If an eight-team playoff implies death, consider the "plus-one" scenario life support for Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee.
"They'll have to wrench a playoff system from my cold, dead hands," Gee said at the pre-bowl media day on Dec. 13.
After a college football season that saw several teams reach the top spot, only to fall from grace, a Top 10 logjam had more people than ever screaming for a playoff - a system Gee wants no part of.
However, Gee now says he is open to a proposed middle ground that is being referred to as a "plus-one" system that would pit the top two teams against each other following bowl season.
"I want to take a look at it," Gee told editors of The Lantern last week. "I need to understand a little bit more of the 'plus-one' system. In some ways we're pretty close to that."
Michael Adams, president of the University of Georgia, is one of many who feels a "plus-one" is just another deterrent to an already unfair process.
"What we have now," Adams told the Toledo Blade, "is a system where the Big Ten has the opportunity to, most every year, get a team into the National Championship Game that, based on their performance, would not get there through a playoff system."
Four of the five Bowl Championship Series games this season featured less-than-stellar matchups. Although a playoff is unlikely to produce a complete package of down-to-the-wire contests, a "plus-one" would at least ensure a closer matchup in the biggest game of all.
Such a system would likely result in two of the four original BCS bowls serving as the semifinals, with the two winners meeting a week later in the BCS National Championship Game.
Still, Gee is reluctant to make any snap judgments for fear that giving an inch could mean NCAA officials attempting to take a mile and implement a playoff.
"I don't understand it well enough," Gee said of the "plus-one" format. "Where I am on the whole system is this: It's a very slippery slope."
The Utah native was chairman of the Big Ten in 1995 during his first stint as president of OSU. He attended a meeting with ABC and the Rose Bowl in Scottsdale, Ariz., that resulted in the creation of what became the BCS.
"When we ceded to move to the so-called BCS system we made it very clear that we would only do so if there would never be any attempt to move to a playoff system," Gee said. "That this was a way to clarify the bowl system, not a way to move to a playoff system. By and large it's worked."
Thirteen years after that meeting, the quest for a playoff is in full effect. Talk hit full speed in late 2007 when as many as seven teams had legitimate claims to play for a National Championship.
"We had probably the best regular season ever, with the worst postseason ever," Adams said. "And it's because so many of these entrenched constituencies have a self-preservation interest here. I just finally said, 'Enough is enough.'"
However, Gee still sees collegiate athletics as a learning experience for young athletes and relishes the bowl system's ability to allow more teams to end the season on a high note. The growth of college football's money machine is tarnishing the true spirit of the game - at least to Gee.
Gee said the NFL playoffs are all about winning. Although everyone loves to win, college football is more about rewarding people for excellence.
"The minute we move away from that philosophy toward a playoff system, then we've lost the integrity of the bowl system and the integrity of what we're trying to accomplish with intercollegiate athletics," he said.
Despite Gee's adamant distaste, talk of a playoff is unlikely to subside any time soon. As long as there are more than 100 teams in college football's bowl subdivision, a team is bound to slip through the cracks each season.
"Plus-one" game or not, a playoff seems to be light-years away in the eyes of this university president.
"At that point it would not be about collegiate atmosphere and athletics," Gee said. "It would be all about just the damn game and television and the $25 million we'd receive from it. That seems, to me, to be a poor price to pay for what we're trying to accomplish."
Zack Timmons can be reached at timmons.60@osu.edu.
2008 Woodie Awards
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Gabriel Mann
posted 1/18/08 @ 12:16 PM EST
Too many bowl games involve a local team facing an out-of-area opponent. University of Florida played in the state of Florida. Georgia played in Louisiana, but they faced Hawaii. (Continued…)
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