Savor UCF championship, end rigged path to playoffs
UCF’s historic football season has brought back memories of my time as a student at UCF. It was 1984. UCF had 15,000 students — mostly commuters. The campus was in the middle of nowhere, at the corner of a couple of two-lane roads — University Boulevard and Alafaya Trail. Six years earlier, our reclusive-yet-visionary university president, Trevor Colbourn, rebranded the school from Florida Technological University to the University of Central Florida and started a football program to help put the fledgling university on the map. The Division 2 football program had racked up an enormous debt, and its future was uncertain. Colbourn was committed to its survival and success, and risked his job to save the program.
As student body president, I had regular meetings with Colbourn. No matter what was on our agenda, he would often bring up a pending U.S. Supreme Court case, NCAA v. Regents of the University of Oklahoma and The University of Georgia Athletic Association.
The case ultimately turned out as Colbourn had feared. The traditional football powers won this antitrust case against the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Until that decision, the NCAA limited TV appearances by college football teams to two or three games per year. Without such limits, Colbourn reasoned, established programs would gain a permanent advantage over newer programs through lucrative TV contracts with broadcast networks and newly minted cable-sports channels.
Unfortunately, Colbourn was right about this decision’s impact. The last time an official college football national champion was not from what we now call a “Power 5” conference (SEC, ACC, Big 10, Big 12, and PAC 12) or Notre Dame was in 1984, the year NCAA v. Regents was decided. Additionally, the decision, and resulting TV contracts, caused a wave of conference affiliations. Before that, programs could rise from obscurity and become perennial national powers. The University of Miami and Florida State University are examples of lowertier, nonconference programs that rose to the top of the college football elite. Unless something changes, except if a Power 5 conference cracks the door open to expand, FSU and UM may be the last programs whose merits vault them into college football’s top tier.
The College Football Playoff (CFP) system tilts the field even further against upand-comers. That’s bad news for programs like UCF, now one of the largest universities in America. The Knights now play Division 1 sports and are this year’s only undefeated Division 1 Football Bowl Subdivision team. UCF’s Peach Bowl victory came over a team that beat both teams that will appear in the CFP Championship game. UCF’s claim to the National Football Championship may be less official, but it is no less legitimate because of how the CFP system is rigged.
Unlike every other collegiate sport, the football playoff system is not owned by the NCAA, but by FBS teams, with Power 5 partisans controlling playoff rankings and Power 5 conferences guaranteed an exponentially higher share of playoff revenue. This year, the CFP ranking committee consistently under-ranked UCF and its scheduled opponents, making it impossible for the Knights to approach the playoff tier. Former UCF Coach Scott Frost rightly called it a “conscious effort” to keep UCF down.
The CFP defends its low ranking of UCF by saying the Knights’ schedule was too weak. But UCF’s schedule strength was rated on par with Wisconsin, which was playoff bound until it lost its conference championship. Moreover, the proliferation of conference affiliations has limited how many nonconference games that teams can play, and Power 5 teams would rather schedule nonconference games with cupcakes than possible upsets, making it harder for teams like UCF to build stronger schedules.
Some say that non-Power 5 programs aren’t consistent winners. That’s because every time up-and-coming teams get on a roll, their coaches are poached by Power 5 programs that can pay twice as much while also using their staggering financial advantage to build superior facilities, market their programs and recruit top-tier athletes. But wait, there’s more. Because now the ultimate membership benefit of the Power 5 cartel is an apparently exclusive path to play for national championships.
If this system does not reek of an unfair, predatory monopoly that uses wrongful gains and historic privilege to perpetuate an unfair financial advantage, then nothing does. It’s not just unfair, it’s un-American. And unless something is done to ensure fair competition on the playing field and on the financial side of the multibillion-dollar business born out of NCAA v. Regents, then another landmark antitrust case may be the only solution.