Crunch Time

By CHRIS DUFRESNE

Jan. 4, 1999 12 AM PT

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TEMPE, Ariz. — The masses are still buzzing about THE YEAR THAT WAS in college football, arguably the most exciting in the sport’s history.

OK, so what can we do to fix this mess?

You’d think the smart money would want to leave stupendous-enough alone, declare last Dec. 5 a college football national holiday and move onto more important matters such as intercollegiate game-fixing.

What could be better than a season that produced--protestations in Columbus, Ohio, aside--a unified national title game tonight between No. 1 Tennessee and No. 2 Florida State?

What could be more exciting than a system that gave us Dec. 5, a triple-treat, triple-header involving UCLA-Miami, Kansas State-Texas A&M; and Tennessee-Mississippi State?

What might trump a status quo that had fans riveted to college football from the moment the inaugural, if not bewildering, bowl championship series rankings were released on Oct. 24?

What could be more lucrative than the present $518-million ABC rights package, or the $36 million the Southeastern Conference alone will pocket this season in bowl revenue?

The answer, of course, is a playoff.

Doesn’t everybody want a playoff?

Radio shock jocks scream about it. Sports editors demand sportswriters write about it.

The logic is sound. This is America, for Knute Rockne’s sake, a place where athletic pursuits in other sports are decided by playoffs.

Playoff talk has never been louder. Several coaches, including Florida State’s Bobby Bowden, have switched positions and now favor change.

Athletic directors have long understood the potential financial windfall.

There are a half-dozen workable playoff proposals. Sixteen teams. Eight teams. Six teams. Four teams.

Nike and Disney-backed playoff plans have been rebuffed in the past.

At least one new playoff offer sits on the table.

ILS, a Switzerland-based marketing and licensing firm, has proposed a 16-school format that would pay a projected $2.4 billion over eight years, more than double the money schools now receive.

Jim Wheeler, ISL vice president, poses the $2-billion question:

“If the finances are there, if the fans want it, if the student-athletes want it, why are we keeping the current system and who are we keeping it for?”

The deal-breaker?

Reality.

In reality, there will be no playoff next year. Or the next. Or the next.

“The media doesn’t understand that,” Pacific 10 Conference commissioner Tom Hansen said this week. “They don’t understand that in the Pac-10, Big Ten and Atlantic Coast Conference as well, the presidents and chancellors make that decision, and they’re not going to vote ‘Yes.’ It doesn’t matter what the coaches say.”

The reality is college presidents are holding firm in collective conviction that a playoff would extend the season and hurt academics, even though there are playoffs in place for all other collegiate divisions.

The reality is that bowl officials, who protect their products like mother hens, think a playoff would diminish their games into oblivion.

“It would inherently damage the present bowl system,” BCS chairman Roy Kramer said.

Kramer says having the Rose, Sugar, Orange and Fiesta serve as quarterfinal or semifinal matchups would kill the freedom to make matchups based on regional ties to protect gate attendance.

“In the NFL, you don’t see Tampa and Dallas playing games in Green Bay,” Kramer argued.

Hansen says you can’t ask college football fans to traipse the country following their playoff teams.

“It’s all we can do to put teams and fans together just once,” Hansen said.

Even Sun Bowl official John Folmer, a harsh BCS critic after his bowl was forced in the 11th-hour to match Texas Christian against USC, says a 16-team playoff could be a death blow to second-tier bowls.

“I think it would kill the Sun Bowl as we know it today,” Folmer said. “It wouldn’t be a community event anymore. It wouldn’t put heads in beds. It wouldn’t be a weeklong event. People would come in the night before and play it like a regularly scheduled game. They’d take their money and get out of here. The money would be administered and controlled by the NCAA.”

Folmer thinks there is an answer. He advocates that the top four schools should be matched in a playoff and all others should be released to make their own bowl deals.

“Go back to the old days for the other bowls,” he said.

The Sun Bowl got fried this year. Folmer had Miami lined up to play USC in an attractive matchup, but the game went poof on the first weekend in December, when Miami upset UCLA and Ohio State was taken as a BCS game, knocking Purdue, the Sun Bowl’s backup opponent, to the Alamo Bowl.

“Take it from a victim,” Folmer said. “This system certainly has a flaw.”

Yet, the reality is bowl officials and television executives have worked years to mesh a system that protects the sanctity of the bowls and provides the fans a legitimate matchup of title contenders.

Give the BCS credit. No one can argue this system isn’t better than the old one, in which bowls sometimes locked up top schools before Halloween.

Consider how far we’ve come:

The 1982 Sun Bowl game between Alabama and Southern Methodist was put together by Boston Globe sportswriter Mark Blaudschun, then with the Dallas Morning News, who told then-Alabama coach Ray Perkins the Sun Bowl was looking for a matchup against SMU.

Was he interested?

Perkins called back minutes later and said the deal was done.

College football has come a long way, baby.

Early 1990s incarnations of the Bowl Coalition and Bowl Alliance were flawed because the Rose Bowl, which has traditionally matched the Pac-10 and Big Ten champions, would not give up a No. 1- or No. 2-ranked school to the Alliance’s “national title.”

Since 1994, this hang-up prevented Rose Bowl-obligated Penn State, Arizona State and Michigan from playing for a unified national title.

But the landscape has changed. Last year, ABC brokered a deal to include the Rose Bowl in the BCS, paying $518 million over seven years for the rights to broadcast BCS bowls.

The BCS and ABC just completed the first year of the deal.

The reality is there cannot be a playoff unless ABC wants it and that ABC doesn’t want it.

“There are absolutely no plans for it,” ABC spokesman Mark Mandel said. “We have long-term contracts with the bowls and the conferences, and that’s the only direction we’re looking at.”

Unless ABC and the BCS tear up the current contract, highly unlikely since the push would have to come from school presidents, the soonest there could be a playoff is 2002.

The ABC deal is four years, with a three-year option, meaning there is a window to consider a playoff plan.

But don’t bet on it.

The reality is that the BCS, despite its maddening shortcomings, worked.

“It accomplished what it set out to accomplish,” Kramer said.

Did Kramer get lucky?

No doubt.

The BCS came within a few plays of having Tennessee, UCLA and Kansas State finish unbeaten, with only two schools being able to play in the Fiesta Bowl for the national title.

Had Kansas State been eliminated by the BCS computer, Kramer and the BCS would have ended up with Tostitos salsa on their faces.

Yet, the result produced a clear-cut No. 1 and No. 2 in the BCS rankings.

The BCS rankings definitely need an off-season tweaking.

The consensus is the three-computer component--Seattle Times, New York Times, Jeff Sagarin--gave a disproportionate power to the likes of Sagarin, whose controversial ratings--”Go Kansas State!!”--equaled the weight of 40 Associate Press writers.

The BCS will probably add more computers next year to balance the tables.

“I thought the BCS worked well,” Hansen said. “Let’s try the BCS for four years and see what the reaction is.”

The Sagarin factor?

“I thought he talked too much,” Hansen said.

Playoff?

“I’ll never say never,” Kramer said. “But the present system works.”

The last, best hope for playoff proponents is BCS mayhem.

Wheeler, the ISL executive, thought he had it this year.

“I was hoping to have three undefeated teams,” he said.

Wheeler wanted to use the controversy to garner momentum for his playoff plan.

Even Wheeler agrees there will not be a playoff any time soon.

“We’ll definitely see the four years of the BCS play out,” he said. The long-term prognosis?