Tressel's playoff impediment
By Brian Higgins
BowlRevolution.com
You have to start somewhere. So when we set about recording the playoff stances of athletic directors, coaches and ranking administrators at all 120 major-college program and the 11 conference offices, we started with Jim Tressel.
It was February and Ohio State announced that its soon-to-be-embattled coach would be swinging through the San Francisco Bay Area to fire up a group of alums wallowing in the misery of a one-loss season.
For a hot minute after hearing the news, I fantasized about Tressel onstage at the Fillmore, squinting through a fog of illicit smoke as he led a thousand West Coast Buckeye fans through an off-key rendition of “Carmen Ohio” while O.A.R. – a chart-topping alt band whose members swear allegiance to OSU football – warmed up in the background.
No such luck. Tressel was booked into a sterilized ballroom of a hotel in an East Bay suburb, 30 miles and a world away from San Francisco. It rained the day he arrived. Inside, trays of lunchmeat wilted in the humidity. It may as well have been Columbus.
Buckeye fans though we were, we weren’t expecting much from Tressel, who had managed to forge through a decade as the leader of one of the highest-visibility programs in the nation without uttering a controversial word. That was about to change, but the scandal that cost him his job was still a few weeks off.
That afternoon, however, Tressel was surprisingly glib. He laughed. He made small talk. He showed particular interest in the tattoo of a female fan (who knew he was an expert on the subject?).
And when cornered about his stance on playoffs, he eloquently captured an issue that we were soon to hear from dozens of athletic department bigwigs while conducting interviews for BowlRevolution.com .
“When they added that 12th game, that really made it difficult,” Tressel said of the outlook for playoffs since the 2002 season, when the NCAA deemed its experiment with a dozen-game regular season a success and made it standard practice across the land.
That very season, Ohio State (which played in what was then an exempt 13th game, the Pigskin Classic) became the first Division I-A team to go 14-0.
Tressel raised a few eyebrows when he went on to say that a playoff system would put the careers of NFL-bound Buckeyes at risk. He pointed to the bruising nature of his team’s 2011 Sugar Bowl victory over Arkansas (which was later abandoned), saying that a playoff system would take an undue toll on players by “demanding that level of intensity week after week.”
To which one fan uttered: “Kinda like playing in the SEC.”
But game No. 12 was the anchor of his anti-playoff argument. It was, as we were to discover, a hurdle to high for many of his colleagues to overcome. And they’re right.
If we assume that the vast majority of teams that make it through a playoff bracket to the title game will have played in a conference championship game, as well, it’s clear that any serious playoff plan will involve some deconstruction. First, the BCS must go. Then the 12th regular-season game must be repealed.
Laugh if you will. But as former ACC commissioner Gene Corrigan noted in an interview with BowlRevolution.com last month, a playoff would “be bigger than the Final Four. It was rival the Super Bowl.”
And billion-dollar broadcasting rights will follow – enough to make lost revenue from a 12th regular season-game inconsequential. And the only way to stop the power conferences from damning that river of revenue is to have every conference involved in the playoff. A 16-team playoff.
Otherwise, let’s end the hypocrisy and start another division for any team that doesn’t wind up in an AQ conference when the dust finally settles on the realignment craze.
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