With new bowl deal, Mike Slive outmaneuvers Jim Delany

Friday afternoon, Southeastern Conference Commissioner Mike Slive and outgoing Big 12 Commissioner announced a five-year agreement to send their conference champions to an as-yet unnamed New Years Day bowl, if those conference champions are left out of the pending four-team playoff being considered by the college football powers that be.

With one press release, Mike Slive shows why he is the Jedi Master of The Deal and Big 10 Commissioner Jim Delany is just another politician.

The deal with the Big 12 does four things:

1. It virtually guarantees that the conference champions of the two most dominant and demographically dynamic conferences will meet in the postseason, whether that’s in the four team playoff that is poised to replace the BCS or in the Unnamed Bowl.
2. It guarantees that if the selection process somehow finds a way to screw the Big 12 and SEC champs out of berths in the final four, it creates a path for the winner of the Unnamed Bowl to be named the Associated Press National Champions. It weakens the credibility of the Delany-driven four team selection process.
3. It places intense new pressure on Notre Dame to join a conference. Delany’s insistence on “conference champions only” in the final four is one thing. Cutting Notre Dame out of a second major postseason matchup with national championship implications is another matter entirely. Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick brushed off Friday’s development, telling the NY Times Pete Thamel that the deal had no near term implications. pffft.
4. It places new competitive pressure on the Sugar Bowl, an event that traditionally hosts the SEC champion. In the BCS era however, the Sugar only hosts the SEC champion if it was hosting the BCS Championship Game or the SEC champ wasn’t playing for the title. Now, the Sugar Bowl may have to compete with another venue. There happens to be a big one just outside of Dallas.

Delany and PAC-12 Commissioner Larry Scott have both expressed strong desire to maintain their relationship with the Rose Bowl, which itself had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the BCS rotation. Their goal is to have at least one of the semifinal games in the new playoff played in Pasadena (assuming that the Big 10 and PAC-12 can both get teams in the four team field).

Hypothetically, a scenario is possible wherein the Big 10, PAC-12 and ACC all get final four berths along with Notre Dame at large. While that hasn’t happened yet, it’s certainly within the realm of possibilities. This is especially true if teams not named Notre Dame must be conference champs and the teams are selected by a human committee in some smoky backroom in Indianapolis. The folks who’ve watched six straight SEC teams win the BCS Championship were drooling over this; praying for it to happen, even.

Until Friday afternoon.

In the doomsday scenario above, a highly ranked SEC team will play a highly ranked Big 12 team on New Year’s Day, in prime time. Maybe the winning team won’t hoist a crystal ball, but it might host the AP Trophy while the two conferences rake in the cash.

Your move, Jim Delany.

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I don’t trust Jim Delany, and neither should you

For a conference commissioner, Jim Delany makes one hell of a politician. Like all shrewd politicians, he knows how to read public opinion and reverse course when his original position has become untenable. It other words, Delany was against a college football playoff before he was for it, and somewhere John Kerry smiles.

If anyone thinks Delany’s apparent change of heart is being made in the interests of the sport of college football, they probably think the former Democrat nominee for President opposed the Iraq war during the 2004 campaign out of dedication to principle.

The only person you should trust less than a politician who reverses positions is a politician whose change of heart is offering you something that sounds too good to be true. The Big 10 balloon-float of a plus one playoff model for major college football, as described in the Chicago Tribune report on Monday, is just such a proposal.

It has all the goodies that make BCS anarchists like Dan Wetzel positively giddy over the possibilities:

• Seeding a four-team, three game playoff with the semifinals held on the college campus(es) of the higher seed(s).
• Competitive bidding from cities seeking to host the final game.
• College football’s national champion settled on the field.
• Wresting control of the college football postseason from greedy, corrupt bowl executives.
• Promising prospects of higher attendance and larger TV audiences for compelling matchups.

What’s not to like about a proposal fleshed out around these bones? Not much. It sounds too good to be true and therefore, it probably is.

Call me a curmudgeon, but anyone gleefully embracing a politician’s offer of shiny objects has failed to learn the lessons of life. And if you came of age during Watergate and still think there’s no hook, no gotcha, no catch… Well, some people are just hopeless.

Yesterday, I touched on the relationship between the Big 10, the PAC 12 and the Rose Bowl. That relationship has existed since the end of World War II. While some of the younger set dismiss the pact as a relic of a bygone era, few such critics sit in positions of authority and most of those who do exercise control are steeped in that tradition.

Accordingly, I don’t believe the commissioner of the Big 10 will propose or support a plan that would likely end the matchup between his conference champion and the champion of the PAC-12 in the Granddaddy of Them All. There’s a catch here somewhere.

I’ve always been an enthusiastic and optimistic supporter of a limited playoff model and many times I’ve expressed support for a plus one. The game of college football is nothing like the NFL, so its postseason should look nothing like the pro’s. A multi-round, seeded playoff model that matches Alabama or LSU against the Conference USA champ is a recipe for disaster, and at least one Big 10 official agrees with me.

The plus one model is the best tradeoff between fan demand for a legitimate championship and university presidents’ legitimate concerns over academics, logistics and finance. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good compromise and the campus semifinals angle makes it even better.

I just don’t believe that college sports’ shrewdest politician will be its principled proponent. Against it before you for for it; for it  before you were against it? I believe Delany has had a heart-changing epiphany about as much as I believe John Kerry did eight years ago.

I don’t trust either one of them. And neither should you.

Jealous over media buzz created by the 2012 SEC schedule, Pac-12 and Big 10 announce interleague plans

Jim Delany and Larry Scott can’t stand it. At 9:00 am this morning, the Southeastern Conference released the 14-team schedule for the 2012 football season. The crowd went wild. “The new schedule is here! The new schedule is here! Have you seen the new schedule yet?”

The commissioners of the Pac 12 and Big 10 were not to be outdone by their big brothers in the SEC. Oh, hell no. So a mere few hours after the SEC’s media splash, the two conferences jointly announced plans to have each member program playing an opponent from the other league every year, beginning in 2017.

In all seriousness, this is great news for everyone except the Rose Bowl, who is now much more likely to get a rematch of a regular season game in the Granddaddy of Them All. Some of the regular season matchups will be must-see football. Think Michigan vs. USC. Ohio State vs. Oregon. Nebraska vs. Stanford. Tell the truth—you’d watch those games, wouldn’t you?

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Did the Big Ten publicly smack down a gossip blogger? Looks like it. Ouch.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why Twitter is teh awesomest invention since Al Gore invented innerwebs. Gossip blogger Clay Travis found a Craiglist ad purporting to recruit fans to attend the inaugural Big Ten Championship Game, set for Saturday evening in Indianapolis, Indiana and tweeted a link to his site.

The Big Ten disputed that suggestion, and publicly called Travis out via its own Twitter account:

Hilarity ensued.

It’s impossible to tell who’s behind the Craigslist ad or whether the offer is real. For all we know, this could be a prank by a crafty SEC fan. IBCR loves a good troll job, but it wasn’t us, I swear!

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Conference Realignment and Notre Dame: No white smoke

Yahoo! Sports’ Dan Wetzel penned a column yesterday, laying out a sound case for Notre Dame giving up its football independence and aligning with a conference that he believes is the best fit—the ACC. It’s a compelling case.

“Ask people in South Bend and one of their chief concerns about super-conferences is whether they will prevent the Irish from putting together legitimate 12-game schedules, including revenue-rich seven or eight home games. Then it’s what it might do to basketball and other sports,” writes Wetzel.

He also points out the demographic trends of the Midwest region of the US, which is growing much more slowly than the Southeast and the Atlantic seaboard, and how population patterns play important roles in both audience and recruiting. When fewer people are living in your region, you have fewer eyes glued to your broadcasts and fewer people in your recruiting territory.

Those are good points, but I don’t see any white smoke from the chimney.

Notre Dame’s “recruiting territory” is the United States of America. It has significant fanbase representation in virtually every major media market in the country. It has its own television contract with NBC Sports. It has longstanding rivalries with Southern Cal, Michigan, Michigan State, Pitt, Purdue, Boston College and the military service academies. Super-conferences with 16 members each will still likely have either eight or nine game schedules that may preclude Notre Dame from maintaining all of those rivalries, but it’s doubtful that we’d see the end of the USC – Notre Dame or Boston College – Notre Dame or Navy – Notre Dame rivalries.

By remaining independent, would the school face the challenge Wetzel identifies in putting together the schedule? Sure. But things can get worked out. Taking the path of least resistance and succumbing to the ACC would be the end of the Irish mystique. It would relegate it to the same status as a Florida State or Virginia Tech. I think the ACC likes Notre Dame a lot more than Notre Dame likes the conference. Any conference, for that matter.

Joining a conference other than the Big 10 likely ends one or more of the rivalries with Michigan, Michigan State and Purdue. Why would the Irish give up such nationally seismic matchups like that for a schedule that includes Clemson and NC State, especially when either the Boston College or the Pitt series could still likely be maintained? If they were forced to give up the biannual trip to Los Angeles, they lose access to a hotbed of recruits in the nation’s most populous state and trade that for a conference matchup with Duke? Notre Dame has access to the east coast also, due its storied rivalries with Army and Navy, two of the greatest places on the face of the earth to watch a college football game. I just don’t see any of that happening.

The conference realignment craze is driven by money, media influence and market share. Notre Dame has a multibillion dollar endowment and ample revenues from its TV deal. It really doesn’t need the money and it already wields considerable influence in the world of college football. They haven’t been in a national title chance since before many of you were even born, but the school still commands ratings and fills the stadium every Saturday.

Notre Dame may feel a little pressure to join the realignment bandwagon, but at the end of the day, their national recruiting territory, national mystique and storied rivalries will live on, as will their FBS independence. Short of a Papal Bull, that is, and fumata bianca billowing from the chimney atop the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

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