The SEC and Big Ten's ruthless, pointless crusade
A collection of short college football columns from Split Zone Duo.
“We have a responsibility for leadership”
That’s the high-minded way that Greg Sankey, the SEC commissioner, describes his conference’s collaboration with the Big Ten in a little decision-making committee.
The SEC and the Big Ten are attempting one of the most brazen power plays in college sports history. On the immediate heels of the FBS conferences (and Notre Dame, sure) agreeing to a 12-team playoff format, the two most powerful leagues think that, actually, 14 might be good, and the two byes in that format should go to the champions of the Big Ten and the SEC. Those leagues would also get three automatic qualifiers, more than anyone else. The B1G and the SEC have some leverage in the “take their ball and go home” sense, as they could stage their own playoff somewhere else and delegitimize whatever is left for the Big 12, ACC, and everyone else. Here are some thoughts:
Just because you can’t doesn’t mean you should.
Every time Greg Sankey or Tony Petitti holds court with reporters and tries to frame himself as a guardian of the future of college sports, he should be pelted with rolls of toilet paper.
This is all so shamelessly pointless.
The SEC and the Big Ten are going to have at least three teams each in a 12-team playoff every year or close to it. Stomping their feet and demanding extra qualifiers and byes will barely—and I do mean barely—increase the two leagues’ chances of winning the tournament in the end. They already win it nearly every year. The system is already slanted in their favor because the selection committee is made up of fallible humans who let conference reputation dictate their thinking.
The SEC and Big Ten not only don’t need new advantages. They’ll barely even benefit from them, except that they will feel more special by making everyone else in college football feel lesser. They have a real chance to get what they want, and leaking their plans to national reporters indicates a pressure campaign to make it happen. The only thing the rest of us can deny Sankey and Petitti is the joy of being talked about as anything other than expensive hatchet men.
Can I interest you in another TV timeout?
More reporting from Ross Dellenger at Yahoo says to brace yourself for the following rule changes:
The introduction of helmet communication between players and coaches. This seems fine. I will miss the brigade of dudes on the sideline wearing different colors of shirts and holding up funny signs with 2000s Nickelodeon characters on them. But I would be lying if I told you that low-fi signaling was essential to my enjoyment of college football. A bit of modernity is OK.
Tablets on the sideline. Same.
A two-minute warning. Why? Who would want this? Naturally, the answer is “TV execs who can sell more commercials.” But nobody else has to like it, nobody should pretend there’s any good competitive reason to change the structure of the end of the half, and everyone should point out that mere months ago, the sport instituted a series of rules changes to make the game faster. Now this.
(Post-publication edit note on the two-minute warning: I could have framed this issue better and will elaborate here. Games aren’t going to get an additional TV timeout beyond what they normally get, but instead, they’ll get a break that is GUARANTEED with two minutes left. That removes the possibility of a late-game clock-killing situation where the time runs out with a few first downs and there’s no stoppage, and thus no TV timeout. I shouldn’t make it sound like your viewing experience just got longer every week. More accurately, it’s now impossible for variance in the flow of the game to eliminate a late-game media timeout, and I think college football leaders aren’t on the level when they describe competitive reasoning for making the change.)
“College football as the diet NFL” is not the preferred trend of any regular person I have ever met, but every policy change in the sport seems to push in that direction. It would be easier to swallow if players were getting a revenue cut from these new commercial breaks, but guess what?
This week in the Split Zone Duo expanded cinematic universe
We recorded a free episode about some news of the week: Georgia State hired Dell McGee, Paul Johnson lit into Geoff Collins in amusing fashion, the EA Sports video game continued to work its way back to life, and UMass joined the MAC.
We did another show that set out to answer a historic question: Can you win a national championship if you don’t get it right with your first staff of assistants?
Steven Godfrey released a Single Wing Q&A for our premium subscribers.
Richard Johnson, live at the NFL Combine, wrote about Brock Bowers for Sports Illustrated.
I, Alex Kirshner, wrote about rushing the court (or field) for The Guardian. I sincerely enjoy describing American college sports for a bunch of British readers.
As Godfrey has mentioned on a few recent Single Wings, we have some big plans for this year. The three of us got together in person last month to plot out not just the 2024 season but also our offseason. I love the offseason because it allows us to be creative outside the constraints of the season, when there’s a lot to react to at any given moment. We’ll share more as we have it.
Become a paying subscriber!
We have some very dear advertising partners, Homefield Apparel and Nokian Tyres, whom you hear us talk about a lot. But at the core, subscribers are why we can make this podcast (and newsletter). Join for $10 a month or $110 a year, and you help make our independent publication sustainable.
Obviously, that’s not all. The more fun stuff is that you get a lot of bonus podcasts, newsletters, the chance to ask questions that we might answer on air, and more. If you’re just interested in seeing what we’re all about and trying samples, you can join our email list for free.
This day in college sports history: The BCS gets a fifth game
The news came down this very date 20 years ago—March 1, 2004—that the four-bowl BCS would become a five-bowl event. The Rose, Sugar, Orange, and Fiesta would be getting a cousin:
''We are envisioning a bowl of equal stature in terms of its command of television audiences and its desirability from a standpoint of teams,'' [a BCS oversight committee member] said in a teleconference call from the Fontainebleau Hilton Resort. ''Whether that would come from the volunteering of an existing bowl system and its own structure or the creation of a new bowl, that's something we simply can't determine at this point.''
In 2006, the BCS National Championship came to life. It denied the Meineke Car Care Bowl its rightful opportunity to become the standalone national title bout.
The “death” of the NCAA is actually just a rebrand.
I know bullying and all, but given perception of the ACC and what just happened to Florida State, don't the Big 12 and ACC crawl begging to make this 14 teamer a reality since leaked plans have both of them getting two auto bids each and they don't have a chance in hell of getting 4 bids between them in other format we've heard?