GROWING PAINS FOR BOWL SEASON
On Saturday, college football’s postseason finally reached a long-dreaded but long-inevitable milestone. There will not be enough 6-6 teams to fill the 80 spots in this season’s 40 bowl games. At least two, and as many five 5-7 teams will find out this weekend they’re going to play another game after all. Kansas State, Georgia State and South Alabama are the lone remaining six-win possibilities.
Seeing this likelihood coming, I began making calls several weeks ago to find out how exactly this process would play out. It quickly became apparent that literally no one involved had any idea. Three years ago, the NCAA formally adopted a contingency plan for this very scenario consisting of several steps, the last of which allows a 5-7 team that “achieved a top-five Academic Progress Rate in the Football Bowl Subdivision for the most recent reporting year.”
I followed up with the NCAA, which confirmed my interpretation that this specifically referred only to the top five APR schools in all of FBS -- most recently Wisconsin, Northwestern, Duke, Michigan and Stanford -- all of which happened to be eligible already. In fact, the NCAA emphasized that the 2012 bylaw was never intended to guarantee enough eligible teams.
Bowl organizers, of course, had a different interpretation, since that one would possibly cause one or more games to “go dark.” They claimed the intent all along was simply to rank the top five-win teams in order of APR score. This year that would be Nebraska (985), Missouri (976), K-State (976), Minnesota (975) and San Jose State (975).
The recently formed Football Oversight Committee -- chaired by Bowlsby -- has been tasked with sorting the whole thing out and will recommend a solution to the NCAA on Monday. It won’t likely be straightforward.
“The Board of Directors has been fairly consistent in saying they’d like to see some form of APR component applied to the selection process, so we’ll try to put that in place,” said Bowlsby. “That doesn’t mean we’ll put them in rank order.”
Among the issues at hand: Which bowls get stuck with these teams? If a Big Ten-partner bowl has an opening, does it get first dibs on Nebraska? And how do you avoid sending a team like San Jose State clear across the country?
“We have to come up with a better policy,” said Bowlsby, “because we can’t be dealing with it on a yearly basis.”
The NCAA used to strictly control the number of bowls but will now certify nearly any community that’s willing to write a check. Seven have launched just in the last two years alone. Some on the conference side would gladly let a few go dark this year just to curb the trend, but that would infuriate organizers and in fact potentially lead to lawsuits.
“We really need to review the whole postseason football issue and making sure we’re doing what 2015 demands,” said the Football Bowl Association’s executive director, Wright Waters. “This issue will put it center of the conversation. We’ll have an opportunity to talk with all the stakeholders and come out if it with a better postseason.”
Just not this postseason.
