Change the future, not the past

With the buzz surrounding the NCAA’s punishment against Florida State’s football team, it seems like as good of a time as any to comment on the process by which the NCAA punishes violations.

The Seminoles are faced with giving up 14 football wins. (Other Florida State teams are facing similar reprimands, but for our purposes, let’s focus on football.) Changing the past isn’t a possibility, yet the NCAA feels changing the record books is the best course of action. I disagree.

As an example, the University of Michigan men’s basketball team vacated five seasons worth of wins. The team abandoned 113 wins between from the 1992-93 season and 1995-1999 seasons, including their 1992 Final Four appearance, 1997 NIT Tournament championship, and 1998 Big Ten Tournament championship. While the record books may show that there was no winner of these titles, I doubt Chris Webber, Robert Traylor and others have lost too much sleep over it.

Pretending teams won or lost games that they didn’t doesn’t accomplish much. If the NCAA wants to really make a dent on violations, they should abandon any thought of vacating wins (i.e., trying to change the past), and instead focus on this four-step approach (i.e., impacting the future):

1. Loss of scholarships. One of the NCAA’s current punishment methods is to reduce the number of scholarships a school or team is allowed to distribute to incoming recruits. Let’s continue the practice from a slightly different perspective: while revoking scholarships hurts teams, it ultimately hurts current students as well, many of whom may have had nothing to do with the violation in the first place. In this plan, teams lose the scholarships – but the school does not. The athletics scholarship fund will be required to fund the number of stripped scholarships for the school’s general scholarship fund. The only criterion for this is that the new scholarship recipient may not be affiliated with the university’s athletics program in any way.
2. Probation. The concept of probation needs to be enforced as a deterrent, not a slap on the wrist. Extend the length of probation terms, increase the requirements needed to be removed from probation, and make sure the definition is crisp and clear – screw-ups of any kind will be strictly punished. Probation is your warning, and teams must ensure that they heed that warning.
3. No post-season of any kind. One of a school’s biggest money-makers is post-season play, and not just its own trips. Conference tie-ins to big paydays help fund lots of things for the schools. Take away not only the chance to play in the post-season, but to receive the benefits earned by any other school, and you’ll see a change in attitude.
4. Free transfer. The last step is the most extreme, but I think it’s the biggest step in cutting down school’s committing violations of any kind. Any major infractions should be punished by allowing players the option to transfer from the university without facing the mandatory one-year waiting period before they are eligible to play for their new school. Top players want to be seen and heard; if they’re school is losing scholarships and missing out on any post-season play, those players may remain invisible and silent. Allowing them to leave, restriction-free, will greatly increase schools’ diligence in monitoring and enforcing their own players.

While there are certainly holes in this argument, and it’s not going to solve all the world’s problems, it’s certainly an improvement over trying to change the record books. The only way to prevent things from happening in the future is to punish the future – not change the past.

Time to dust off the playoff argument

I want to tackle this issue before it becomes the hot topic of the season, if only because it seems to turn into the hot topic of every season. So what exactly is the answer to the age-old question – “Why not a college football playoff?”

School presidents, conference commissioners, and the BCS big wigs often seem to play the "what about our athletes’ educations?" argument. Frankly, it is both tired and weak. College basketball can have a playoff/tournament without a problem, college football games are played (mostly) on Saturdays (no classes!), and the season has already stretched into mid-January. Asking top-flight teams to play one or two more games (without having to take 40 days off between games) is not going to cause anyone to flunk out who wouldn't have flunked out anyway.

Before you start thinking you’re going to read over another list of reasons in favor of a playoff system, think again. I like the system the way it is – my biggest problem with it is the half-hearted reasoning we’re consistently fed for why it should remain as it is now.

It seems like every year, the team left on the outside screams for a playoff system, but only after they’ve been left out. I’m sorry 2008 Utah, 2004 Auburn, 2003 USC, 1994 Penn State, and others... you’ve established the system, you live by the system, you profit from the system. If you’re going to argue with the system, you can’t do it after you’ve been hurt by it.

While I'd like to see a legit champion – and I don’t deny the fact that the current system does not give us a legit champion – I personally like the fact that every game means something now. Say we're heading into Rivalry Weekend, and Ohio State has locked up the #3 seed in the playoffs and Michigan is mathematically eliminated -- do you really think Ohio State is going to play its starters all game and risk fatigue or injury before the next week's playoff game?

Also, how would we qualify the "top eight teams?" College basketball has 31 automatic bids, so everyone has a chance to guarantee their spot – not the case in college football. When you have 34 at-large teams, a team has a fairly weak argument when they scream, "We're the 27th best at-large team, we should have gotten in!" Figuring out who is #34 and who is #35 is a lot easier than figuring out who is #2 and who is #3.

How would college football do it? The obvious guess would be to take the six BCS conference champs and two at-large teams.

In 2008, a 6+2 playoff would have meant (records pre-bowl game) Virginia Tech (9-4), Oklahoma (12-1), Cincinnati (11-2), Penn State (11-1), USC (11-1), and Florida (12-1) automatically get in. So that leaves two spots for Texas (11-1), Texas Tech (11-1), Ohio State (10-2), Ball State (12-1), Utah (12-0), TCU (10-2), Alabama (12-1), and Boise State (12-0). How exactly do you pick two out of those eight? And how can you say Virginia Tech (9-4) or Cincinnati (11-2) is more deserving than almost any of those teams?

While a playoff would certainly be exciting, let’s hope the folks in charge deal with college football’s other problems first. If we can bring back some meaningful non-conference games and standardize conference schedules and conference championship games, maybe we’ll weed out the pretenders from the contenders and not even need a playoff system at all.