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College football's fans want a playoff. College football's leaders don't.
There's one compromise that might appease both sides – improve the regular season.
When Ohio State and Southern California play on Sept. 13, it will likely be the only time two top-5 teams from different BCS conferences meet before the BCS National Championship Game.
If previous blockbuster cross-conference matchups from the Bowl Championship Series Era offer any indication, the OSU-USC winner can pack its bags for the BCS title game on Jan. 8 in Miami.
Under the current television contracts a postseason playoff couldn't happen until at least 2016 – even if there were support for the idea, which there isn't.
Instead, though, why not create more marquee in-season games like this year's USC-Ohio State game?
Call it the BCS Challenge. Match up two teams from each of the six BCS conferences – the ACC, SEC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-10 and Big East – and sprinkle those six games into the first two weekends of the season. Slap an ESPN logo on it and, voila!, a de facto playoff.
The sport wins. The fans, who are now mostly subjected to lopsided preconference yawnfests, win. TV wins. The winners – and, by proxy, their respective conferences – would, well, win. But even the losers win because the games would be so early in the season, there would be plenty of time to recover in the BCS standings.
“That's a great idea,” Ohio State AD Gene Smith said. “But …”
But?
“The execution might be a problem,” Smith added. “Football scheduling is complicated.”
Unlike college basketball, which operates on a year-to-year basis – and, in the ACC's case, blocks off an open date each summer to allow ESPN and the conference to schedule the ACC-Big Ten Challenge – football schedules are done three, five and 10 years in advance.
Burke Magnus, ESPN's senior vice president for college sports programming, said the idea of the BCS Challenge appeals to the Worldwide Leader, but ...
But?
“That would make the basketball schedule look easy in comparison,” said Magnus, who has helped ESPN arrange the ACC-Big Ten Challenge. “If we could translate the same logic of basketball to football and the end result was a really meaningful competition, absolutely we'd be interested.”
The OSU-USC game will be meaningful but it was finalized in 1996, Smith said.
“There's a lot of luck involved in scheduling,” Oklahoma AD Joe Castiglione said. “You just can't predict what will happen five or 10 years down the road.”
Not all big intersectional games need a crystal ball or a 10-year window. Gary Stokan, president of the Atlanta Sports Council, needed less than 18 months to pull together Clemson and Alabama for the kickoff of the 2008 season at the Georgia Dome.
ESPN, which will bring its popular “GameDay” crew to Atlanta for the game between two likely Top 25 teams, helped Stokan sell the game but it was ultimately Alabama coach Nick Saban who made the game possible.
“We want to play a major national opponent on national TV early in the season,” Saban told Stokan. “It's proven that's how you win a national championship.”
Not all teams are interested in a tough out-of-conference test. The SEC traditionally has avoided such contests because the league is considered so strong. The past two national champions are from the SEC.
Except an unbeaten Auburn team missed the 2004 BCS title game because of a weak nonconference schedule. If not for late-season losses by USC in 2006 and West Virginia in 2007, the SEC would have been left out of the BCS title game in each of those seasons, too.
Stokan said he'd be willing to stage three games in Atlanta on the opening weekend – on Thursday, Saturday and Monday nights – and create the “Daytona 500 of college football.”
“We have always believed that any TV opportunity you turn down is a lost opportunity for your program,” said Virginia Tech AD Jim Weaver, who agreed to play LSU last season and USC in 2004 at ESPN's behest.
Flexibility would be the No. 1 requirement, he said, and cooperation from ESPN, which would provide both the national audience and the proper financial incentive.
Even with his own willingness to rearrange the schedule and play big games, Tech's Weaver doesn't think the BCS Challenge would ever become a reality. “The logistics are too difficult,” Weaver said.
