I get that the bowls have flaws, yep--this story too, just as others, sounds bad. But despite that, I just can't get worked up into an anti-Bowl (major or minor) fervor as Brian does. I'm going to the Sugar Bowl, will have a great time, and am happy it exists in the format it does. In fact, if we used the four major bowls and had a plus one after that, as far as I'm concerned I'd have no further issue with how we select the NC. There is almost never in any year, (IMO) more than a couple teams with legit claims to play in the final game-after the bowls have been played. 

People keep saying that home site semi-final playoff games would ELIMINATE the concern of the fan base having to travel twice.  That is only true if the home team wins.  If the visiting team wins, wouldn't the fans have to travel twice if they want to also attend the Championship Game? 

"Denard just kicks your ass and then has a snack."

Just awesome.

Go Blue!

I have issues with a plus one. Sure, on the years listed, it gives a fair shot. However, in a year like last year, should Auburn have had to play another game? I would be in favor of some sort of flexible system. I know that is incredibly unrealistic but say, for instance, you put in a qualifer like the third team has to be within so many ranking points of the second team for the plus one to kick in. Also, what you likely do here is remove a BCS bowl and two at large births. Do we want to do that? The other issue would come with 3 undefeateds and a one loss in the top 4 which would be like the scenarios Plus one propoenents would use as the perfect case. What if the one loss wins? Why should a team who won their first 13 or 14 games have to play a team that had already lost and what if that team is a team they have beaten? Then, essentially all we have done is reduce the value of losing no games relative to  1 game. That is by far the biggest value. A playoff fixes very little unless you have the perfect year with 4 one loss teams or 4 undefeateds. You are simply moving your controversy down the rankings. I'm not even going to go into the problem with determining the 4th and 5th teams but it's pretty obvious that owuld be far from cut and dried as well. 

All right...go ahead and neg the hell out of me, but getting the media to be your lap dog is part of doing the damn job. they are the (piss poor) filter and contolling them keeps the fans content...helps recruiting...helps with donations..and helps pump up DB's (shamefully purposed) waitlist for season tix. 

I agree that RR got a raw deal when he stepped into the job.  Maybe he could have fixed it with more support, better advice, or just a more skillful approach.  Maybe he was a dead man walking while watching LC beat Florida from the sidelines.  I don't know, but he never came close to handling the non-football aspects of the job in a strong manner. 

Look...I'm pretty sure Wangler and many others wanted Miles to be coach.  I'm pretty sure the vast majorty of our ilk (including me) wanted Harbaugh.  But Hoke came in and owned, absulutely freaking dominated, the position and the media from Day 1.  He makes the ravings of Drew Sharp seem even more ridiculous than they were 5 years ago.  He makes the existence of Rosenberg seem more pathetic than maddening.  Yes he's in a comfort zone.  He created it.  It's the same comfort zone Bo created, lived in, and shared with us for 20 years. 

The point is that we don't need to constantly compare RR's treatment to BH's.  RR got less than he deserved and less than he needed.  BH didn't wait to be treated in any manner.  He immediately put to rest any short-term questions as to his legitimacy; then (along with his non-gerg staff) put the long term questions to rest through pure on-field competence.

this time of year, you hear every single talking head on TV, radio, internet whatever talking about the bowl situation and how it is emblematic of today's society, "a place that rewards mediocrity, even 6-7 teams are rewarded, everyone gets a trophy!"

i agree that the bowl situation is emblematic of today's society, but happen to take the opposite side of the "today's society" view. in a time that rewards "events" and "marketing" and "branding," 35 bowls are not created to reward teams but to promote things and make the host city money, the teams and their general success is irrelevant, for the most part.  the legal obligations and small print and the large BANNER ADS are the true importance of these games, not to give UCLA $750,000, which is less than nothing, not to give kids an interesting experience.

He's emotionally engaging but provides nothing of any real substance.  I'm not being sarcastic when I say he's perfect. 

For the band? Bandies speak up, and while it may be there are room in a list of hotels given by the bowl, the band rooms are almost never as swanky as the team/VIP hotel. Often not as centrally located, and not as nice, as well as more packed per room.  This may have changed over the years, but I remember the fancy hotel being for team, coaches (and families), AD and U VIPS, and some support staff.  Cheerleaders and band etc. were often off the main placement.

.

From TFA:

Before the interview ossified into its current state -- pith-helmeted archeologists pinpoint the approximate time of death to 2005 -- the baseball clubhouse was a great place to have a conversation. After games, writers would sit in the manager's office, wait for the radio guys to ask their questions and then just talk. You got to know something about the man: what he liked to drink after a win, what he liked to drink after a loss, whether he was exasperated or resigned. At some point a clubbie would arrive with a plate of food, and you got to know whether he was on a diet or whether the game had made the very idea of eating intolerable.

Oh FFS. The reporter who got all chummy with the athletes over a sammich was just as retarded as the reporters looking for "gotcha" quotes now; neither does anything remotely close to a public service.  The civility is gone but to the fan it wasn't worth crap to begin with the way it was used.  What this guy is pining for isn't quality journalism; it's a monopoly on player access.  This guy wants to hang out with celebrities like the sycophant he is.

What fans want is insight.  Knowing what a player likes to drink after a loss gets us no closer to understanding the game or the players than trying to create drama by taking quotes out of context.  What we really need are reporters who know what the fark they're talking about and can then communicate that to the masses, but this takes a lot of working knowledge and skill.  Heiko's work* is way more valuable than an entire room full of reporters asking Hoke again if he ever utters the words "Ohio State" (look, if you're asking because you've heard it before, it's not news), and he doesn't have to watch Greg Mattison eat a damned sammich to do it.  Instead the world of journalism  -- in any field, for that matter -- is a trench full of entertainers run by a Borg-like committee with no sense of what they're doing.  Unaccountable, sterile, and devoid of insight.  This is what it looks like from the outside, at least, and whatever excuses might come from within has to account for that.  Whatever the hell people are doing, the result is unacceptable.

*This is still half the battle though.  Heiko asks meaningful questions, but MGoBlog is rather raw for a n00b.  That's fine within the blog's scope, but for journalism in general, the other half of the battle is conveying information simply and concisely.  This takes terrific writing skills, though, so the modus operandi these days is to ask stupid questions and publish the answers.  No thought required at any level, but no insight whatsoever.

LOL, Jim Delany as Londo Mollari.

The blood is already on my hands. Right or wrong, I must follow the path ... to its end.

- something about "Leaders" and "Legends," I think.

It's been a while since I saw a Babylon 5 reference, nice work!

Per Michigan's FY 2012 budget, the athletic department is expecting to receive $2.47M in FY 2012 from the Big Ten in conference distributions from net bowl revenue.  If you multiply that by eleven teams, then the total amount the B10 programs received was about $27.17M.

The total amount that the bowls paid out to the B10 Conference in that same time frame was a little over $37M in gross revenue.  That means roughly $10M didn't make it into the the B10's programs or about 27%.

All the bowls paid around $270M gross last year to the different conferences in Division 1-A.  Take 27% off of that and the amount the schools received was probably around $200M net.

Jim Delany and other conference commissions have said that a college football playoff would pay more than the BCS system.  Delany is even on record saying that it'd pay "three or four times more" than the BCS.  For sake of this discussion, I'll use the $200M figure, multiply it by three and we're perhaps on firm footing here to think that the schools would get $600M net from a playoff system (although it's likely more).  This also doesn't count what the bowls would pay in addition outside the playoff system--let's add $100M to that amount net and say the schools would get around $700M.

Under the BCS system, the Big Ten received roughly 10% in net revenue to the schools of the gross revenue of the BCS.  Now I don't know how the money would be divided in a bowl system between the conferences, but let's say that 10% or the $700M or $70M net would go to the (now twelve) Big Ten programs.

The means Michigan would receive something like $5.83M from the Big Ten in conference distributions instead of the $2.47M I mentioned above--about $3.36M more. 

Now keep in mind that this is back of the envelope numbers, but I think they're roughly in the ballpark and they're certainly in line with guys like Dan Wetzel and Mark Cuban have said.  So why doesn't Jim Delany endorse this cause of action?

One reason is fairly clear--he (with the endorsement of the conference presidents) don't want to cede control of the college football post season to the NCAA.  It's just way too valuable a commodity to them in terms of free publicity for the schools that translates into great admissions, forums to entertain donors, etc., to give up for and additional $3.4M per team.  There's also no knowing how much of a "cut" the NCAA would take--that means it might not appear to be as lucrative as the figures I wrote about above would imply.

The second reason is that Delany wants to protect the conference and the market it serves.  He doesn't want to give any potential competitors (the future Boise States, TCUs and Utahs of the world) the resources or the forum (in terms of higher profile bowl games or a playoff) to promote themselves.  In sum, he wants to keep them "poor" in terms of money and exposure so that the Big Ten brand can maintain all its competitive advantages.  Now I don't know if Dan Wetzel's tweet about Delany telling the Sugar Bowl officials that he didn't want to see Michigan playing Boise State is true or not, but it would certainly be consistent with his past actions.

We'll see what happens in future years, but I get the impression that the tide is turning against Delany on this issue--and it has been for years.  When college football went to 85 scholarships in 1993, that meant the smaller teams could get better players overall.  As cable television expanded and more teams were being shown, that gave them greater publicity then ever before--just think about what Boise State was in 1991 and compare it to today.

Now we have the BCS which the fans and media don't like and which more conference commissioners are rethinking in terms of either changing how the bowls pick teams to even considering a Plus One system.  We'll eventually get a playoff and I suspect it'll settle in on eight teams when it's all said and done.

Does anyone else find it ironic that a piece about the "death of the sports interview" is on ESPN.com?

run much of the world. 

Thanks for the B5 reference. Still the only show to come close to real physics in outer space.

The 24/7 coverage of nearly all sports and the complete lack of distinction between reportage and opinion makes this sort of headline hunting gotcha coverage happen. Too many so-called reporters hoping to become a personality and too few really interested in getting the facts - they jump right to "their take."

MGoblog is sort of a hybrid. It clearly has a distinct point of view (pro-Wolverines) but so far Brian and others have managed to keep to the notion that we should to find out what the facts are. We can argue about why the game was won or lost, but let's be sure we got the stats and play-by-play right.