| |
 No thanks BCS coordinator cool to football playoff proposal
Posted: Monday June 21, 1999 04:22 PM
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) -- The coordinator for the current Bowl Championship Series says he's not interested in a Swiss marketing firm's plan for a 16-team college football playoff to begin in 2003. "I'm not here to say there will never be a college football playoff," said Roy Kramer, BCS coordinator and commissioner of the Southeastern Conference. "But I don't believe it will be run by someone in Switzerland." ISL, a Swiss-based marketing and licensing firm, first introduced its plan to Kramer last December. The firm has since met with many other conferences in hopes of drawing support for the proposal. ISL's $2.4 billion plan calls for a 16-team playoff that would begin in early December, with first-round and quarterfinal games played at the site of the higher ranked team. The semifinals and title game would use three of the four BCS bowls, with the title game set for the weekend before the NFL's Super Bowl. While Kramer doesn't think the ISL's plan will work, he is aware of the push for a college football playoff. To counter it, the BCS plans a promotional campaign this fall for all bowls. "I think what we have discovered is that there is so much talk about a playoff that we thought we would try to do something to promote the bowls," Charles Bloom, an SEC assistant commissioner and BCS media relations director, said Monday. "We've created a one-page advertisement and it's up to the schools to run it in their football game programs and their media guide," Bloom said. Bloom said the BCS also plans television and radio commercials to run throughout the season. Meanwhile, Kramer has a slew of reasons why he thinks the plan won't work, starting with the fact that the BCS plan runs three more years, then the Big 10 and Pacific 10 have a contract with the Rose Bowl for three years after that. "That's a six-year window that it can't happen," Kramer told The Birmingham News. "You've got to have Ohio State and Michigan in the mix. You can't go sell it without them." Kramer also said the timing of the proposed playoffs won't work because the first-round games would be played on college campuses during weekends in which the NFL season is still continuing. "I've done my share of TV negotiating, and we're talking about going head-to-head with [the NFL]?" Kramer said. "That's enormous television dollars. That's a tough nut to crack." Kramer also said a playoff system could hurt the integrity of college football's regular season. "College football is built on the regular season," Kramer said. "Tennessee-Alabama, Georgia-Florida, Florida-Florida State, USC-Notre Dame, Michigan-Ohio State -- that's the guts of college football, the backbone. If you put your eggs in the playoff basket, we deflate this," he said. Kramer likened it to college basketball's regular season, which he said is second fiddle to the NCAA tournament. "The NCAA tournament is everything to college basketball," he said. "People don't care in January and December."
| |||||||||||||||||
Copyright © 1999 CNN/SI. A Time Warner Company. Terms under which this service is provided to you.
| |||||||||||||||||
