Corporate Ruin of New Year's Football

[joncarl]

I don't think there is anything new in here, just another opinion. But I guess I am of that age, mom would put on a crock pot of soup and we would snack on chips, meat, cheese and crackers and bring in another tv to the living room and watch football all day. Games were fun to watch, football was the focus not all the other stuff. Times change, I get that, just miss football being fun.

David Rafferty (opinion): The corporate ruin of New Year’s football

 

[Turd Ferguson]

Well thanks to Hulu I get to watch terrible Aflac commercials featuring Deion Sanders and Nick Saban during every commercial break. But like that stupid commercial says: "Must be the money"

 

[DuckTownHusker]

The guy started his article by calling it the "tee-vee" which made me instantly think he was an out-of-touch 90 year old man.

Football is still very enjoyable to watch. If a kid wants to skip out on a meaningless bowl game, than go ahead and let him. It's a chance for the backup to shine. And truthfully, we have too many bowls as-is. I would rather see us either embrace a full playoff system like the NFL (and the losers stay home) or just go back to having like 10-15 bowl games that actually mean something. Right now, we're in the squishy middle with 40+ bowls featuring 0.500 MAC teams playing against the 9th best team from the Big XII or ACC. It's just stupid.

Either give us real playoffs or go back to a day full of Oklahoma-Penn State and Florida-USC exhibition style bowls.

 

[Costa Rica Red]

ESPN is doing to sports what CNN did to news.

 

[EastOfEden]

I watch CNN but they don't have much on sports. Don't know what you mean. ESPN bought up all the bowl games so I guess ESPN might be the one. ESPN also has a monetary interest in just how well the SEC does.

 

[Hville]

I’m sorry but I totally disagree that this is corporate driven. The CFP has been fan driven from day 1. The demand to get away from polls declaring champions was unilaterally identified as the number 1 problem with college football. The commen solution was to take the best two teams after the bowl game and let them playoff. The fans demanded four teams and got it. Now we want 8 or 16. We are our own worst enemy.

 

[Costa Rica Red]

CNN turned news into a profit center. 24/7, inventing juicy stories if their weren't any available, created on air personalities, bringing their viewers opinion upon opinion upon opinion.

 

[KleinTxHusker]

The guy started his article by calling it the "tee-vee" which made me instantly think he was an out-of-touch 90 year old man.

Football is still very enjoyable to watch. If a kid wants to skip out on a meaningless bowl game, than go ahead and let him. It's a chance for the backup to shine. And truthfully, we have too many bowls as-is. I would rather see us either embrace a full playoff system like the NFL (and the losers stay home) or just go back to having like 10-15 bowl games that actually mean something. Right now, we're in the squishy middle with 40+ bowls featuring 0.500 MAC teams playing against the 9th best team from the Big XII or ACC. It's just stupid.

Either give us real playoffs or go back to a day full of Oklahoma-Penn State and Florida-USC exhibition style bowls.

I watched a great number of the games on NYD along with the KSU-LSU game. I am not sure that the quality of play declined that much with the optouts. IMO, it actually added a degree of drama and interesting variables. (Arkansas PSU game - can PSU take advantage of mess ups in thin Ark secondary? Can Ark continue to pound the rock against depleted PSU D, with marginal passing effectiveness).

I'd really like to get football back to more improvisation and emphasis of coaches on working and winning with they players they have.

Nothing has made me angrier than when we've gone through the two decades of coaching changes and someone walks in and says we need better players and we can't succeed until we get them. And their coaching was worse than the players we had, IMO. "It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools..."

An old ball coach once said a great coach was one that can beat you with their players, and then if you swapped players would beat you with your players. It was either Bear Bryant or Bum Phillips, and it was far more folksy than what I wrote (and hard to follow)...

 

[Bigger Ed]

I’m sorry but I totally disagree that this is corporate driven. The CFP has been fan driven from day 1. The demand to get away from polls declaring champions was unilaterally identified as the number 1 problem with college football. The commen solution was to take the best two teams after the bowl game and let them playoff. The fans demanded four teams and got it. Now we want 8 or 16. We are our own worst enemy.

I could not agree more. We are reaping what we sowed.

 

[NU_Alum]

I’m sorry but I totally disagree that this is corporate driven. The CFP has been fan driven from day 1. The demand to get away from polls declaring champions was unilaterally identified as the number 1 problem with college football. The commen solution was to take the best two teams after the bowl game and let them playoff. The fans demanded four teams and got it. Now we want 8 or 16. We are our own worst enemy.

The problem with "mob rule" so to speak.

I think you're spot on.

 

[Costa Rica Red]

I watched a great number of the games on NYD along with the KSU-LSU game. I am not sure that the quality of play declined that much with the optouts. IMO, it actually added a degree of drama and interesting variables. (Arkansas PSU game - can PSU take advantage of mess ups in thin Ark secondary? Can Ark continue to pound the rock against depleted PSU D, with marginal passing effectiveness).

I'd really like to get football back to more improvisation and emphasis of coaches on working and winning with they players they have.

Nothing has made me angrier than when we've gone through the two decades of coaching changes and someone walks in and says we need better players and we can't succeed until we get them. And their coaching was worse than the players we had, IMO. "It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools..."

An old ball coach once said a great coach was one that can beat you with their players, and then if you swapped players would beat you with your players. It was either Bear Bryant or Bum Phillips, and it was far more folksy than what I wrote (and hard to follow)...

He'll beat your'n with his'n, then beat his'n with your'n. Something like that. I thought it was attributed to Bobby Bowden but I could be wrong.

 

[lincoln84]

Mob rule is also what afflicted NU over the decade(s).

 

[NUinID]

The guy started his article by calling it the "tee-vee" which made me instantly think he was an out-of-touch 90 year old man.

Football is still very enjoyable to watch. If a kid wants to skip out on a meaningless bowl game, than go ahead and let him. It's a chance for the backup to shine. And truthfully, we have too many bowls as-is. I would rather see us either embrace a full playoff system like the NFL (and the losers stay home) or just go back to having like 10-15 bowl games that actually mean something. Right now, we're in the squishy middle with 40+ bowls featuring 0.500 MAC teams playing against the 9th best team from the Big XII or ACC. It's just stupid.

Either give us real playoffs or go back to a day full of Oklahoma-Penn State and Florida-USC exhibition style bowls.

I get that this is your opinion and all that, but the simple fact of the matter is that all of those meaningless bowl games make money for everyone involved.

Was listening to someone speaking on XM radio I think on The Full Ride with Childers and Nuehisel. They were discussing this very thing. He said all those minor little bowls are watched a lot more than you think they are. The Idaho Potato Bowl had like 1.5 million viewers on a Tuesday at 1:30 PM mountain time. This was December 22. A work day and they had that many viewers. They don't care one bit about butts in the stands. It's all about TV viewership.

I personally think there are probably a few too many bowl games at 40, but I wouldn't cut back to 15. I think 30 would be a nice number.

 

[KleinTxHusker]

He'll beat your'n with his'n, then beat his'n with your'n. Something like that. I thought it was attributed to Bobby Bowden but I could be wrong.

Bowden could have said it, and probably did, but pretty sure it predates him. Daryl Royal was another name for that matter. I’m pretty sure I heard it in the mid 1970’s before Bowden became a huge success.

It probably predates Bear for that matter.

 

[Porkchopexpress]

I’m sorry but I totally disagree that this is corporate driven. The CFP has been fan driven from day 1. The demand to get away from polls declaring champions was unilaterally identified as the number 1 problem with college football. The commen solution was to take the best two teams after the bowl game and let them playoff. The fans demanded four teams and got it. Now we want 8 or 16. We are our own worst enemy.

I'm gonna disagree with this take. The product we have today is still corporate driven. The fans wanted a playoff, but that's not what we received. What we have now is an invitational designed to maximize profits. I said this in another post, but a playoff implies there's some sort of guaranteed access. Unfortunately, we haven't gotten away from polls declaring the National champion, because polls are used to decide who gets to play for the National championship. The only guarantee a team has to be in the CFP is to be ranked high enough at the end of the season. What we have here is the classic case of the powers-that-be trying to please two different camps at the same time. That type of thinking never works over the long run.

Assuming the FBS level joins every other collegiate sport in every other division and creates a true playoff with automatic berths, I think we'll look back on the CFP as a huge and greedy disaster. It didn't really change all that much from what we had previously, it just amplified the problem of relying on polls and public opinion.

With all that said, if a true playoff never happens, then I'm all for going back to the old days, tie conferences into specific bowl games, let those bowl games negotiate TV deals on their own, and create old-school New Year's Day drama again.