Maybe this is how the revolution to take back college football’s postseason starts. Maybe it takes a well-respected athletic director to spell it out clearly to fellow administrators for the awakening to begin, to take hold.
A forehead-smacking scandal involving one of the BCS bowls provides an opening. When a conference champion loses $1.76 million to play in that bowl game, that raises more red flags.
But, maybe, just maybe, for the lesson to stick, for the revolution to begin, the message must come from a man who had served as an athletic director for 30 years, bucked convention by installing a blue football field and guided a program from Division I-AA to national phenomenon — punctuated by two victories in that very same, now tarnished, bowl game.
“The sport where the NCAA can generate the biggest revenue, and they end up giving it away,” Boise State athletic director Gene Bleymaier told roughly 170 City Club of Boise members Monday afternoon.
“If the university presidents ever really truly understood what was happening, they would be in disbelief. The NCAA leadership over the past 30 years has been lulled to sleep while this transformation took place.”
In Bleymaier’s version of how the corrupt BCS system came to be, it is the commissioners of the six power conferences who recognized the leadership void and stepped in to increase their own power, enrich their own leagues and “now control the most lucrative piece of college athletics.”
“And they control it for free and at the expense of all the other Division I football programs,” Bleymaier said.
Can you imagine the NFL allowing another enterprise to run its playoffs and the Super Bowl? Can you imagine the NCAA allowing someone else to run the men’s basketball tournament and keeping the profits?
The executive directors of bowl games are profiting from college football’s popularity, Bleymaier said, instead of the colleges and universities that invest in the product, that pay the coaches, that award scholarships.
At a time when schools are cutting programs, when they are sacrificing traditional conference alignments and rivalries for a bigger piece of TV money, when they are selling everything up to and including, in some cases, their souls for extra revenue, they refuse to take control of college football’s postseason.
A postseason, Bleymaier said, that would generate more money than the basketball tournament, which provides 90 percent of the NCAA’s revenue now.
Instead, they allow the current system to remain. A system where Connecticut can lose $1.76 million on its trip to the Fiesta Bowl, whose executive director was treated to company-sponsored strip club trips, birthday parties and golf club memberships in three states.
No amount of noise from outsiders, including the damning “Death to the BCS” book, seems to do anything.
But an insider like Bleymaier — so well respected that the athletic director at Southern Mississippi called him to learn BSU’s secret — maybe he has a chance.
Maybe he can convince enough athletic directors, who can wake up enough presidents. Maybe he can convince them that many of their budget woes would go away if they’d be willing to get rid of the bowl tradition as easily as they dismiss conference tradition.
“I just think we’re leaving so much money on the table,’’ Bleymaier said. “You think about it, all the schools invest all this money and do all this and then we give away the most lucrative part of the season. We just give it away.
It hasn’t for a while. It’s good to see Bleymaier start telling that story. It’ll be better if he keeps telling it.
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