COMMENTARY : College Super Bowl? No! Let’s Give Players a Little Time to Study

One of those unscientific, color-coded telephone polls in USA Today showed recently that most red-blooded Americans favor a college football playoff.

This is no more a surprise than a poll favoring free beer or a date with Michelle Pfeiffer. Division I college football is an aberration, and not for, say, its moral standing. What big-time college football does each year is leave you hanging. It refuses to satisfy. It’s a tease in pads and helmet.

All the other sports (including divisions II and III football) eventually arrive at a satisfactory conclusion, with some manner of tournament from which a winner, a champion, emerges. You can start with the big-league World Series and work your way down to the Little League version. We get a clear-cut winner and losers equally clear cut, and that’s the way we like our sports.

College basketball provides us with a tournament champion. So does college soccer. And baseball. And lacrosse. Debate teams. Even cheerleaders have championships.

Only college football demurs.

In football, we rely primarily on two polls, one of sportswriters and the other of football coaches, to determine a national champion. It’s not the greatest system devised by man. Football coaches generally leave the voting to their sports information directors. And how many different teams can a sportswriter, even one with cable, see in a season? Besides, would you want anything really important decided by sportswriters? Or football coaches?

This season happens to be spectacularly confusing. Among the principal contenders for national honors, Florida State beat Miami, which beat Notre Dame, which beat Colorado. Does that make Florida State champion? No. Florida State has lost twice this season. Colorado lost once, but it made the mistake of losing its final game, a slip that pollsters tend to notice. Once-beaten Notre Dame played the toughest schedule but lost to once-beaten Miami in December, meaning Miami is the champion, or so the voters proclaimed.

But are the bad boys from Miami the best team, or do they simply have the best timing?

Why not, you’re probably thinking, take this college football Final Four to some warm-weather clime, play one weekend to get down to a Final Two and then have a college Super Bowl to settle this thing like men?

Well, there are many reasons why not.

To begin with, on a philosophical note, what’s wrong with a little disorder? Must we have everything tied into neat little packages? Does two plus two always have to equal four?

A college football playoff would necessarily interfere with bowl games. Do we really want to jeopardize a system that has given corporate sponsors so many years of pleasure? And what about parades. Would there be a college Super Bowl parade? I doubt it. The present bowl system, our country’s greatest growth industry, basically allows alumni from virtually every college in America to visit someplace warm sometime in December. This not only feeds the economy, but it also helps conserve oil. We must therefore tread gently in this area.

And, of course, there is the small matter of academics. E. Gordon Gee, president of the University of Colorado, wrote in the New York Times on Sunday that “colleges and universities must stand first for academic values.” He went on to write that a college Super Bowl would be the “ultimate sellout.”

Gee is absolutely right. Even college officials have finally come to recognize that most sports seasons have grown too long. They have commissioned studies that show athletes who want to be students don’t have enough time to do both. Witness the case of Lou Holtz, who affects concern for the athlete as student. Two players who missed practice to catch up on their studies were not allowed to play in the Orange Bowl. That’s a great message. But a worse message would be to add games, even playoff games, or maybe especially playoff games, to a season that is already too long.