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College Playoff

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DaddyBigBucks;1050911; said:
no, no, no


The reason we don't have a playoff already is because of fear, fear, fear.

[strike]The people in charge of the decision[/strike]The people who are currently exercising their veto power over the move to a play-off right now are the University Presidents. These are men and women who never left academia.

There are too many reasons to go into it here, and I probably don't need to because the following statement is not controversial among people who have experience in the real world: THE REAL WORLD IS A VERY DIFFERENT PLACE FROM ACADEMIA.

People stay in academia all of their lives for various reasons. The majority stay there because they prefer it to the real world for one reason or another. Those who have been there long enough to become University Presidents have the culture of it ingrained into their soul, into their decision making process.

These men and women are not, by their nature, capitalists or entrepreneurs. They are egg-heads. After spending a few decades in the nest, they have nothing like the stomach necessary to scrap an old system where the money and the people are known commodities.

In order to get a play-off system, that's what they'd have to do: Leave a known system behind, with its well-heeled supporters who are all very complimentary of and connected to academia; and enter a new system with new supporters with unknown piles of money, many of whom will be private-sector types (I can hear the egg-heads cringe as I type).

Would there be less money in a play-off system? Don't make me laugh. Take one look at the acres of empty seating at lower-tier bowls and come back and make that point with a straight face. There were huge swaths of the New Mexico Bowl that were devoid of people, and New Mexico was playing in that game! Even if some of the lower-tier bowls were included in a play-off and some were not, it is difficult to imagine that those left behind would become less relevant than they are.

Or maybe people are just thinking of how irrelevant they would seem compared to the bowls that were made part of the play-off system, or to the play-off system itself if it were made separate. This is a tacit admission that the 8 games involving 16 play-off teams, or the 4 games involving 8 teams; would be far more interesting than what we have now.

Why do you think it is that even some BCS bowls were not sold out? Does anyone want to try to suggest that these games wouldn't be sold out if they were play off games? Feel free to believe it, but please don't expect me to refrain from laughing at you if you say it out loud.

Then of course there is the old, "People wouldn't be able to travel to multiple rounds of a play-off".

Bull-crap

Somehow, the NFL pulls it off and their fans survive.

These are the kinds of issues that private sector types, the entrepreneurs and capitalists that the egg-heads so fear, are very good at solving.

But those people will never get their hands on the problem until the egg-heads let them. Don't hold your breath.
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I can see how anyone might think that way. After all, there have been plenty of examples of egg-headed decisions by universities over the years. However, although what you say may be true of some academics coming out of arts and humanities faculties or in some very minor universities but certainly is not what I know to be the case in major universities, such as Ohio State. So, I'd like to present another point of view.

First, most academics I know own their own consulting companies and many have business experience in business schools. I know quite a few academics who are earning millions. Nothing is so practical as good theory and nothing is quite so entrepreneurial as running your own consultancy.

Second, in a timeof shrinking government subsidies worldwide, universities have been forced to become entrepreneurial and more competently-managed.

Consider the changing face of university research. Many universities are working in concert with major corporates and earning big bucks in entrepreneurial activity. The research triangle in North Carolina is a prime example, with lots of work in tandem with UNC, Duke and NC State medical, telecommunications, biotechnology, engineering and business faculties. In earlier times, much of the success of Bank One and The Limited derived from working closely with Ohio State academics.

Universities also are having to be incredibly entrepreneurial and managerial as they globalize their operations or face global competition. This is leading to collaborative degrees, distance education, and collaborative research. Most major business schools now are opening branches in other locations throughout the US and overseas.

How tough is global competition? One business school in Africa is now ranked 50 places higher than Ohio State in the MBA program. They are ranked 4th in open executive education programs and recently took a major Johnson & Johnson program in Europe away from the other two finalists, which included two of the world's top three b-schools. The University of Michigan b-school tried to compete in the South African executive education market and withdrew in less than a year. One research project in their faculty now encompasses more than 40 countries.

Higher education is global. It's tough. It's anything but insulated.

Within this context, universities are also having to manage on far thinner margins, due to the shrinking support of government for education and pressures to hold student fees in check. In this vein, we should remember that only a handful of athletic departments nationwide are profitable.

One could argue that universities have to be far more entrepreneurial and competently-managed than most businesses in today's rapidly changing, globalized higher education industry.

I'm not a university administrator, but as a professor I have observed many of them quite closely. I have found a few egg-heads over the years, but not many. Consider that all of the entrpreneurial activites I describe above, which constitute nothing short of new busines models for many universities, require investments and support from senior management within university structures and considerable risk-taking.

I'm also not arguing for or against playoffs.

My point is that I wonder if (a) it really is accurate to portray academics as people living in insulated environments devoid of "real world" business problems, given even the brief examples of contrary evidence that I present above, and then (b) to suggest that college playoffs aren't happening because these "egg-heads" are risk-averse?

An alternative argument in respect of why universities reject playoffs deserves consideration.

Perhaps university administrators are acting in a managerially-competent manner by asking those proposing a playoff to provide proof that their brands and financial revenues will not be harmed by such a system. Why should universities really care if their teams win national championships? Is there any evidence showing that alumni donate more money when a team finished #1, as opposed to say #5? What would be the cost of the extra games, how would revenue be affected, etc? Where is the concrete proposal of a system with current and proposed financial issues addressed? If these guys are so removed from sports, which may be true, shouldn't competent business people from the "real world" be smart enough to know that they need to present a coherent argument of the true effect of the change on university revenues from post-season games?

So far, I think it is pretty clear that a coherent argument has not been forthcoming. What prevails is a lot of bleating and whining by both sides and little coherency from which to draw conclusions that would favor change.

That said, is it not equally possible that the major universities do not believe that a playoff system will be in their interests financially?

My advice to those proposing a change is to take on the responsibility to present a rational financial argument in favor of playoffs. Until then, I think it is inaccurate to suggest that adminstrators are incompetent or insular just because they are asking "where's the beef?"
 
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HailToMichigan;1051087; said:
You said it yourself - many of the bowls cannot fill their stadiums. Would you honestly travel from Columbus to Orlando for, say, the C****s S****s Bowl if you knew it was just a precursor to something better?
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First, many of the bowls can't fill stadiums because they have shit teams playing. Do these bowls actually expect to sell out when they have unranked 7-5 Buttfuck State playing unranked 7-5 University of Coitus Interuptus?

Second, none of the playoff games are simply a "precursor to something better" because it may just be your last game of the year.

Third, big schools (like those who would make the playoffs almost on an annual basis, such as Ohio State, USC, a couple SEC teams, etc.) travel more than well enough to fill any venue. Ohio State fans alone would fill up any venue for any game in the country.
 
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Supporting a playoff is like supporting the benching of starters in the Ohio State - Michigan games. The college football regular season is part of what separates it and makes it better than the NFL, and I pray to God that the FBS continues to have it's playoff be the regular season.
 
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Lockup;1050135; said:
All that is true and I recognize that point of view. I am not in favor of a 16 team playoff for the reason you said here. I can live with 8 but really don't like it. I like 4 and believe 4 keeps the "on" part of the regular season in tact.
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I've only skimmed this thread, so sorry if this has already been touched upon.

4 would be no better than we have now. OSU, LSU, Va Tech., OU, UGA, USC, are all the teams "claiming they deserved a shot. 2 of them get left out.
 
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Steve19;1051271; said:
...First, most academics I know own their own consulting companies and many have business experience in business schools. I know quite a few academics who are earning millions. Nothing is so practical as good theory and nothing is quite so entrepreneurial as running your own consultancy ...
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Sorry Steve, but with all due respect, this was as far as I read.

Someone who owns their own consulting company is, by definition, not a career academic. Someone who spends their whole life in academia cannot, by definition, have a consulting company on the side.

Like it or not, there is a mind-set to academia that the rest of the world can see. Perhaps you addressed that in the rest of your post, I don't know.

As I've said before, I am unique in that my feelings on this issue are very luke-warm: way too tepid to bother any longer with this debate anyway...
 
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MililaniBuckeye;1051274; said:
First, many of the bowls can't fill stadiums because they have shit teams playing. Do these bowls actually expect to sell out when they have unranked 7-5 Buttfuck State playing unranked 7-5 University of Coitus Interuptus?

Second, none of the playoff games are simply a "precursor to something better" because it may just be your last game of the year.

Third, big schools (like those who would make the playoffs almost on an annual basis, such as Ohio State, USC, a couple SEC teams, etc.) travel more than well enough to fill any venue. Ohio State fans alone would fill up any venue for any game in the country.
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One: Bowl attendance is much more a function of how close the fan bases are to the bowl than how good the team is. Several of the "crap bowls" had fantastic attendance.

- Motor City Bowl (7-5 Purdue vs. 8-5 Central Michigan)
- Texas Bowl (7-5 TCU vs. 8-4 Houston)
- Liberty Bowl (10-3 Central Florida vs. 7-5 Mississippi State)

Second- and third-tier teams that had marginal seasons and were rewarded with third-tier bowls. Yet each of them packed in over 60,000 people for the game. Proximity is absolutely crucial. The Las Vegas Bowl overstuffed the stadium for the same reason (a little over 40,000 in a stadium that seats 36,000). Wake Forest helped bring 53,000 people to Charlotte for the MCC Bowl. Proximity is the thing.

Two: I'm sure there are plenty of Ohio State fans to fill up a venue. Once. Not four times. You're in Hawaii. Would you travel from Hawaii to San Diego to Hawaii to Orlando to Hawaii to New Orleans to Hawaii to Phoenix? Would a fan in Columbus do the same? Not damn likely. There is no precedent anywhere that says fans can do this. Even in March Madness, there are only three destinations, and the first two do not sell out, and they are in 20,000 seat arenas, not 70,000 seat stadiums.

I can't find all the attendance figures from last year's March Madness, but it is not hard to do some extrapolations. The total attendance was listed at 696,992. Florida's two Final Four games were attended to the tune of 51,458 and 53,510 - let's just assume Ohio State fans traveled just as well, so a total Final Four attendance of 157,452. 539,540 divided by 61 (the remainder of the games) is a whopping 8,844. Eight thousand. I do know that Florida's Elite Eight game pulled in about 25,000, so that average is going even further down. Do you need further proof that multiple neutral-site games will be very poorly attended?
 
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HailToMichigan;1051381; said:
One: Bowl attendance is much more a function of how close the fan bases are to the bowl than how good the team is. Several of the "crap bowls" had fantastic attendance.

- Motor City Bowl (7-5 Purdue vs. 8-5 Central Michigan)
- Texas Bowl (7-5 TCU vs. 8-4 Houston)
- Liberty Bowl (10-3 Central Florida vs. 7-5 Mississippi State)
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Show me the attendance vs. capacity figures for those games...
 
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