Monday, September 26, 2011

Oliver Luck understands the fiscal insanity of the BCS & Bowl Games

During a weather delay in the WVU-Marshall game on September 4, 2011, Oliver Luck spoke to the WVU Mountaineer Radio guys.  One of the topics that came up was bowl games including the millions of dollars colleges waste to attend bowl games.  Oliver Luck gets it.  So when you hear Bill Hancock or any other BCS mouthpiece claiming that "..the presidents and the coaches and the ADs support what we have..", that person is lying.  Blatantly.


Sunday, August 7, 2011

2011 OOC Scheduling - SEC! SEC! SEC!

Fresh off a record-setting 2010 season with regards to Out-of-Conference (OOC) schedules, more on that here *1, the 2011 college football season will be here is less than a month. And with it will be even weaker OOC schedules and more records for cupcake scheduling.

First, let’s look at some overall highlights or rather lowlights. 2011 will be the first time in history that all 6 AQ conferences play at least 20% (1 in 5) of their OOC games against FCS schools. Related to this, 22.7% of all OOC games played will be against FCS schools, a record for the 4th consecutive season. Also, three conferences (ACC, Big East, SEC) will have every single team play at least 1 game versus an FCS school, another record. Lastly, 3 conferences (Big Ten, Pac-12, SEC) will set records for the number of OOC games played versus FCS teams, although it should be noted that both the Big 10 and Pac-12 added teams for the 2011 season. Now let’s recognize some individual conferences for their achievements.

They’ve won 5 straight BCS Championships and you don’t achieve that level of success by playing quality fellow AQ opponents on a regular basis. The SEC will join the Big 12 (2006) and Big 10 (2010) as the only conferences to play at least as many OOC games versus FCS schools, twelve, as versus fellow AQ schools, twelve) *2. Additionally, 2011 will mark the first year that every SEC team plays an OOC game versus an FCS school. Finally, the SEC will play exactly 25% of its OOC games against FCS schools—another record. With three records in one-year, they don’t call the SEC the best conference in college football for nothing.

Just like the regular season product, the other conferences just don’t match up to the SEC in 2011. While the ACC and Big East didn’t set any records for OOC scheduling in 2011, it does mark the 3rd consecutive year that each conference will have every team play at least one game versus an FCS team. The Big Ten also didn’t set any new records but its 10 games versus FCS schools ties the record it set in 2010, although this year it does have one more team (12) than last year (11). The Big 12 is a mixed bag as its percentage of games vs FCS schools, 20%, will be the highest since 2008; however, the same is true for its percentage of games vs fellow AQ schools.

The most disappointing conference has to be the Pac-12. Traditionally, it has been the gold standard in terms of scheduling quality opponents instead of cupcakes. It played the highest % of OOC games against AQ schools the last two years (50%-2008, 48%-2010). It has the lowest average percentage of OOC games against FCS schools since 2006, when the 12 game regular season became standard, at 14.3%. It has three of the four teams (USC, UCLA, Notre Washington, Note Dame) who have never played an FCS school *3. But, oh how the mighty have fallen. The 22% of OOC games against FCS teams in 2011 falls just short of the 23% record the Pac-12 set in 2010. Additionally, the league added two teams this year, and five additional OOC games *4, yet the total number of OOC games versus AQ schools, 15, stayed the same as last year. Finally, from 2007-2009, the league played a total of 8 OOC games against FCS schools; in 2011, the league will play an identical number of games against FCS schools.

Although the results for 2011 aren’t quite as bad as they were for 2010 or in 2009 when I first looked at OOC scheduling, the indicators are still very clear. AQ schools love scheduling easy OOC games against FCS schools, oftentimes at the expense of games against fellow AQ schools. We’ve now crossed the threshold where, after 2011, half of the AQ conferences will have had seasons where every member plays an OOC game against an FCS team and seasons in which the number of OOC games against FCS teams is equal to or greater than the number of OOC games played against fellow AQs.



Percentage of OOC Games versus AQ, FBS Non-AQ, and FCS teams in 2011
2011
AQ
FBS NON-AQ
FCS
ACC
44
29
27
BIG EAST
40
40
20
BIG 10
29
50
21
BIG 12
30
50
20
PAC 10
42
36
22
SEC
25
50
25





Footnotes
*1-http://playoffsolution.blogspot.com/2011/08/2010-record-year-for-aq-schools-ooc.html
*2-Note: Notre Dame is not considered an AQ school for this statistic though it was for all the percentage calculations
*3-This will become two teams of the remaining three after 2011 as Washington is scheduled to play Eastern Washington on Sept 3.
"Notre Dame, USC and UCLA last holdouts from college football's cupcake feast", The Oregonian, April 9, 2011
*4-Cal and Colorado are playing this year but it is not considered a conference game due to existing contracts that were in place before the Pac-12 expanded. Thus, technically there were only five additional OOC games added instead of six; even though this game appears on both teams schedules it can only be counted once as it is only one actual game being played.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

2010 a Record Year for AQ Schools OOC Scheduling

2010 was a record setting year for college football. And I’m not just talking about the legal gymnastics the NCAA exhibited to clear several high profile players.

To follow up on my earlier study, where I examined out of conference (OOC) scheduling for the 6 Automatic Qualifying (AQ) conferences since the creation of the BCS, I looked at the 2010 regular season to see if the disturbing trend toward scheduling cupcakes for OOC games continued. Did it?? Of course it did!

*All conferences except the Big 12 and the SEC decreased the % of OOC games played against fellow AQ schools in 20101

*Every conference except the Big 12 played nearly 1 in 4 of its OOC games against an FCS school

*Three conferences (Big 10, Pac-10, SEC) played the highest % of OOC games against FCS schools ever

*The Big 10 became only the 2nd conference ever (Big 12 – 2005) to play more games against FCS schools (10) than against fellow AQ conference schools (9)2

*The Big 10 and Pac-10 each played more than 20% of their OOC games against FCS opponents for the first time ever

*Among all 6 conferences, 22.4% (58 of 259) of all OOC games were played against FCS schools, which marked the third consecutive year a record was set in this category

Percentage of OOC Games versus AQ, FBS Non-AQ, and FCS teams in 2010

2010
AQ
FBS NON-AQ
FCS
ACC
40
33
27
BIG EAST
38
40
23
BIG 10
27
50
23
BIG 12
25
58
17
PAC 10
48
29
23
SEC
33
44
23



Footnotes:
1 – Similar to the earlier study, games against Notre Dame were included in the AQ category for % calculation purposes

2 – Notre Dame was excluded from this calculation and only schools in the 6 AQ conferences were used

Sunday, January 9, 2011

The 2010 Orange Bowl-Bare Midriffs, Time Share Tactics, and Attendance Woes

Editor's Note:  A version of this post appeared on Playoff Pac's Blog here.

On March 8, 2010, the BCS Twitter page (http://twitter.com/insidethebcs) proclaimed “Another banner year of TV ratings and attendance highlight America’s passion for college football”.( 1) However, if one read the article they linked to (available here), there was conspicuously little coverage of the Orange Bowl among the list of “Bowl Ratings Highlights” and “2008-09 Notable Bowl Facts and Milestones”. The only mention it received was in the “Bowl’s boasting double digit growth in viewership included:” section where it was noted that its television viewership increased by 17%. In fact, the strength of ticket sales were mentioned for the other 3 original BCS bowls (Fiesta, Sugar, Rose), but not for the Orange Bowl. Given the recent trouble the Fiesta Bowl has experienced, I decided to look into the Orange Bowl and the view was not pretty.


While the television viewership of the Orange Bowl was up 17%, as mentioned earlier, ticket sales were not. The Orange Bowl had an announced attendance of 66,131 (2), which besides not being a sellout for the first time in 9 years, missed the sellout mark by a significant margin (Note: it’s good that bowl games don’t have NFL style blackout rules—more on this in a minute). Sun Life Stadium has a capacity of 75,000 for football games (3); thus, the stadium was only 88.1% full for one of college football’s 5 major BCS games. Now we don’t want to denigrate the lovely fans of Iowa or Georgia Tech, but does anyone truly believe that those two teams would have played in front of stadium that was less than 90% full if the winner got to play another game to advance towards a national championship in addition to just a trophy full of oranges? Or that if either team hosted the game on campus only 88% of the stands would be full? For the record, the last NFL playoff game to not sellout, and consequently be blacked out in the local television viewing market, was January 13, 2002 when Miami hosted Baltimore (4). Of course the poor economy played a part in this decline in ticket sales, but let’s take a look at some other potential reasons, specifically the Orange Bowl’s current marketing strategy and leadership.

The Orange Bowl’s marketing plan to attract local fans to purchase tickets in 2009 was fairly simple: feature attractive young females in face paint showing their bare midriffs along with the enticing promise of being able to purchase tickets to the BCS Championship game---in 2013. Yes, come out to the Orange Bowl so that you can meet hot girls showing off their painted stomachs. And we’ll also throw in the right to purchase tickets to a game that doesn’t happen for another 3 years. It’s no wonder that in the offseason the Orange Bowl committee decided to create a “..multi-tiered strategy to increase declining ticket sales..” (article here). This included hiring a Vice President of Ticket Sales and Operations in addition to hiring more ticket office employees and creating a program where corporate clients will be required to refer the names of other businesses to the Orange Bowl. According to Eric Poms, the Orange Bowl Committee CEO, “A new membership requirement is to have each new member provide us with two contacts in the business community. Then we will prepare ticket packages and visit each employer.” (article here) Does that sound similar to how timeshare presentations work to anyone else? Let’s give the Orange Bowl credit for something though; the new VP of Ticket Sales, Dawson Hughes, has experience working with the Kansas City Royals, a Major League Baseball franchise with a history of poor attendance.

The performance of any organization usually starts at the top and one need look no further than the leadership of the Orange Bowl. Flashback to December 2007. You might be wondering how Ohio State just got selected for the BCS Championship Game despite losing its next to last game of the regular season to Illinois (remember, every week is a playoff in the regular season), but that’s another discussion for another day. The real controversy among the BCS selections was the fact that Kansas got chosen ahead of Missouri for an at-large bid and a spot in the 2008 Orange Bowl. This selection was interesting due to several reasons: Missouri and Kansas had identical regular season records (not including the Big 12 Championship Game), Kansas’ record was due in part to a relatively weak schedule that did not include Texas or Oklahoma or Texas Tech (in fact they had not played a single ranked team until they played Missouri), and most importantly, Missouri beat Kansas during the playoff regular season. Now maybe, despite those factors, the Orange Bowl honchos wanted Kansas because officials figured they would travel better than Missouri or they felt Kansas deserved the opportunity more given their paucity of bowl appearances, 10, at the time compared to Missouri’s 24. Those reasons are at worst, understandable, and at best, justifiable. But that was not what the Orange Bowl leadership looked at according to CEO Eric Poms, "Having a one-loss team compared to a two-loss team was the most pressing thing we looked at. At the end of the day, that was our thought process.'' (5) Ignoring the fact that both of Missouri’s losses came against Oklahoma, who Kansas never played, one can’t help but wonder how earning the right to play for the Big 12 Championship (and a guaranteed BCS bid) can hurt a team’s BCS chances. Let’s examine the logic. Missouri beats Kansas 36-28, to earn a spot in the Big 12 Championship game where it loses to Oklahoma for the 2nd time. This loss drops Missouri’s record to 12-2 which, while statistically worse than Kansas’ 12-1, was not competitively worse as Missouri had only lost (twice) to a team that Kansas had never played and they had also beaten Kansas head-to-head. With logic like that, it’s no wonder we routinely see BCS officials making ridiculous claims like “at the start of the season, every team has an equal chance to play for a national championship

Now let’s return to the present with current President and Chair of the Orange Bowl Committee, Phillis Oeters. Oeters wrote a letter to the editor that appeared in the Miami Herald on January 3, 2010 (link here) deploring the idea of a playoff in college football. The letter featured many of the common anti-playoff myths: “Simply put, a playoff would end the bowls as we know them…”, fans would not be able to travel to multiple neutral-site playoff games, “But with 34 bowl games, 34 teams end the year successfully.”, and “In a playoff, teams will only spend one night in town, as opposed to a week..” Ignoring the fact that there have been numerous playoff proposals which keep some of the bowls and even incorporate the BCS games as a part of the playoff, one must start to wonder if the letter wasn’t secretly written by BCS chief Bill Hancock as he used every single one of those misleading claims in his infamous interview on the Dan Patrick Show in November 2009. However, the most unusual parts of the letter came towards the end. Oeters said that during bowl games “Universities meet with donors and raise money to support their academic programs. A playoff would destroy that.” Ignoring the veiled implication that playoff proponents are not concerned with supporting academics on college campuses, the idea that university donors would not attend playoff games is simply laughable. Immediately after that, Oeters stated “So if the bowl system works, is part of American culture and creates economic opportunity for communities and colleges around the country, why would we want to get rid of it?” The problem with Oeters hypothesis is that while bowls are clearly part of American culture and create economic opportunity—although not for many schools that participate in them due to mandated ticket sales and other requirements—the bowl system clearly does not work. But that could also depend on what one’s definition of “work” is. Does the bowl system provide players with an opportunity for a glorified exhibition game where they receive bags of expensive merchandise for free? Does the bowl system allow some teams weeklong vacations in tropical climates? The answer to both questions is clearly yes. However, the most important question in my view is this: Does the bowl system help determine college football’s FBS “national champion” based primarily on actual on-field performance (not conference affiliation or preseason ranking or computer models) from a pool of multiple teams with similar records or regular season achievements? The answer is a resounding no, which is why the both Orange Bowl and the BCS are part of the problem rather than part of the solution.