08:53 AM
04/26/24
04/26/24
May 15, 2010
Columnist: Greed Fuels College Football Realignment: The Football Bowl Subdivision is the most inequitable sport in the world, writes Florida Times-Union columnist Gene Frenette. "College fraud-ball at its highest level is so imbalanced and punctuated by greed, it'd be better off forming four 16-team super conferences and let whichever schools get left out play for a separate national championship. In a perfect world, those 64 big-boy schools could only play each other."
College football is about money?
In other news, sun comes up in the morning.
posted by TheQatarian at 11:42 PM on May 15, 2010
The players should get some of that dough.
posted by DudeDykstra at 01:10 PM on May 16, 2010
I don't disagree with him, but so what? Is he just now discovering that Div I-A (I still call it that)-college football is a money-driven organization, existing only to make schools, conferences, and TV networks rich? If so, it's a little bit late for him to have noticed.
Everything right now is being driven by money-schools are desperate to try and get a little bit of the pie, and conferences are looking at athletics as a business venture (at least when it comes to the major sports of men's basketball and football. Everything else is irrelevant to the discussion). The conferences are trying to maximize revenue for their own TV networks and package themselves to the TV networks. Everything is about money right now, and it has been for a few years now-it's just now starting to be utterly evident.
The other noteworthy thing is how everything is being driven for one sport-CFB. Everything else is expendable before that pursuit. The NCAA could have done something to split CFB and men's basketball as different entities and allow them to be dealt with as business entities instead decided to turn a blind eye and stick to the notion of "amateurism", as if there was no difference between the NAIA tiddly-winks championship and the BCS Championship that millions of dollars revolved around and was put into. The NCAA wasn't willing to make a difference, and the market is, sadly.
College football right now is Europe in the summer of 1914-empires and alliances are on edge, waiting for one spark to start a massive chain reaction that will change college football forever. The first conference to grab 16 will inspire the other big ones to do the same, and tear smaller conferences and each other apart in the process.