The Man Stopping College Football

We delved into his early life and basketball background, explored his time as the commissioner of the Ohio Valley Conference, looked at how he built his power as the Big Ten commissioner and helped form the BCS and talked about how he turned the college sports world upside down with the Big Ten Network and adding Nebraska to the conference. Now we try to answer why Jim Delany wants to keep the current BCS system as-is despite calls for its end from the media, fans and even college coaches. It’s the fifth and final part of our week-long series on the man who is standing in the way of a college football playoff.

The biggest issue for a college football playoff isn’t necessarily money. A playoff would make money. A lot of money, in fact.

According to a 2007 Yahoo! Sports profile on Delany, if the BCS just implemented a plus-one system – where the four BCS bowls are played regularly but then the top two performers play in a final championship game – that would generate an extra $50 million. Create a four, eight or 16-team playoff and the BCS would practically be printing its own money.

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While the amount of money isn’t an impediment for a playoff, the distribution of wealth is. Last season, the BCS conferences got 81 percent of the revenue generated from the four BCS bowl games and national championship game despite two non-BCS teams playing in BCS bowl games. So the big six conferences raked in $115.2 million, according to Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal.

And for Jim Delany and the Big Ten, the deal is even sweeter. The Big Ten and SEC both got $22.2 million from the BCS last season for having two teams in the BCS bowls. That was almost as much money as the rest of the non-automatic qualifiers got combined ($24 million) despite Boise State and TCU playing in the Fiesta Bowl. All told, the Big Ten and its schools made over $36 million from the bowl games last season.

Delany and the Rose Bowl have a pretty sweet deal set up, as they both seem to operate by their own set of rules.

The Sugar, Orange and Fiesta bowls all pay $6 million for that right. The Rose Bowl doesn’t. Plus the Rose bowl never has to change time slots, making it easier to incorporate the game with the bowl’s parade. That means more money. The other bowls must constantly change time slots and the day’s festivities are many times disjointed. Not so good for business.

Did we mention the Rose Bowl has its own eight-year, $300 million TV contract with ABC despite all the other BCS bowl games being broadcast on Fox in recent years?

But a playoff, while it would generate a ton of money, wouldn’t generate guaranteed money to the Big Ten. And Delany has shown he prefers the safe guaranteed route over the potential for major payoffs. He did it in the early ‘90s when he tied his second and third place teams to the middle-tier Citrus and Holiday Bowls.

At the time he defended his decision by saying: “Our hope is that you can build up these bowls to where you can have six or seven healthy bowls, not four. This enhances the bowl structure and ourselves.”

The end goal is securing as much money possible for the BCS conferences, primarily for the Big Ten. In a playoff scenario, the Big Ten could stand to make millions of dollars more if two conference teams played in the championship game. But imagine a dooms-day scenario in which the Big Ten champion finished ninth in the BCS standings and the conference was left out of an eight-team playoff altogether (the highest Big Ten team in the BCS standings is No. 7 Wisconsin).

Again, it’s not about the money made but the money distributed.

Delany’s big defense of the BCS is how it preserves the excitement of the regular season. He might have a point there. Each regular season game does carry more weight without a playoff. But we’d be foolish to think Delany is worried about the excitement of the regular season. We’ll let him explain it from a Yahoo! Sports profile in 2007:

“There’s also no doubt in my mind that there would be a huge sucking sound coming out of the regular season towards the postseason because I know, as a fact, that there is a consumer dollar, there is a marketing dollar, there is an advertising dollar and it’s not an unlimited dollar.

“It’s a migratory dollar. And the dollar tends to follow those areas of those elements of a competitive season that are most attractive. And right now what I would say is that we’re at some sort of equilibrium of a bowl system and a championship game on the one hand. There’s some gravitas from an economic perspective, from a public interest perspective in the regular season. I see there being a balance.”

So why does the NCAA not stand in and try to do something? Every other NCAA sport uses a playoff to determine its national champion. The problem is, the NCAA has no control over the BCS, which is managed by the 11 conference commissioners in the FBS. The BCS is basically an ongoing battle between the six BCS conference commissioners vs. the five non-BCS conference commissioners. Who do you think wins?

In college basketball, the sport with arguably the most exciting postseason, the six power conferences make up just a fraction of the 32 Division I conferences. It’s much easier for the have-nots in college basketball to have a voice. Good luck with that in football.

In the recently released book “Death to the BCS,” the writers capture just how powerful Delany is:

“(Delany) is one of the most powerful people in college athletics. His influence far outweighs that of even the NCAA president, because Delany belongs to the group that hijacked college football and refuses to let go.

(Joe) Paterno may be the king of the sport, but Delany is the ayatollah, speaking the word of God.

And that word is no.

No to a playoff. No to an extra championship game following the bowl season. No to any semblance of sanity in America’s greatest spectator sport. No to anything but the loathsome, odious, reviled BCS.”

So how could we ultimately get a playoff? After all, no one thought the Big Ten, Pac-10 and the Rose Bowl would never join a bowl alliance, but they did when the BCS was formed in 1998. When Penn Sate got jobbed out of a national title in 1994 despite going undefeated and Ohio State almost got left out in the cold in 1995, Delany went into action.

The BCS has jobbed plenty of teams from a shot at the championship, most notably an undefeated Auburn team in 2004. And the public seems to think that if two undefeated teams get left out of the title game this year (probably Boise State and TCU), the BCS will fold due to public pressure. However, that’s very naive. Public pressure means nothing to the BCS because it answers to no one.

Here are the ways a college football playoff could be formed:

• Delany himself as said the huge attendance numbers and profits in college football prove the BCS works. The only way to prove him wrong is for people to stop attending and watching college football. Likelihood that happens? Zero.

• The BCS shuts out an undefeated Big Ten team in order to prompt action from Delany. However, as possibly the strongest football conference in America, it appears highly unlikely that would ever happen.

• Delany, 61, retires. But he’s in no position to do such a thing yet. And even if he did, he’d probably make sure the man, or woman, who replaced him would continue his agenda.

• The government steps in. But even though President Barack Obama himself said there should be a playoff, let’s be honest, they have a lot more important things to worry about than the BCS right now.

• By far the most likely scenario, Delany figures out a plan that implements a playoff while still funneling most of the money to the Big Ten and the BCS conferences. He was the one that made the BCS happen in the first place in 1998 because he found a way to maintain the Big Ten’s Rose Bowl connection and still be eligible for a title game.

In 2007, Murray Sperber – a former Indiana professor and outspoken critic of the current college sports system – said: “Don’t be totally shocked if in a year or two or three Delany and these people reverse field and they said we’ve decided to bow to the public and do the playoff. If the money is there.”

If the money is there. That’s the key. So, yes, a playoff could very well happen in the future. But just remember who will likely guide that process. And then ask yourself, “who will this playoff ultimately benefit?”

We’ll eventually get what we want only if college football kneels and kisses the ring of Jim Delany to make it happen; an acknowledgment that Delany truly is the Godfather of college sports.