Bowl Season Extreme Makeover Edition

It has been 303 days since the last time I ranted. Since that time, I got engaged. Kim Kardashian also got engaged. Lebron James showed the world that his kryptonite is the 4th quarter of big games. The Pirates were in 1st place after the all-star break. Kim Kardashian got married. The Eagles became the most recent “dream team” to fail to deliver. Tim Tebow saved Denver and all of us. Kim Kardashian got divorced. Jerry Sandusky gave a whole new meaning to "horsed around".

So what it is that could get me out of my slumber and writing again? No, not the Jersey Shore premiere tonight, however that could be a good future topic. Combined with finally having time, after being incredibly understaffed at work for the last 4 months and sitting through meaningless bowl game after bowl game, I figured the terrible bowl system would be a great topic.

I know that I will not be breaking ground here by saying that the college football post-season is the worst in all of sports. And since we are only in year 2 of the 4 year deal between the BCS and ESPN, which spent $500M for the rights, the current BCS system is not going anywhere anytime soon. Rather than complain about the system, I’ve come up with a better, more entertaining system for the college post-season.

A bowl draft.

Hear me out now. I think we all realize that despite being entertaining, the post-season in college football consists of 1 important game, the national championship game, and 34 absolutely meaningless games. In my system, you will still have 34 meaningless games to go along with the national title game, but you will have better match-ups pairing off evenly matched teams with no pre-arranged conference affiliations. (By the way, ideally, I would only have between 20-25 bowl games, but we know that neither the bowls nor ESPN are going to throw away the money that these bowls bring in.)

All of that being said, I actually like the idea of the BCS. I think there are many good ideas in how they come up with their rankings. Where they fall short is the limiting the rankings to affecting just the top 2 teams. So let’s use the BCS standings in the draft format. This is how I would do it if I had a chance to revamp the college bowl system.

THE BASICS:
1) Using the BCS rankings, list all the bowl eligible teams, starting at the top with #1.

2) Using bowl payouts, we create our draft order. The 4 BCS bowl games would always draft in spots 2-5 followed by the highest payout game all the way down to the lowest payout game drafting 35. This year the draft order would have looked like this:

1. National Championship Game
2. Rose Bowl
3. Fiesta Bowl
4. Sugar Bowl
5. Orange Bowl
6. Capital One Bowl ($9.1M)
7. Cotton Bowl ($7.25M)
8. Outback Bowl ($7M)
9. Chick-fil-A Bowl ($6.9M)
10. Insight Bowl ($6.65M)
11. Alamo Bowl ($6.35M)
12. Gator Bowl ($5.45M)
13. Champs Sports Bowl ($4.55M)
14. Holiday Bowl ($4.15M)
15. Sun Bowl ($4M)
16. Music City Bowl ($3.675M)
17. Pinstripe Bowl ($3.6M)
18. Meineke Car Care Bowl ($3.4M)
19. Belk Bowl ($3.4M)
20. Liberty Bowl ($2.875M)
21. Independence Bowl ($2.3M)
22. Las Vegas Bowl ($2.2M)
23. TicketCity Bowl ($2.2M)
24. Military Bowl ($2M)
25. BBVA Compass Bowl ($1.925M)
26. Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl ($1.675M)
27. GoDaddy.com Bowl ($1.5M)
28. Little Caesars Bowl ($1.5M)
29. Hawaii Bowl ($1.3M)
30. Armed Forces Bowl ($1.2M)
31. Beef O’Brady’s ($1.075M)
32. Poinsettia Bowl ($1M)
33. New Orleans Bowl ($1M)
34. New Mexico Bowl ($912,500)
35. Idaho Potato Bowl ($650,000)

THE DRAFT:
The way the draft would work is simple. There would be absolutely no conference affiliations with any bowls. There would be no automatic bids for any conference. Obviously, the top 2 teams would automatically be placed in the national championship game. After that, it is a free for all, minus a few simple rules.

* Bowls will select in order, with a pool of 10 teams to pick. For instance, this year with the 2nd pick, the Rose Bowl would be able to pick any 2 teams that finished 3-12 in the final BCS standings. (Remember the #1 and #2 teams would be off the board already in the national title game.) Next pick would be the Fiesta Bowl and 2 more teams would open up for their selection, teams #13-14. And so on and so forth, until all the bowls are filled.

* No team can drop more than 5 bowl games. Meaning every team must be selected within five games of becoming available. This rewards teams for successful seasons despite how unattractive they might be as a bowl team. For instance, this season Boise State would had to have been invited to one of the top 8 bowls, instead of going to the Las Vegas Bowl, which ranked #22. It would also prevent teams with great history and huge fan bases being selected to bowls they don’t deserve (This year it would be Ohio State and Florida, both 6-6 and unranked, playing in the Gator Bowl.)

Think about what this would do for the college football post-season. First, the TV networks could/would sell the hell out of the live draft. Imagine having every AD or head coach at the draft along with the bowl committee members. They make the pick, the coach or AD’s from both schools go up onto stage and shake hands. Chris Fowler, Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit talk about that bowl for the next 5 minutes or so, maybe interview the coach or AD from the schools. Everybody wins. The schools gets some press, the bowls gets their individual time in the national spotlight and the coaches get a little face time.

Another benefit to this system is you don’t have repetition. Bowl attendances have been way down the past few years and a big reason is fans don’t want to go back to the same bowl a few years ago. Sure lots of fans will go and support their team wherever they go, but they want to go to new places and see new things. In the last 3 years, 9 different teams played in the same bowl game at least 2 of those 3 years.

This format also helps other conferences get a chance to play each other. For instance, the Big East has the best record of any automatic qualifying conference in bowl play over the past 6 seasons. Does that mean that the Big East is the best conference in football? Of course not, but they don’t get a chance to prove themselves against the bigger conferences either. The Big East currently has 6 bowl affiliations. Of those six, they play the ACC in 2, the Big 12 in one, the SEC in one, C-USA in one and their BCS bowl game, which is usually against an ACC team in the Orange Bowl. The Big 12 game is against the 7th place team from the Big 12 and the SEC game is against their 9th place team. So even when they play the elite conferences they are playing the worst bowl eligible teams that the conference has to offer. While in turn the SEC and the Big Ten both set up their top teams to play each other in 2 different bowls.

THE MONEY:
Now, many people might complain that this is taking money away from teams/conferences since the bowl contracts with conferences all but guarantee a certain amount of money that every conference knows that they will receive come bowl season. I disagree. If anything, conferences have a chance to make even more money. This year the SEC had 3 teams in the top 6 and 4 in the top 9, yet both Arkansas (#6) and South Carolina (#9) were both blocked from partaking in any BCS bowl because current rules state only 2 BCS bids per conference.

The bowl payouts would probably also go up, creating more money in the total pot for teams. The reason the bowl payouts would go up is because that directly affects your draft order. If you want to get better teams to your bold game you up your payout. Payouts would have to be submitted before the season starts in a blind bid, the draft order would then be announced closer to the end of the season. If the Las Vegas Bowl wanted to make a splash next year to celebrate the 20th year of the bowl, they could make a larger bid than they might normally, and get a better match-up between top 15-20 teams.

One last detail I would tinker with would be the bowl payouts. Instead of each team splitting the pot and putting on an exhibition for the fans, I would have the result of the game determine the payout. Winning team takes two-thirds and the losing team gets one-third.

I know that this does not fix all the problems in the college football post-season, but I think it does make bowl season better. I know as a Pitt fan, that I would love to be able to see Pitt play Penn State in a bowl game or maybe Arizona State, now that Todd Graham left Pitt for that job. Before, that was impossible. The chances of playing in the Cotton Bowl or Rose Bowl are currently non-existent if you are an ACC or Big East team, which should not be the case. Change is good. Change is needed.