Rose Bowl more like Supreme Court Bowl

Chuck Neinas has a special nickname for Monday’s Rose Bowl semifinal between Georgia and Oklahoma.

“The Supreme Court Bowl,” said Neinas, the longtime college football power broker.

It’s all because of precedent. The last time these two storied programs shared such a big national stage in college football, they shook the foundation of the sport for decades to come.

But it didn’t happen on the field. Monday’s matchup actually will be the first time the two have faced each other in more than 1,200 games apiece since the 1890s.

Both instead joined forces against the NCAA in a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984. They won a 7-2 decision, allowing schools and conferences to make their own deals for television coverage instead of having a heavy-handed NCAA control it as a monopoly.

The ruling eventually led the sport to where it is now: Dozens of games are on television every Saturday in the fall instead of only a few. Other fallout from the case includes wildly lucrative television contracts, the debut of conference TV networks and more schools switching conferences in pursuit of more TV money.

“I think it’s been the biggest event to help college football in the last 50 years,” said Neinas, former boss of the College Football Association and former commissioner of the Big Eight and Big 12 Conferences. “It brought exposure to the game and created more interest in the game, and obviously opened up the game to many people.”

The legacy of this case is still debatable. The rise of cable TV and the internet might have forced college football to move in a similar direction anyway. And not everybody agrees that a deregulated money grab for TV revenue was good for all.

Yet here they are: Georgia and Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl — a College Football Playoff game owned by another powerful entity that controls certain postseason TV rights and revenue for all major college conferences. Only this time, the Sooners and Bulldogs aren’t complaining.

There were only a few television networks back then, primarily ABC, NBC and CBS. The internet as we know it didn’t exist, and ESPN was just getting started. So the only way to see your favorite team play was to attend the game in person or hope that it had earned a rare appearance on television.

Since 1951, these appearances had been controlled by the governing body of college sports to avoid having TV compete with paid attendance at games and to preserve “competitive balance” and spread television exposure to as many NCAA members as possible, not just the most popular teams.

To meet these objectives, the NCAA limited a school to no more than six TV appearances over two years. It also effectively restricted competition without regard to viewer preference.

Bigger schools sought more exposure and money for football in the regular season, hoping for a free market more like regular-season basketball, which wasn’t restricted by such rules. They banded together through the College Football Association (CFA) to get a better deal and eventually reached one with NBC in an act of rebellion against NCAA power.

In retaliation, the NCAA threatened to punish these mutinous members.

The CFA wanted to fight this in court. But to do so, Neinas said it needed some schools to put their names on an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA — as NCAA members that would be harmed by the threatened penalties.

Neinas said Georgia and Oklahoma stepped forward as plaintiffs in large part because both schools already were tightly connected with the CFA cause.

After years of NCAA appeals, the Supreme Court finally ended the fight in June 1984. Justice John Paul Stevens delivered the opinion, holding that the NCAA had violated the Sherman Act with its stranglehold on televised college football.

“The NCAA has restricted rather than enhanced the place of intercollegiate athletics in the Nation’s life,” Stevens wrote.