College Football Playoffs: Shut Up, Harvey Perlman

Let's just get right into this. Here's what Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman had to say to ESPN.com about bringing semifinal playoff games to college campuses (emphasis: ours):

"I don't think that's acceptable to us at this point," Perlman said of the campus-sites plan. "There would be some advantages to the Big Ten in doing it that way, but the end result would be that the bowl system and the Rose Bowl would be kind of like the NIT in basketball. If you have a playoff system outside the bowls, it would do serious damage to the bowls. ... I don't think anybody would pay attention to the bowls." 

This is a sensationally fan-unfriendly message to send to Nebraska and the rest of the Big Ten. What Perlman is saying to every Big Ten team that might be ranked in the top two in the nation and in line to host a playoff game is this: "We would love to play this game at home for you, but then you might start to take all bowl games for granted. See you in Pasadena!"

There is no such thing as a Big Ten school (short of the University of Chicago, I guess) that is incapable of hosting a semifinal. I know that because a semifinal game is also called a college football game, and college football games happen at college football stadiums. Shocking, I know.

Furthermore, the bowl games already occupy a lower position of importance than the NIT. At least the NIT crowns its own champion! If the NIT invited all 32 teams to participate, then stopped after the first round and handed out trophies to all the winners, then it would be the bowl game system we know and love in college football.

We have watched the vast, vast majority of bowl games play basically zero role in crowning a true national champion for decades in college football. The ratings are good anyway. The ratings will continue to be good because people are already used to their team not being in championship contention in the postseason. That's not changing.

This is just taking two teams out of the pool of 68 that are playing meaningless* postseason games and giving them a meaningful game outside the bowl system. If the bowl system seriously can't survive that, it's not going to be able to survive much, and certainly it wouldn't be the robust institution it has claimed to be for decades.

Thus, then, it is extremely difficult to see the constant fetishization of the Rose Bowl by Jim Delany and his cohorts as anything but a sign that college football is so utterly beholden to the moneyed interests of the BCS bowls and their committees, the conference commissioners would rather please these bowls than their own member schools' fanbases.

I would love to be proven wrong about that.

*This is to say "meaningless" in that it doesn't directly affect the national championship. Certainly anyone who's actually participating in a bowl game doesn't consider it meaningless. The same goes for the NIT.