STILLWATER – The meetings begin on Thursday (June 17-18) in Chicago with the commissioners of all the conferences involved in the College Football Playoff and Jack Swarbrick the athletic director of Notre Dame. Swarbrick was part of “the working group” that was assigned the task in January of 2019 of looking at the CFP halfway through it’s first 12-year contract and seeing if it could be improved. The Notre Dame athletic director was joined by SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson, and our own Big 12 boss Bob Bowlsby. I know there are some out there that aren’t Bowlsby fans, but honestly, he has done a much better job than the previous league supervisors. He hasn’t cowered to Texas like several did. He does believe for the conference to be at it’s best that Texas needs to join OU in being good in football, but he welcomes all comers to claiming the championship trophy.
Bowlsby and the others know the CFP needs Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, and other bluebloods, but they also need more. Variety is definitely a spice. The more, the merrier has been around a long time as a saying for good reason. I can’t lie or dodge it, this format announced gives Oklahoma State a greater opportunity to be in the playoff, most seasons in recent years they would be in the mix deep into the season.
Bowlsby has been tough to get as a guest on radio shows, but the folks at Sirius-XM and the Big 12 Today Show had him on and I’m kidnapping some of the conversation.
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Bob Bowlsby has been a tough commissioner for the Big 12 Conference.
“The working group” had the job of looking at the four-team playoff and the entire set-up, bowls involved, selection process, schedule on the calendar, all of it. They were quick to say nothing was wrong with the four-team playoff. It has worked, but they did say with their model of 12 teams, top four (all conference champions) getting byes, the next four hosting first round games on campus sites against the 9-12 teams selected that more is better. The playoff needs more inclusion as in all top conference champions, Group of Five inclusion, and multiple teams out of the conferences that prove the be the strongest.
One aspect Bowlsby spoke of that I certainly agree with is the selection process. Letting every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a computer poll into the process drove me nuts.
“The human selection process with 13 honest people in a room doing a very difficult job is far superior to the blended polls or the computer computations, so if we ended up with a four-team playoff going forward then I don’t think we would be upset with that at all,” Bowlsby said answering a question on Sirius-XM from co-host Gabe Ikard. “It has worked exceedingly well.
“We looked at a lot of different things, but format is the one that has got the most attention. (The working group) spent hundreds of hours working through formats and numbers and permutations of various models and arrived at the model that was presented to the rest of the commissioners last week,” added Bowlsby.
I like his confidence as he believes “the working group” did such a thorough job that this process which includes a CFP Board meeting On June 22 in Dallas.
“Ultimately, it’s my belief that we will recommend to the board a model next week (in Dallas) and the Board of Managers, the Presidents that represent all of the conferences will make a decision on what we should do going forward, Bowlsby continued in the interview with Big 12 Today. “I suspect that we’ll get good support. The four members that worked on this have something north of over 150-years-experience and I think we asked the right questions.”
The process will continue as the model will be poked and pried. There will be some changes, probably most cosmetic.
“This is a process that it will at least be fall before it culminates and comes around in a resolution. Time will tell how soon it will be able to be implemented,” Bowlsby said on Sirius-XM. “There are a lot of moving parts that will determine how soon it will be implemented. Maybe we have to wait until the end of the 12-year period. On the other hand, I think there are some opportunities to do it sooner than that.”
The bowl attachments and the television contract will be the main variables with that. How much of a split do the bowls get in ticket sales and television money? How much more is ESPN willing to fork over for more games, and quite likely more competitive games? Hopefully, everybody will keep repeating, ‘the more, the merrier.’
From the very beginning of the College Football Playoff we have valued conference championships
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Jack Swabrick hugs his head coach Brian Kelly at Notre Dame.
“I’ve been proud of my colleague Jack Swarbrick of Notre Dame for saying, ‘we have the prerogative of going into a conference if we want to. We value our independence and it has been our tradition, and therefore we aren’t going to win a conference championship and we won’t have access to one of those byes,’” Bowlsby said of the willingness for Swarbrick to go along with that part of the model nowing Notre Dame could never get that advantage unless they joined a conference.
“Playing an entire season and each week answering the challenge of a tough conference is a very worthy undertaking. It is a very good indicator of how good a football team that you are,” Bowlsby said.
Bowlsby reminded the audience that while the teams seeded five through eight will get to host a CFP game on campus, that money goes to the CFP coffers, not their school. Same with the television money. The question as to why the quarterfinals wouldn’t also be held on campus sites, is answered by the calendar and tie between the CFP and college bowl games historically with college football.
“The bowl system has been very good to college football and we would really like to make sure that New Year’s Day and the celebration of New Year’s Day is synonymous with college football and so that’s why we are abdicating putting the quarterfinals within the bowls on New Year’s Day. I think there can be disagreements on it, but we didn’t get where we are without having significant conversation and going through to resolve what we thought were the right priorities.”
Four CFP quarterfinal games on New Year’s Day or on years where that holiday is on Sunday then on an adjacent day. Count me in!
In other words, I like the plan and I hope we can get it cranked up as soon as possible.
