I can’t be the only person who wonders why anybody outside the SEC and Big Ten would go along with the idea that those two should each get four automatic bids in an expanded College Football Playoff field.
Seriously, if you’re ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips, for instance, why do you go along with the SEC and the Big Ten each getting four automatic bids, and you getting two, along with the Big 12?
I keep reading that the SEC and Big Ten are holding all the cards, but … how?
The SEC and Big Ten are two of the 10 FBS conferences plus Notre Dame in the CFP.
Two is not a majority.
What gives?
The answer: Phillips and the rest apparently capitulated last spring when the SEC and Big Ten threatened to bolt from the CFP and have their own postseason, which would have been utterly worthless, in agreeing, reportedly, to a memorandum of understanding handing control of the playoff to the Big Two.
This is all still vague – reporters from outlets like Yahoo! Sports and ESPN have written about the MOU, and indicated that it is their understanding it gives control of the future of CFP to the SEC and Big Ten, but the details of whatever has been put to paper have not yet been made public, so all we can do is speculate.
One thing I won’t speculate on: if Phillips did, indeed, agree to give control of the future of the CFP to the SEC and Big Ten, that would be a firing offense to me, if I were the president of the University of Virginia, or another ACC school.
And if UVA President Jim Ryan was on board with Phillips on this, it would be a firing offense to me if I were a member of the UVA Board of Visitors.
What sense does it make for, really, anybody outside the SEC and Big Ten to keep pouring tens of millions of dollars each year into football for the privilege of being tackling dummies for second- and third-tier SEC and Big Ten programs?
ACC schools, in particular, are already getting the short end of the stick, with the unfriendly TV contract with ESPN that will keep our football, men’s basketball and everything else malnourished for the next decade.
The rest of us outside of Clemson and Florida State might as well just cut football and put our money in, here’s a radical idea – we could put more in the school part of school.
One advantage to going this route: less kids having their lives cut decades short by CTE.
Seriously, how far are we, anyway, from football becoming the next boxing, which hasn’t made the front page of the sports section since, what, around 1996 or 1997?
This could be for the best, if you look at it from that perspective.
Since nobody wants to look at it from that perspective, yeah, Jim Phillips, you effed up on this one, man.
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Chris Graham
