Some things just don't change, even after 60 years.
College football is no different. Seven-digit television contracts and the spectacle that is the NFL draft may have turned the game into a national fan favorite over the years, but deep down the issues that plague the sport are the same.
People still aren't sold on bowl games, even if the sponsors are.
Last week, my borderline nerdy quest for sports nostalgia led me to a stack of old issues of Sportfolio, a pocket-sized illustrated digest similar to Sports Illustrated before Sports Illustrated ever existed. (You'd be surprised what you can find in the basements of the library.) I skimmed through some of the issues only to be reminded how long ago the 1940s really took place.
Then came a 1948 headline that seemed as 21st century as the Houston Texans: "Do Bowl Games Menace Football?"
Wait, aren't the stubborn supporters of the current BCS system always touting the tradition of bowl games as justification for their nonsense?
The 1948 complaints ranged from the question of whether academic institutions should be conducting sports programs like professional teams - "I feel it is out-of-bounds for a group of universities professedly or honestly committed to the amateur idea," as then-Minnesota president J. Louis Morrill put it - to the large financial benefit the system was to the participating teams - "It seems to me that these bowl games, by and large, are rather purely commercial in nature," then-Virginia Athletic Director Norton Pritchett said.
For the past five years, the same arguments have popped up in some shape or form on talk radio and television shows when the inevitable "The BCS is dumb" segment of the program comes on. It may be a bit louder with all the talking heads finding an affinity for heated quarrelling recently, but the criticism hasn't changed much in 60 years.
Take, for instance, a Rose Bowl arrangement that set off quite a bit of debate, according to the article. The Big Nine (now the Big Ten) and the Pacific Coast Conference (now the Pac-10) made a five-year pact in 1947 to match their respective champions against each other in the Rose Bowl, in essence giving the two conferences a stranglehold on the biggest bowl game of the day.
"As long as we stand by and let them monopolize bowl play, they'll keep on recruiting and subsidizing teams that are strong enough to get more bowl invitations," one critic said in the article.
Monopoly? Remember when Hawaii went undefeated last season? Remember when Boise State did the same thing the year before? Remember when neither of them got a shot at the title?
Sounds like the BCS Conferences have a monopoly. The last time a mid-major was invited to the championship game was in 1984 when Brigham Young University won the title despite being from the Western Athletic Conference.
Same story, different decade.
And that "tradition" bowl supporters have been talking about for years now? Turns out it does exist, just in the form of obstinate coordinators pursuing a system that most fans don't care for. Apparently that tradition has been passed down through the generations.
This is college football, and it's been this way for a while.
Some things just don't change, particularly when money is involved.
