Today’s column: College Football is a Big Fat Mess, Vol. 2,554 — Another Way to Fix It (That Will Be Ignored Because it Makes Too Much Sense).
The participants in the College Football Playoff are ready to play on Friday. Just look at these guys. Notice anything familiar?
Yep, it’s pretty much the same old crowd. You could’ve picked three of them before the season even started. Alabama (yawn), Clemson (yawn), Ohio State (yawn), Notre Dame (what are they doing there; didn’t they just get smoked by Clemson?).
Anyway, same old thing. It’s an old fall rerun.
For the record, four schools have claimed 20 of the 28 berths in the CFP since it was created seven years ago — Clemson and Alabama (six each), and Ohio State and Oklahoma (4 each). Clemson and Alabama have qualified for six of the seven playoffs.
Only 11 teams have even played in the CFP; by comparison, in the past seven years, 17 NFL teams have reached the “final four,” and only one team has more than three berths (New England, six).
The sameness of the CFP field can be blamed on both the method of determining champions — which has been flawed forever — and the lack of parity.
There are obvious ways to remedy the former, but as long as the powers that be (Power Five, TV networks) are making lots of money, nothing will change. The Group of Five conferences — which consist of 59 of the FBS’s 130 schools, none of which has cracked the CFP — haven’t had the foresight or boldness to break away and form their own playoff, which would create a split championship and ultimately force change. Nor has there been an effort to increase the size of the playoff field and create a path for Group of Five teams to the championship (this year it’s unbeaten Cincinnati’s turn to get shut out of the playoff).
So, beyond the CFP format that we are stuck with, there remains the question of parity, or the dearth of it. There’s a simple solution — cut the scholarship limit. Cut it from 85 to 75 or 70. This would disperse talent. It would prevent Alabama and Ohio State and the rest of the powerhouse programs from stockpiling talent on their bench, preventing other schools from signing them.
This has been done previously. In 1973, the first scholarship limits were imposed, capping them at 105, largely to meet the demands of the new Title IX law. In 1978, they were cut again, from 105 to 95. From 1992 to 1994, they were cut once more, from 95 to the current limit of 85.
The first thing that will happen if another cut is proposed is dire predictions for the end of the football world by coaches. When scholarships were cut to 95 in 1978, former USC coach John McKay was quoted as saying, “Mark this day on your calendar. This day is the ruin of college football. It will only go downhill from here.”
When another scholarship cut was mandated in the ’90s, the reaction was the same. “They’re just going to water it (college football) down until it can’t compete with the pros for the attention and dollars,” coach Bobby Bowden told Sports Illustrated in 1993. “They’re just going to produce an inferior product.”
“You can’t bite the hand that feeds you,” Michigan State football coach George Perles told the same magazine. “If you cut and cut and cut, your product won’t be worthwhile to sell to advertisers.”
All of which of course proved to be nonsense.
Football coaches moan that cuts would hurt the quality of the product and thin a depth chart that is necessarily deep to cover injuries, but that’s more nonsense. According to a report on the Athleticscholarships website, in 2001 an average of just 55 players appeared in each game for 30 Division I-A teams; a study of games in 1999 and 1997 produced similar results. The website reported that a study of five teams revealed that only 39 players received significant playing time (five minutes or 10 plays). Jon Solomon of AL.com reported, “National champion Alabama used 59 players per regular-season game in 2011, ranging from 49 to 69 participants.”
Meanwhile, NFL teams have an active squad of 53 players, plus a dozen more on the practice squad. FCS schools survive on 63 scholarships.
At 85 scholarships, FBS teams are just three scholarships short of being able to provide scholarships for the first, second, third and fourth string, offense and defense.
“They could probably get away with 75–80 (scholarships),” former head coach Steve Spurrier once said. “ ... There are so many players on football scholarships at every college that never play. They’re just sort of there helping practice out and so forth.”
In 2012, the NCAA Division I Board of Directors considered reducing scholarships in football to 80, based on the recommendation of a subcommittee, which believed it would free money to be spent elsewhere and “allow for athletics talent to be dispersed across more intercollegiate athletics programs.” The subcommittee reasoned that it not only would allow talented athletes to be distributed among more teams, but also allow athletes the opportunity to play rather than sit on the sideline.
The NCAA board of governors rejected the subcommittee’s proposal.
A reduction of just five scholarships would mean five more athletes who could improve the play of, say, Colorado State or Coastal Carolina, instead of being stored away on the bench at Alabama and Ohio State. In a sport where the rich get richer every year, it would spread the wealth and create more parity in a sport that badly needs it. Is there any sport that has more bad (lopsided) games and a smaller percentage of teams that actually compete for the championship?
When Sports Illustrated asked Bowden about scholarship reductions in 1993, the magazine noted that the coach “moaned” that “The smaller teams will keep getting better. They’ll get the players we can’t get.”
That’s the hope anyway, even if Bowden and the rest of the Power Five coaches and their schools aren’t happy about losing some of their monopoly.