Kirk Herbstreit, ESPN and the Myth of College Football Bowl Games

A time will come, shortly, when the Young Bulls watching over college football will look back at the first decade of the 21st century and marvel more of the Old Bulls didn’t see it coming.

Chris Fowler of ESPN, an Old Bull, seems to comprehend the landscape clearly—that these are the days of trouble in the empire; a time when landed interests are marshaling forces to protect—and suggesting will be reformed—what the masses have determined is an unjust monopoly of power. 

But have you heard in what terms Kirk Herbstreit, ESPN’s chief college football analyst, expresses his understanding of the current postseason bowl system? It's like listening to one of Plato's cavemen taking the mere show of everything, the surface presentation of it all, and discussing it like the final frontier of reality.  

Just the other day Herbstreit suggested, explicitly, that a 6-6 or 6-7 football team being invited to play in a bowl game was actually an affront to college football—an unmistakable symptom of a soft society’s compulsion to manufacture admirable self-esteem by awarding everyone involved in competition a participation trophy. 

It was as if the system he spoke of was from the bottom line, corporate perspective of its operators—some meritorious enterprise for the lifting-up of young men.

In Herbstreit's understanding of it, for-profit sporting spectacles select teams to play based on the pluck and skill and sportsmanship of their student-athletes' and teams' on-field performances. Though by some confluence of cronyism and corruption nearly every bowl game has been granted the status of a non-profit endeavor. This despite several of their directors being paid upwards of $600,000 annually for overseeing the organization of a single football game. 

That modern bowl games are a reward for players given after the completion of a fine, commendable regular season is a secondary function of their reason for being.

The bowls themselves exist to generate a profit for the corporations, directors and civic groups which host and broadcast them. It is their first and most fundamental operating principle. Whom and what precisely they profit is a subject and scope fit for a much longer and more complicated article.

But it should be taken for an economic truth that these operators would happily take winless football teams from, say, Alabama or Florida, if it wouldn’t—for even the dimmest followers—expose once and for all the venal, coin-jingling heart of the entire process. 

Bowl operators and host cities want two teams whose fan bases are willing to buy the heaps of tickets force-sold to universities at the moment a bowl contract is signed. Schools then pay their own costs to transport and keep their official party at the contest's site for a week, where they're joined by a hoard of high-spirited partisans in a mood to disperse their money around the game's location.

That is the sum total of what the operators want, and it is everything. 

What has become morbidly amusing to watch are moments when an aficionado of the game like Herbstreit stumbles accidentally over the very stone-hearted truth of the business, only to move on so quickly there’s not time for even a glance back to see what it was that caught him up. 

From Houston on Saturday morning, during the regular College GameDay broadcast—on an impromptu monologue criticizing bowl operators and the NCAA for awarding “participation trophies” to less-than-deserving football teams—Herbstreit actually blew the whistle on the whole system.

In addressing both his colleagues at the desk as well as the audience, he said, to paraphrase, that “our network” is certainly as guilty as anyone of creating all these bowl games. 

That admission must have astonished more than one camp follower watching the broadcast.

But Herbstreit blew right by it like a pebble had hit his windshield, when in fact a strip of road spikes had torn the rubber from his wheels completely.

How long before someone like Herbstreit careens headlong into something he can’t ignore and is forced to reckon with a hard reality?

Does he really believe additional bowl games were established by his network in order to reward more players and teams for outstanding performances on the football field? It is truly a bright spirit to light that darkness and see perched there not some sinister raven cackling, "Ever More," but only the just rewards of an autumn’s football campaign well conducted.

The entire system of college football has arrived at this moment at the yawning mouth of a Nietzschean abyss—the Old Gods are certainly dead, and the time has come to raise-up something new. But who, beyond Dan Wetzel, sees that?

For observers, and perhaps damningly, former participants and analysts like Herbstreit—all those who insist on identifying themselves as “traditionalists”—there is almost incredible evidence that they can't see the “eternal flame” they’re standing sentinel over is extinguished.

The generation of football patriots who, as boys and “traditionalists”—somehow cynical in ways that indicate our country has grown older, more open-eyed and world-weary about things that Europeans have long understood—saw clearly the foundation of the BCS in 1998 as a corporate effort to preserve a system of wealth gathering for established interests. 

What is becoming difficult to suffer, though, is the astonishing naiveté from chief analysts of Herbstreit’s stature, compromised by the very networks they work for.

There's no balanced, sane reason for begrudging Herbstreit the bright, Norman Rockwell reality of his life; though maneuvering a checkmate on the grounds that its maintenance has become a sort of forced-perspective trick would be more parade ground in its ease of execution than trench warfare.

But what is not too much to ask is that the blond-haired, blue-eyed boy from Ohio—the lad who quarterbacked the state’s flagship college football team, and married its head cheerleader—at least puts down the Horatio Alger books long enough to read Winesburg, Ohio before attempting to interpret the realities of college sport for the public through endless sequences of dead clichés and hackneyed images.

The message for those whose job it is to watch over the welfare of the sport is clear—things are not always as they seem.