If I’m ESPN and I just paid billions of dollars to secure the rights to the Rose, Sugar, Orange and Fiesta Bowls, I can’t be pleased with what I got this year.
With the exception of the title game, the biggies lineup has to be the worst in recent memory. And I’m not just talking about Northern Illinois here:
Orange Bowl: NIU vs. Florida State.
Sugar Bowl: Florida vs. Louisville.
Rose Bowl: Wisconsin vs. Stanford.
Fiesta Bowl: Kansas State vs. Oregon.
It’s almost as if the Notre Dame-Alabama title game is so good, the BCS said we have to balance things off with some uninspiring games. Only K-State-Oregon rates as a truly marquee match up. The others? Forget about it.
Wisconsin has five losses, and just saw its coach bolt. But the Badgers are playing in Pasadena thanks to Ohio State being ineligible for a bowl. Louisville? Somebody has to put an end to this idea that the Big East champion deserves a BCS bid.
And Northern Illinois? Listen, the Huskies are a great story and had a great season. But they barely register in my backyard in Chicago. And the Huskies coach also departed to take over North Carolina State, hardly a football hotbed. Let’s just say it will be the first and only time the Wolfpack job will be considered a step up for a BCS coach.
Will the country really tune in to watch the Huskies play in the Orange Bowl? ESPN definitely will push the Goliath angle. But after a full helping of games on Jan. 1, by the time the Orange Bowl rolls around in the evening, America might take a pass on watching a MAC team.
It isn’t just me. ESPN’s very own Mark Schlabach ranked all the bowl games. While he had the Fiesta Bowl second, he had the other big money BCS bowl games lower on the list; Sugar was sixth; Rose seventh; and Orange eighth. And you can make the argument that the Capital One Bowl, featuring Georgia-Nebraska, should be slotted higher than ninth.
Meanwhile, Schlabach ranked the Oklahoma-Texas A&M match-up in the Cotton Bowl third. Cotton Bowl officials have to be doing handsprings with likely Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel. Fox also is thrilled with the prospect of a primetime game on Jan. 4.
And Fox gets that game at a fraction of the price ESPN shelled out for the BCS bowls.
Don’t think that is going unnoticed by ESPN. While ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit got roasted for expressing his outrage over NIU’s bid over the air, privately the executives were grumbling just as loud in the suites in Bristol. Two of your BCS teams, NIU and Louisville, never appeared on national television on a Saturday this year.
Given its considerable investment, you could be sure ESPN will push college football officials for a system that guarantees the big-money bowl games also are the best games. It also would be a nice thing to do for fans.
That’s not asking too much, is it?
Well, whose fault is it that Louisville and NIU were never on national TV this year? ESPN certainly could have changed that if they wanted to, even if they had waited most of the season to see how good the teams were. This always drives me nuts. You only see the teams they want you to see and their argument is that other teams aren’t as ‘big’. Well, for them to get ‘big’, they need to be on TV. A little more variety in their programming of games would get ESPN a larger pool of ‘big’ teams to put on the air.
I agree that ESPN doesn’t like the end result of the BCS games, but the teams who made it played by the rules. The BCS is crappy system, so blame should go to the executives who put this thing together in the first place.
The rules are known ahead of time.