that brand for all it’s worth. It ultimately is a business decision.”

They have all the money and they intend to do everything to keep it. That is their business. Just don’t insult me by telling me that there is a “method” to determine a national champion. It is just to make sure that whoever plays for that championship comes from a very small and artificially-contrived group of institutions. There is nothing national about that. It is like the U.S. Open saying “It is an open field, except for lefthanders and people from Rhode Island.” How is that open?

Appalachian State defeating Michigan raised many questions. If the best I-AA school can beat Michigan at Michigan, couldn’t some of the best I-A schools from non-BCS conferences beat some of the best BCS schools on a neutral site, possibly to win a championship? Of course they could. But they will never get that chance because the system is designed to keep them out.

The polls decide on over half of the criteria that determines who plays for the national championship. These are polls that were done before anyone had run even one play from scrimmage. Yet by doing these polls before the season starts, it gives the money boys a head start. They are placed ahead of the non-BCS schools even before they begin. So they can shuffle their order at the top all year, but two of them always will play for the jillions of dollars in the national championship game.

It was only when they were threatened with a lawsuit that they even made it possible for a non-BCS team to get a BCS bowl bid. But sure as anything they aren’t going to create a system where just anyone can win the biggest BCS bowl. That one is going to stay in the family, that’s for sure.

As a sports fan, that should annoy you. It would be like starting the year with the Yankees getting a five-game head start. The Yanks, like most of the BCS teams, have most of the advantages to begin with, but at least they start even with everyone else. Not so in college football. They don’t want to leave that to chance.

So you get a “sport” where some teams get head starts (the polls), where a format is created that passures that if, somehow, a team can overcome some disadvantages and play as well as the big boys, they still get left out and where a team can lose one game the first day of the year, be eliminated from any championship hopes and people can explain that away as a logical process to crown a champ.

It is what it is. It’s a money grab, plain and simple, and if that’s what they called it, I would respect it. It may provoke discussion, it is often interesting and can be frequently exciting. It’s just not one important thing.

It’s not fair. And it’s not designed to crown a truly national champion.



Bob Valvano is a Sellersburg resident, an ESPN Radio show host and former head basketball coach at Bellermine University. He can be reached at bobvshow@yahoo.com

        

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