Friday, August 23, 2002
Big-time football gets even bigger
By Steve Wieberg
USA TODAY
College football, at its highest, most competitive level, continues to equate bigger with better. Stadiums keep expanding, and so does the list of million-dollar coaches. And now this direction has led to the longest, busiest, most money-driven season in the sport's history.
Virginia and Colorado State met Thursday in the Jim Thorpe Classic in Charlottesville, Va., kicking off a 2002 schedule that spans a record 135 days and more than 700 games.
Because of a change in NCAA rules and a quirk in the calendar, nearly every school in the top-tier Division I-A extended its regular-season schedule from 11 games to 12. The extra game will earn the individual schools as much as a seven-figure bump in ticket and TV revenue.
Sixteen teams will play in “classics” like Thursday's that are exempt from that limit. Six will play in conference championship games. And 56 — six more than last year — will wind up in bowls.
Twenty teams are assured of playing 13 games. For Nebraska or Big 12 Conference co-members Texas Tech and Iowa State, it could add up to 15 — an extra-long season for a I-A team.
The Huskers' Dahrran Diedrick is unfazed. “We didn't come to Nebraska to practice all year. We came to play games,” the senior running back says. “So let's play games.”
But educators and other officials are less enthusiastic.
“It represents one more extension of the over-commercialization of college sports,” says William Friday, North Carolina's president emeritus and co-chairman of the reform-seeking Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. “The pressure of money manifests itself in so many dimensions now. We push, push, push to the limit. And one of these days, it's going to collapse under its own weight.”
He insists, “We ought to be going the other way.”
The response from coaches is muted. If injuries become an issue, some wonder whether 85 scholarships will be enough to last a season, considering freshmen often are held out of competition by being redshirted. Talk of increasing eligibility from four years to five has begun, but that is a long way from becoming legislation.
“Physically,” Arkansas State coach Steve Roberts says, the long season “definitely will take its toll on our team.”
Says Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer: “We cut scholarships in recent years (to a maximum of 85), and now we're asking our players to play another game. I don't see where that's necessarily healthy. This is going to be a big challenge.”
Two for the road
Nowhere, perhaps, is that challenge greater than at San Jose State and Arkansas State, where already-struggling programs are staring at 13-game schedules without a week off. No other teams play so many weeks without a break. San Jose's schedule is near-sadistic: seven of the first eight games and a total of nine on the road, putting the Spartans on planes and buses for 23,574 miles from Aug. 31 to Nov. 16.
They'll run that gantlet with 62 or so scholarship players, well shy of the NCAA limit. The program is paying for a previous coach's reliance on junior college transfers, who arrive with only two years of eligibility and tend to leave gaps in a roster when a batch moves on.
Current San Jose State coach Fitz Hill has tweaked his practice regimen, shortening sessions and scaling back the Spartans' heavy hitting. It's a strategy repeated nationwide. “You can't run the players down and then expect them to go out on the field and play,” Hill says. “You only have so many bullets you can shoot.”
But the former Army second lieutenant and Bronze Star winner doesn't want your pity. “People look at 13 weeks of football,” he says, “and you have to realize that some people have to go into 13 straight days of combat. We could be chasing bin Laden.
“I tell our players, 'We're staying right here in this country. We're going to eat good. We're going to travel well — we've got a charter plane. And we're going to be together.' I can't look at the negatives.”
Undaunted, San Jose State filled out its 2003 schedule just last month with powerhouse Nebraska. On the road again.
In 1970, the regular season expanded to 11 games. In 1999, the NCAA signed off on the 12th, allowing schools the option when the calendar yields 14 Saturdays from the Labor Day weekend to the end of November. This year and the next are the first two when that occurs; there'll be four more from 2008 to 2019.
More games on the field mean more games on TV. For example, ESPN and ESPN2 will combine to show 103 regular-season contests, up 11 percent from last year and 41 percent from 2000. A Wednesday night game has been added to this year's menu, meaning at some point in the season a college game will be shown on every day of the week.
The motive is no secret: more money. As coaches' salaries spiral and schools race to expand and improve their facilities, most I-A athletic programs are unable to meet expenses without some kind of subsidy from the university, according to the association's most recent studies.
“Most of this,” Big 12 Commissioner Kevin Weiberg says, “is driven by a desire to have an extra home game and the revenue associated with it.”
Florida resumed a tasty rivalry with Miami (Fla.), which will travel to Gainesville on Sept. 7. “Ka-chinggg.” The showdown between teams ranked Nos. 1 and 7 in the preseason USA TODAY/ESPN Coaches' Poll will earn Florida a projected $1.9 million.
Plop another game in Michigan's 107,501-seat Michigan Stadium, and it means another $4 million to an athletic program that will spend $55 million in the coming year on 12 men's and 13 women's sports. Only football, men's basketball and hockey generate enough revenue to pay for themselves.
The windfall is “probably the difference between me having some breathing room and no breathing room in my budget for the next two years,” says Michigan athletics director Bill Martin, who's sinking the money into overdue building and facilities maintenance.
Attractive matchups
There are other reasons to like the 12th game. LSU vs. Virginia Tech. Auburn vs. Southern California. That Miami-Florida blockbuster, the schools' first regular-season meeting since 1987.
The schedule is peppered with several more appealing matchups.
Anyway, 12-game regular-season schedules (and 13th games in a bowl) were hardly rarities before the rule change. Eleven major-college teams played 13 games last season, and two more — BYU and Fresno State — played 14.
The effect of the added grind? Those teams had a combined .791 winning percentage in August, September and October, a .786 percentage thereafter. No apparent late-season toll there, though eight of the 13 teams “did” lose their regular-season finales.
And 13- and 14-game seasons are modest by lower-division standards, thanks to playoffs that settle those championships. Montana played 16 games en route to the NCAA's I-AA title last year, taking the field 14 weeks in succession after sitting out the weekend following Sept. 11. Runner-up Furman played 15 games. Division II champion North Dakota also played 15.
Games are acknowledged to be more physically demanding in I-A, where the players are bigger, stronger and faster and the hitting more vicious. But Nebraska coach Frank Solich points back to 1999, when his team finished the regular season with an 11-1 record, beat Tennessee 31-21 in the Fiesta Bowl “and was playing its best football at the end” of the season.
“That team, without question, could have gone on and played 15 games,” Solich says. “I know that. Our coaches know that. That team knows that. We'll see how well it works this year.”
And next year.
And then?
Some athletics directors concede they may have trouble weaning themselves and their budgets from the 12th-game income. As Daniel Fulks, who oversees the NCAA's study of college athletic finances, cautions, “We can only put so many seats in a stadium, and we can only sell so may tickets, and we can raise ticket prices only a certain amount, and we can only get so much money out of television and radio. But on the expense side, we don't have those ceilings. There's nothing to stop salaries and benefits from going up, (and) grants-in-aid.”
Sentiment has been expressed by some athletics directors to go permanently to a 12-game season.
Opposition has been expressed, as well, by indignant academicians and others who feel college sports already are overgrown. Stanford considered a 12th game this season and chose not to further infringe on the time of athletes who also are supposed to be students. University presidents in the Pacific-10 Conference, to which Stanford belongs, drew up a proposal to rescind the 12th game after 2003 but ultimately failed to push it through NCAA channels.
“By and large, the presidents feel football is big enough or already too big and is emphasized too much on campuses. And they just don't want it to be bigger,” Pac-10 Commissioner Tom Hansen says. “That's what I always try to tell people about a (major-college) playoff. They (college presidents) are never going to approve a playoff.”
Yet ultimately it may be one or the other — a 12-game regular season or a playoff.
Where the BCS fits in
The Bowl Championship Series, which uses a complicated mathematical formula to select two teams to play for the I-A national title in one of its affiliated bowls, is contractually locked in through the 2005 season. The six conference commissioners are weighing what to do beyond that, and they'll launch a broad review of the sport's postseason format in the next six to nine months — looking at options from a BCS extension and preservation of the decades-old bowl system to a playoff.
Expand the postseason, and there's no chance the regular season will be expanded. Keep the postseason to one bowl a team, and a 12th regular-season game will be more appealing. “People will probably wait and see,” says Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese, who heads the BCS.
At Arkansas State, Roberts, in his first year, isn't looking that far ahead. He and the Indians — picked to finish at or near the bottom of the Sun Belt Conference — travel Sunday to 16th-ranked Virginia Tech, launching a 13-game season that'll actually be played in one day less than 13 weeks.
To minimize the toll of preseason practices, Roberts moved steamy afternoon sessions to evenings and set up a tub of ice water in which his players could take an end-of-the-day dip.
“Our biggest challenge,” he predicts, “will be to prepare our football players emotionally and mentally for 13 consecutive weeks. We've got to have some activities to sort of relax our minds and rekindle the emotions.”
His guys compare with Nebraska's in at least one respect. “Players love to play,” Roberts says. “They'll play anybody anywhere.”
And on every given day.
———
(Contributing: Florida TODAY correspondent David Jones)
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Big-time football gets even bigger
