Colleges Deserve a Big Payoff

For the first time, college and pro football are using playoff systems to name their No. 1 teams--their national champions.

Financially, however, the colleges are cheating themselves. Their cash payoff, in the end, will be absurdly and unnecessarily smaller than the NFL’s.

In an era when support money for many major universities is dwindling, the college championship game, as played New Year’s week within the existing bowl structure, will bring in only a fraction of the millions that are out there for special season-ending events.

Meanwhile, the NFL’s event, the Super Bowl, will continue to monopolize the late-January attention of America and raise a fortune for pro football.

The colleges could--and should--get that kind of payoff. And they would have it with a four-team January playoff ending in an annual championship game on the Sunday before the Super Bowl.

They are on the right track now with their votes and computers, which have been programmed to identify college football’s top two teams. But it’s not enough. Usually there are three or four valid title claimants, as there are this year. So they should vote four teams in.

With four universities involved in two mid-January semifinals and a final game, they could raise half a million, perhaps a million, for every school in Division I-A, and pay off everybody’s athletic-budget debt.

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Too many losers: The only good reason for college football to have a national championship game is to raise money for the nation’s universities, which need it, some of them desperately, in every section of the land.

When, however, such a game is as low in revenue production as this season’s will be, there aren’t many benefits. The scene will be like pro football’s, with one team labeled champion, and every other team labeled loser, even the major conference champions.

Two months from now in Division I-A, there will be one winner and 110 losers. How many people will be happy with that? College football was better off when any bowl winner could say, “We’re No. 1,” and challenge the figure philosophers to prove otherwise.

It’s true that many media people love to talk and write about a bona fide national champion, but how does that help the 110 losers?

Plainly, two or three or 10 winners are healthier than one. And plainly, the major bowl games should mean something, which, this season, they won’t. They have all been downgraded except the Fiesta, this year’s site of the only important bowl game.

By contrast, ahead of a three-game January playoff, all bowl results would be factored into the final voting and computing, and that would make the bowls more meaningful than ever.

The idea of a January playoff has been opposed, reportedly, by the universities of the Big Ten and Pacific 10, which should give more thought to the national need for more college revenue. They’re all hip deep in business, the football business. At the gate each fall, they do everything that any other good businessmen would do except maximize their profits. Macy’s maximizes with January sales. The colleges should maximize with a genuine January event.

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Soccer parallel: The Super Bowl is a happening that the NFL lucked into. Thirty-five years ago, when the owners of the old NFL tried but failed to lick a new league, the AFL, they accepted it, and merged, and their super-playoff plan followed irresistibly. The AFL itself had lucked into survival only because its birth coincided with the birth of nationally televised games.

Other U.S. leagues and sports lacking good fortune such as that have been traditionally slow to make progress.

For example, it’s obvious that what soccer needs to get ahead in America is a European-style cup tournament each year after a shorter league season is over. As outlined the other day by Times soccer columnist Grahame L. Jones, a single-elimination knockout tournament would be different enough to get the attention that playoffs don’t.

To create a three-game playoff system, what college football needs is a prod that would get the Big Ten, Pac-10 and other dissenters on board.

Their fears that a few student-athletes would miss a few classes are unrealistic. There are many ways to overcome that objection.

Fears that the season would be unreasonably lengthened are also unrealistic. It would be extended for only four teams--and if that’s a problem, some of college football’s nonconference games could be eliminated.

Fears that college football would be overemphasized are basically naive. In a competitive sports world that is particularly crowded now with NFL games and college bowl games during the first week of January--when the college title game will be just one more feature--it takes some heavy emphasis to attract the sports public, which is where the money is. And more money is the great institutional need. Ask any college dean. Ask any teacher. Ask any student.