POINT OF VIEW / BOB OATES : Yes! Playoffs Will Pay Off : Cash-Strapped Universities Need a Football Final Four

From here to Florida, the bowl games last week separated the title contenders from the rest in college football, leaving, as usual, a web of unanswered questions, starting with these two:

What’s the best team in the land?

Should a national championship playoff climax the college season?

The answer to Question 2 is easy: Sure, starting next year.

But Question 1 is unanswerable.

Even if Florida State met Notre Dame or Nebraska again next week, the winner wouldn’t be the better team, necessarily, let alone best of all.

The nation’s leading college football clubs are so closely matched most years that nearly any 60-minute happening can be disproportionately influenced by turnovers, bad calls, big plays and the like.

More than one loser can claim: “We were robbed.” More than one winner can brag: “Look at the scoreboard. We’re No. 1.”

Accordingly, sports fans who want to settle the best-football-team argument on the playing field are asking the impossible.

So why have a championship game?

The rationale for that is something else.

You play it for a reason that is as urgent, as honorable, as American, as it is excellent.

You play it for the money.

ROCKY TIMES HAVE AMBUSHED UNIVERSITIES

In two respects, a January playoff, bringing together the four best teams emerging from the bowl games, will someday be as welcome as it is spectacular.

It will:

* Create an American classic. With semifinals one weekend and a title event the next, three big annual games will be added to the winter sports calendar.

“I’d support a final-four playoff,” UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young said the other day. “More games would be too many. One isn’t enough.”

* Strengthen American education. With revenues evenly divided, a playoff could generate as much as $1 million each year for every school that competes in big-time football.

And they all need it.

“These are rocky times for (state) schools, and for most private schools, too,” Richard Little, vice president at Miami University of Ohio, said, voicing an opinion that can be heard on any campus.

The need didn’t seem so acute a few years ago--when there was no real need for a championship game, either. College football has been a consistent success story without it.

But there have been major changes lately in the economic condition of the universities.

Budget problems have led many schools to drop some of their varsity sports.

Many--UCLA among them--have even abolished or downsized academic departments.

“The money just isn’t there these days,” Little said. “They’re phasing out departments and degree programs (because) more than half the states have cut back on aid to higher education.”

The problem is that the states have been financially stricken, too.

“The (legislature) thinks about us, but they also have to think about Medicaid,” Little said. “And so many other things: the burgeoning prison population, secondary education, infrastructure breakdowns, social-service needs. There’s a confluence of pressures and problems.”

The universities are responding to the crisis predictably with unprecedented increases in tuition and fees.

Whereas inflation in America rose 2.8% last year, the cost of a college education was up 6%, a College Board spokesman said at Princeton.

The average for tuition, room and meals at all U.S. four-year colleges now is $6,207 a year, he said, but the cost rises to $10,000 and up at larger state and private schools, and to $25,000 or more at some.

With such intense pressures on the economy of every university, all possible sources of revenue need to be looked at. A football final four would plainly help.

NFL KIND OF MONEY IS THERE FOR A FINAL FOUR

Postseason college football has always attracted a number of outspoken critics. Football in January, they continue to charge, is crass commercialism.

What does it have to do with education? they ask. Who needs it? We’d be overwhelmed by two weeks of media hoopla and hype.

But in this case, that’s the whole point.

The more commotion, the better. The nation’s troubled universities need windfall profits. If hype helps, hype.

The payoff could be impressive.

The NFL’s Super Bowl in recent years has been hyped into a one-day $50-million event. It reaps $41 million from TV alone and then sells out at $175 a ticket.

A college football final-four playoff, capitalizing on the nation’s post-bowl game ferment, could arguably double that--producing $50 million for the main event plus $25 million for each semifinal.

The take from the championship game alone “would be closer to $100 million than $50 million,” in the opinion of Georgia Athletic Director Vince Dooley.

Others tend to agree. In both total revenue and excitement, some suggest, a final-four playoff might even outpace the NFL’s longer playoffs for these reasons:

--Even taking into account the overlap, there are slightly different publics for pro and college ball, both of them very large.

--CBS, which has lost the NFL, is in the market for a comparably prestigious major league enterprise and could bid against ABC for at least a share of college football.

--With only three games, a brisk college playoff, going head to head against pro football’s month-long January playoffs, would offer a compact, competitive zing.

On Monday nights, possibly.

Or, conceivably, the championship game should be played in the NFL’s usual bye week before the Super Bowl.

As college basketball has found, there’s something about a finely focused final four that stirs the imagination of the country.

“The instant we have championship football, it will become one of the world’s four great annual sports events,” Dooley, a winning football coach for many years, said from Georgia, comparing it to the Super Bowl, World Series and college basketball tournament.

Education would gain the most. It would gain substantially wherever big-time football is played.

“I’d like to see the revenue equally divided between academics and athletics at each university,” Dooley said, proposing a course of action that could well be taken, when they come to consider it, by the presidents of the top-division schools.

At present in Division I-A, there are 106 football-playing institutions, but some of them favor a smaller grouping of about 70.

In either instance, assuming a playoff payoff approaching $100 million, each school would get an annual dividend of, more or less, $1 million.

Suppose Dooley and the others have overestimated--and revenues are only half that. What’s wrong with half a million?

Why throw all that away?

THREE PLATOONS ANSWER TO OVEREMPHASIS

Those arguing against a college football playoff typically mention one or more of the following:

* As arranged by the new bowl coalition, there is often a championship game now.

Yes, but, were Florida State and Nebraska really No. 1 and No. 2 last week?

And how much money did they make for Division I?

When New Year’s Day is crowded with eight bowl games--or even four or five--no one of them realizes the kind of revenue that’s there for a later championship event.

To maximize proceeds, the universities need a time when a brief title series could get the undivided attention of the country.

* The bowl associations, fearing a loss of prestige, bitterly oppose football playoffs.

Yes, but, such fears seem exaggerated.

The Jan. 1 bowl tradition is firmly established. And interest will be even greater in the New Year’s games that have final-four significance.

The bowl associations have already profited hugely from their friendly relationship with college football. Their self-serving lobbying against a four-team playoff--in an era of great need for the universities--is unseemly.

* College football in January means that the players will have to miss too many classes.

Yes, but, a campus classroom isn’t necessary to the learning process. You can go to school in any hotel, in any suburb.

Where necessary, the teams could travel during the postseason with three platoons: offensive, defensive and academic. They make enough money to take along a small platoon of tutors to help the players who need it.

There is an NCAA rule against aid to athletes unless the same services are offered to other students, but NCAA rules are often modified. A reason for modifying this one is that the revenue created by football players will be of benefit to all students.

The point is moot, of course, at the many schools that are between semesters or quarters in January.

After New Year’s Day, moreover, only those who play for the final-four teams need be off campus, and some will only be gone for the weekend.

Although cries of overemphasis can again be expected, the fact is that college football players are required, in any case, to miss few classes--fewer than basketball players or debaters or political activists or many others.

* The university leaders who exploit football players throughout the fall will be exploiting them unbearably if they continue it into January.

Yes, but big-time college football should find a way to cut the athletes in. They are no longer the amateurs they were earlier in the century.

As we have argued before in this space, today’s college football players are entitled to a percentage of the gross--possibly 20% in the regular season and 10% during the much more lucrative playoffs.

They earn it. They are recruited as athlete-entertainers whose job is to earn it.

THEY CAN PICK A FINAL FOUR, NOT A FINAL ONE

To select a final four each winter, the present voters--sportswriters-broadcasters and coaches--might as well stay in business.

Their separate votes for each team could be added up, as they are now by coalition calculators. And the top four in the combined totals could be seeded 1 through 4.

If there were a playoff this winter, the top-seeded teams, as determined in this week’s compilation after the bowl games, would be Florida State, Notre Dame, Nebraska, and Florida.

Those seem the obvious four.

In fact, over the years, the coaches and writers have usually had the top four right--though not always in the right order.

Yet if voting by groups of bystanders is good enough to certify a quartet, it is an unacceptable way to crown a champion.

It’s like letting historians decide who won the Civil War.

The problem is that the inherent defects of any poll are magnified when one team must be singled out as champion.

For example, some of the writers raising their hands for Florida State again this week--instead of Notre Dame--are engaging, no doubt, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, having first named the Seminoles No. 1 last summer, before their first game.

Still, that sort of thing isn’t what’s mainly wrong with polls. If there were a final-four playoff, you couldn’t be sure the best team won that way, either.

The crucial flaw in voting for No. 1 is that it creates absolutely nothing in the way of revenue.

What’s needed most is a fresh way to raise fresh money.