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Get Four
|  | NOVEMBER 27, 2003
By Keith Dunnavant Behind the Revolt in College Football [Page 2 of 2] PLAYING OFFENSE. Even inside the superdivision, ambition and fear have led to corporate-raider-style conflicts in the past six months. When the Atlantic Coast Conference this summer and fall lured Miami, Virginia Tech, and finally Boston College away from the Big East, the conference was effectively declaring war on one of its BCS partners. The move strengthened the ACC's ability to win fat TV contracts. Another wild card is Notre Dame, currently an independent in football and a member of the Big East in other sports. Both the Big East and the ACC have lobbied the football Irish, which could infuse either conference with an unmatched jolt of charisma. The Big East on Nov. 4 raided Conference USA for five teams, including three football schools, a defensive measure intended to protect its BCS status. "Everybody is trying to position themselves for the future, but that's difficult when you don't know what the future is going to be," says Loren Matthews, senior vice-president for programming at ABC Sports, which is paying $930 million over eight years for the rights to televise the four BCS games. "UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES." It would be much easier to dismiss the anti-BCS forces' party-crashing efforts if not for the effects of rule changes beginning in the 1970s that have slowly brought some parity to the game, partly by limiting the number of scholarships that schools can offer, which means the available talent is spread further around. Teams from the lowly Mid-American Conference (MAC) have upset four BCS programs so far this year, something that never would have happened 20 years ago. Yet it's unlikely that any MAC team will earn a BCS berth. "I don't believe this was some sort of conspiracy," says Tulane's Cowen. "But the fact is, five years later there have been a lot of unintended consequences." With the next round of BCS TV negotiations expected to begin in mid-2004, the issue of what form the series will take after the 2006 games has assumed greater urgency. The outsider conferences know they have a narrow window to alter the system, so they have been running their hurry-up offense in recent months. The Nov. 16 meeting brought together a committee of BCS school presidents, Cowen and other non-BCS chiefs, and Myles Brand, head of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. Afterwards, the two sides announced that they would hire consultants to propose different models for change following the 2005 season. They expect to meet again in late January or early February. "We just want fairer access," says Rick Chryst, MAC commissioner. LOUSY RECORD. Agreeing on what constitutes a fairer system will be no easy task. Short of a 16-team playoff, every other possible option remains on the table. The outsider conferences are pushing for automatic bids to the BCS, which would give them true parity with the major powers. That would require adding two more bowl games, which seems unlikely. A more plausible approach would be to add one new bowl game to the BCS while lowering the threshold necessary for outsiders to qualify. While the presidents try to hammer out a compromise, some athletic officials continue to argue that any expansion of the system would run the risk of weakening it. "The question is: What does the marketplace want?" says the Big East's Tranghese. And TV, of course, will cast a large shadow: ABC Sports has been assured that it will be consulted about any changes. "But at the end of the day, it's the BCS's game, and they set the rules," says ABC's Matthews. The problem is that college football doesn't exactly have a winning record when it comes to agreeing on how to divide the spoils.
 Dunnavant is the author of Coach: The Life of Paul Bear Bryant Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | |
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