Dear FBS Schools: Pick on Teams Your Own Size! (A Parable)

Once upon a time, before some of you young'uns was born, the NCAA had three divisions for all sports: I, II, and III.

Then, in the middle of the 1970s, a lot of the big, fat, and rich football programs in Division I decided they were tired of sharing their money and television exposure with the small, skinny, and poor football programs. After all, said the big bullies, the scrawny kids stood little chance of competing with the big boys to win all the marbles.

It was cruel, said the big bullies, that the little guys kept bringing their marbles to the playground each week and losing them, week after week. It would be fairer, said the chubby champions, to break their one group into two groups: a group for the big boys, and another group for the weaklings.

That way, the big boys could draw bigger crowds and more attention each week, as the fights were going to be fairer, and there would be no "pushovers".

So, in 1978, the NCAA did what the big bullies wanted: they split Division I into two, creating I-A for the big programs and I-AA for the little programs (or for the former bullies who stopped playing for all the marbles and chose to spend most of their after-school time doing their homework and studying at the library instead).

That was 30 years ago this year.

Somewhere along the way, the big bullies realized that they had lost one important thing in the split: the ability to pick on the weaker kids and get official approval (in their win-loss record) for doing so. As it turns out, some of the more mean-spirited kids who came to watch the bullies fight enjoyed it when they kicked sand in the faces of the weaker kids before pummeling them into a pulp.

Also, once some bullies began bending the rules, and started picking fights with weak kids on the sly, slipping in one or two fights a year to improve their win total, it was in the self-interest of the other bullies to do the same, or risk having a worse record and being thought inferior to the bullies with "padded" win totals.

Not surprisingly, the mean-spirited kids who watched the fights were happy to see the bullies bending the rules and taking unfair advantage of their size. "All's fair" they would yell.

Some of these kids even had their own rankings based on polls of the other kids, and they found out that beating up on a scrawny weakling would help a bully's chances of being ranked as a better fighter, even over other bullies who didn't fight any weaklings and only fought other bullies.

However, some of the more fair-spirited kids realized that this sort of bullying was not only not competitive, it reduced the integrity of the whole process of deciding the champion. These kids argued that in boxing, weight classes are strictly enforced for a reason: a fight between boxers of significantly different weights was not, is not, and never can be a fair and competitive fight.

David and Goliath squaring off is for mythology and literature, the studious scrawny kids pointed out. The extraordinarily one-sided military conflict between the USA and Panama (1989) was a matter of geopolitical strategy and national interest, and was never meant to be a fair fight in the "spirit of competition", they added.

Sports is different, these kids argued. Sporting competition is not meant to stack the odds in favor of one team or another, and there are certain parameters that ensure the competition is fair. The parameter that the bullies argued for in the first place (in order to get more attention, and revenue...pay-per-view schoolyard brawls) was now being ignored by those same bullies.

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