The Justice Department has sent a stern letter to the NCAA asking why there isn’t a playoff system for big-time college football and implying that the Bowl Championship Series does not comply with federal antitrust laws.
Hey, this from an inept and politically motivated Justice Department that doesn’t have the time to investigate Project Gunrunner where the government sold weapons to Mexican drug lords and those weapons were used to kill Americans.
The open borders Justice Department instead wants to get involved in something for which they have no legal standing. As most with this Justice Department, the letter is politically motivated. With dreams of the successful college basketball tournament dancing in their heads, fans want that similar feeling from a college football playoff. The Justice Department knows they have a winner with this distraction.
But the majority of the NCAA member institutions don’t want a postseason tourney so why should the NCAA make plans to do something its members don’t want?
The fact is that college football and college basketball are different animals. For one, and for a lot of reasons I won’t go into now, there are a third fewer football games than basketball games. Each game of the college football season is huge. NCAA basketball champs Connecticut lost nine games this season – that’s about a fourth of their games. That’s like a football team winning the national championship with a 9-3 record – that can’t happen now and it shouldn’t.
I like college basketball the way it is – actually fewer tournament invitees would be better – and I like college football the way it is. The college football bowl system has been around since 1902 and there is great tradition. Why do we have to throw out tradition when a few tweaks here and there would preserve what has been successful? Yes, there are too many bowls games with strange names but Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delaney said what I believe is the best argument against a college football playoff.
He told me in an interview recently, “We are about making the regular season relevant – we think it’s the greatest regular season of all sports, college or pro.”
He’s right. Don’t mess with it to placate a politically motivated Justice Department and misguided fans who would miss the importance of each and every college football game. So-called fans will wait until the playoffs to start following college football.
To read a different take from Capital Sports’ Dane Huffman click here.