Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
If you’re a fan of college football—or just an aficionado of greed and avarice—it’s that time of year to enjoy the spectacle of crusty old men doling out bowl invitations.
Remember: In the big picture, it doesn’t matter.
This is important to grasp while soaking in the breathlessness of it all on Sunday. Aside from the five BCS bowls, with their $17 million–plus payouts to conferences (money that, of course, pales next to the importance of instilling the proper values in “student-athletes”), the other bowls are, well, other bowls.
Now that the once-charming tradition of a handful of New Year’s Day bowls has swelled to 35 games, which barely can get filled by stretching to every .500 team this side of your weekend beer league, becoming “bowl-eligible” is to athletic achievement what “receiving a diploma” is to academic brilliance.
The big controversy is over the “national championship game,” which of course doesn’t determine a national champion because arriving at the No. 1 and 2 spots in the BCS rankings is as much about beating the system than other teams.
But setting aside the obvious case for a national tournament—something radical like the NCAA’s own basketball March Madness tourney, in which winning games against other teams actually determines the outcome—the real problem with the football-bowl selection process is that it has virtually nothing to do with winning games at all.
It’s all about the subjective judgments of those 34 bowl organizations, all reaching those judgments behind closed doors and none feeling a shred of accountability to anyone but themselves. Whoever they are.
I alluded to these people as “crusty old men,” and I realize that may be unjust, as we don’t know that some women aren’t among their number. It is an apt description of the few who lower themselves to appear publicly as bowl representatives.
In any event, the ultimate problem with the bowl-selection process is that the bowls aren’t bound by—or even concerned with—the regular-season performance of the football teams they are selecting. It’s about making money for their organizations (and, for all we know, themselves).
Every major football conference has bowl affiliations and a pecking order through which the bowl matchups are determined, which is well summarized here.
The one of most local interest here, of course, is that of the Big 12 conference, in which the University of Missouri (my alma mater) is about to endure its annual debasing by the powers-that-be. The problem is simple: The bowls are chosen based upon their perception of ticket sales and TV ratings, not upon results over the previous three months on the football field.
Over and over, we hear the phrase “travel well” to describe the competing schools, as in “Texas travels well” or “Stanford doesn’t travel well,” suggesting the college-football season is more about the willingness of college students and boosters to book flights than it is about football teams winning games.
It’s about money.
In the Big 12, the winner of tomorrow’s conference championship game between Nebraska and Oklahoma automatically goes to one of the big BCS bowls: the Fiesta Bowl. (Next year, when the Big 12 shrinks to 10 teams, there will be no championship game, so the Fiesta Bowl spot will simply go to the conference winner.)
In the pecking order, the most prestigious bowl and the first to select a Big 12 representative (to compete with one from the SEC) is the Cotton Bowl, and one would think that appearing there should be the reward of the second-best Big 12 team. But it isn’t.
This year, the Cotton Bowl rushed to announce its invitation to Texas A&M, one of five teams to finish with a 6-2 regular-season Big 12 record. The selection of the Aggies is a no-brainer financially, as the football-crazy fans in College Station certainly “travel well” to a destination that is less than a three-hour drive.
The Aggies finished with six straight wins, including one each over Oklahoma and Nebraska, so there was no way the Cotton Bowl was going to choose the loser of the Big 12 Championship Game—played in the very same stadium four weeks earlier—over A&M.
But what about the other two Big 12 schools that had the same conference record as A&M, Oklahoma State and Missouri? Both ended up with overall records of 10-2 (better than A&M’s 9-3) and both had beaten A&M this season. Both are higher in the BCS rankings: Missouri is ranked No. 12, Oklahoma State is No. 14, and Texas A&M is No. 18.
Oklahoma State narrowly beat A&M 38–35 on its own field, but Missouri— the highest-ranked of the three in the BCS system—crushed the Aggies on their home field in College Station by a 30–9 margin just six weeks before the Cotton Bowl invited A&M.
So Missouri had a higher BCS ranking (by a lot), a better overall record, a three-touchdown victory on A&M’s home field…and the Aggies deserve the nicest plum that the Big 12 bowl hierarchy has to offer?
If you visit the Football Bowl Association’s media propaganda page, you’ll see all kinds of defensive testimonials about why the bowl system is needed to protect the integrity of the regular-season results. (Warning: If you’re prone to nausea, there is content about “student-athletes” on this page that you might want to avoid.)
Maybe instead of football games, the NCAA schools should have 12 weeks of competition between the schools’ athletic departments and boosters in the areas of in-house travel bookings, donations, and the like. Who needs results on the field when this is all about who “travels well”?
As you move down the Big 12 bowl pecking order, the next selector is the Alamo Bowl, which is likely to bring the same sort of bias to its choice of schools. Missouri didn’t sell tickets well in its 2008 appearance there, in no small part because the fan base was deflated by two awful losses (first, to longtime rival University of Kansas in the annual showdown at Arrowhead Stadium, and then an embarrassing 62-21 annihilation by the University of Oklahoma in the Big 12 Championship Game). At the time, it was quarterback Chase Daniel's final season at Mizzou, so when national-title hopes turned into late-season disaster, there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm for trekking 850 miles to San Antonio to play a mediocre Northwestern University team. It’s a 14-hour drive, and nearly that long of journey by air by the time a Mizzou student flew through Kansas City or St. Louis.
This year, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the Insight Bowl, hosted in Tempe, Ariz., feel the same reservations about the Tigers’ “don’t-travel-well” reputation. Most likely, Mizzou will end up in the fifth-ranked Big 12 bowl—the yawner known as San Diego’s Holiday Bowl—despite a likely second-best finish among Big 12 teams in the BCS rankings.
How exciting is the Holiday Bowl? Well, at this writing, the likely Pac 10 opponent, the University of Washington, hasn’t been locked down because at 5-6 it isn’t even bowl-eligible. The Huskies have to beat the Pac 10’s worst team (Washington State University) to make it to .500, so it can earn a place in this “prestigious” bowl game.
Unless the bowl system is reformed to require bowls to honor regular-season performance over biases and perceptions regarding the almighty dollar, schools with bad-travel reputations like Missouri are destined to face this predicament annually. After all, Texas and Oklahoma teams (of which there are six among the remaining 10 “Big” 12 members) will generally travel better to bowls located in Texas.
So, Missouri is faced with three choices to fix the situation:
1. Win the conference (presuming the Fiesta Bowl doesn’t find a way to wriggle out of its commitment to automatically take the winner).
2. Join another conference.
3. Convince the Cotton Bowl to move to St. Louis.
For now, enjoy college football’s Selection Sunday. It’s about as meaningful as the notion that this is all about “student-athletes.”
SLM co-owner RAY HARTMANN is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
Note: This version of the story has been updated with the correct spelling of quarterback Chase Daniel's name.
