The Rose Bowl and the Execrable College Football ‘Playoff’: A Counterfactual

As is well-known now, the shortsighted powers-that-be in college football are soon to announce a 12-team college football playoff. The only hold up to the agreement up until now has been the Rose Bowl, and its desire to maintain its brilliantly earned and very valuable 5 pm et slot on New Year’s Day. The Grandaddy of ‘Em All sadly forfeited what it had made great, thus paving the way for the NFL-ization of college football. It won’t be immediate, but in time 2022 will be seen as the beginning of the end of college football’s extraordinary popularity. There will be still great games and great athletes, but fan excitement will slowly decline.

That is so because tradition is the lifeblood of college football. What made it great were the regional rivalries in pursuit of a New Year’s Day bowl tied to a team’s region. The Rose Bowl annually matched the Big 10 and the PAC 10 (now the PAC 12). Sometimes the winner was the national champion. How was the champion decided? Through votes. Which, while it sounds odd, was really the point. The debates about who is #1 began every year well before January 1 and continue as you’re reading this lament. Which was also the point. College football was different. By design.

As opposed to faux “superconferences” populated by the teams with no natural history together, in the past the football powers would schedule big games with out-of-conference opponents as a treat for fans, but most importantly as a way to score rankings points (see above) with media members and coaches. It’s all a reminder that a college sport sadly headed toward AFC vs. NFC setup in the form of Big 10 vs. SEC won’t just be devaluing the regular season with its execrable playoff. It will also be shrinking the palpable excitement of Alabama, Texas or USC coming to town, or the excitement for fans of the aforementioned occasionally visiting out-of-region, out-of-conference schools. In other words, where Texas vs. Alabama used to be a rare but much-anticipated home and home extravaganza played out over a calendar year, in the future the two will play each other out of humdrum routine. Lame.

All of which brings us to a counterfactual. Imagine if the Big 10 and the PAC 12 had flipped the middle finger to the gauche notion of a “playoff” meant to “settle the eventual champion on the field.” Imagine the joint press release from the two conferences:

“We in the Big 10 and PAC 12 have good taste, and because we do, we would never so cavalierly throw away our end of season finale, which is the embodiment of brilliant taste, the Rose Bowl. A ‘playoff’ system, and certainly an eventually expanded system as imagined by college football’s charitably crude powers-that-be, will not only devalue the edge-of-one’s-seat regular season, but it will by its very name shrink the bowl system that gave college football so much charm in favor of revolting, and ever-expanding quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals.

About the vandalism taking place of what’s seriously great, we urge the conferences and school presidents presently embracing what’s so graceless to seriously reconsider. As for the Big 10 and PAC 12, we’ve already made our decision to stick with the Rose Bowl as our annual season endpoint over what’s so bumbling and un-polished. And for those who think our decision errant on account of our opting out of a “national championship” after a “playoff,” think again. As the traditional powers that populate both conferences explain rather well, no serious college football fan will readily attach “national champion” to a system that lacks the participation of the Big 10 and PAC 12.

In other words, enjoy your college football ‘tournament’ that lacks a number of the game’s greatest traditions, and that will settle very little as evidenced by fairly routine upsets of the much better team in the Super Bowl. We’ll enjoy the Rose Bowl every January 1^st, as can Big 12, SEC and ACC fans eager to glimpse what once made their sport so special. Oh yes, it airs at 5 pm et.”

To all of the above, some will say that recruiting in the Big 10 and PAC 12 would have declined if they’d opted out of the “playoff” system. Such a view is hard to take seriously. The reason why has to do with the prestige of the schools in each conference. It’s not unrealistic to say that more than a few athletes, and more than a few parents, would still be won over by the long-term career genius of having USC, Stanford, Michigan, and Northwestern (among others) next to one’s name.

Others will point to the NIL money that will allegedly only grow for schools associating with what, at least in the near-term, is a lucrative “playoff” system. It’s a seemingly reasonable point that doesn’t remain reasonable when it’s remembered how extraordinarily well-to-do the alums in the Big 10 and PAC 12 are. Think about it. Figure that Stanford’s alums alone could dwarf the all the combined NIL contributions of “playoff” teams between breakfast and lunch.

From there, it’s worth pointing out that the Rose Bowl is the Rose Bowl. That it is raises a question of why? Why give up what’s so revered for that which is so tawdry? And please don’t say greed was the answer. Such a move insults greed precisely because it will slowly erase the tradition that made college football so lucrative in the first place.

More important, why give up what is brilliant when you didn’t have to? The simple truth is that Big 10 and PAC 12 could have very likely broken the playoff system through non-participation; non-participation that not unrealistically would have included Notre Dame.

Instead, and in embracing a sub-NFL, the Big 10 and PAC 12 haven’t just set in motion college football’s decline. They’ve arguably put out to pasture one of the sport’s most enduring symbols in the Rose Bowl. Sad.