College Football | Start the debate again

You might have missed it last month. In this paper, it got one sentence:

"A survey of more than 2,000 faculty members from 23 schools, prepared especially for the Knight Commission, highlighted one conclusion: 'A striking number of professors say they don't know about and are disconnected from issues facing college sports.' "

Quick, then, let's ram through a college-football playoff while they aren't looking!

Of course, it's not so easy. Shortly, that will be underscored again because the run-up to settling the national-title debate is going to be messy. There will be no neat divide between two unbeatens and also-rans, just a lot of one-loss teams — Louisiana State, Missouri, Oklahoma, West Virginia, maybe Kansas — jostling for an edge.

On his ranch outside Spokane, Bill Moos just laughs. In June in San Diego, Moos had already turned over the Oregon athletic director's job to somebody else, and he spoke after being honored at the annual Pac-10 meetings.

He didn't go without an opinion. He recalled that in 2001, Oregon was squeezed out of the BCS title game. For the league presidents and athletic brass, he put forth his vision for a limited college football playoff:

Continue to play the four major bowl games, with anchors like the Pac-10 to the Rose Bowl. Match the four winners in semifinals — if necessary, on home fields. Then play a title game.

"All four bowls should have great ratings and wonderful attendance," Moos argued. "It's not the big guy [the BCS title game] and three also-rans. Every one of those four would be an important bowl."

In the hospitality room that night, Moos said, "They all sounded like I was a genius of all time."

The next morning, he was just one more oaf begging for a playoff against intransigent presidents.

Their position seems ever more curious and indefensible.

Missed class time? Check out a basketball player going to a conference tournament and then a couple of weekends of the NCAA tournament, taking final exams on the road.

"They're [the presidents] self-righteous on the missed class time," Moos said. "In my 12 years at Oregon, I have to strain my memory to remember when our football players missed one class. We would travel at 5 o'clock [Friday]. Then you turn around and the softball or baseball or golf team might miss three or four days a week."

Would a short playoff diminish the regular season? Funny, but anybody tuning in to college basketball can almost nightly see a crowd storming the court. March Madness doesn't seem to have dulled that passion.

The Moos truce would eliminate the early-loss-versus-late silliness that overrides reason. Despite a defeat to Illinois, Ohio State could still scramble back through the Rose Bowl to get where it wants to go (not that, after last January against Florida, we want to see them there again).

No doubt, one of the presidential concerns was voiced by faculty polled in that Knight Commission survey. "Athletic decisions on campus are being driven by the demands of the entertainment industry," it concluded.

Well, duh. For any Pac-10 school — make that any in the nation — if it's a choice between the athletic director not balancing the budget or inconveniencing constituents for TV, the president will accommodate Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit every time.

Speaking of cash, it's difficult to believe the Moos idea, or even the much-discussed "plus-one" plan — a single game after the big bowls — wouldn't outstrip the current arrangement.

"Think about the television money," Moos said. "Oh, my goodness."

Fox has the BCS bowls for about $83 million a year. ABC has the Rose, at roughly $35 million annually. If the NCAA basketball tournament brings $545 million a year from CBS, you'd like to think a limited playoff could fetch double what the big bowls are getting now, maybe $250 million.

Volunteers needed

What's wrong with this picture? The Pac-10, generally recognized as no worse than the second-best conference, is struggling to fill its six (possibly seven) bowl arrangements. But in a down year, the Big Ten already has 10 teams eligible (only Minnesota is out).

The Southeastern Conference also has 10 past the threshold, and Vanderbilt is 5-5.

So there won't be a lack of candidates if UCLA, Arizona and Washington State fail to fill Pac-10 bowl slots.

Replay follies

The officiating fiasco at the end of the Washington-Oregon State game pinpoints at least one major flaw in the system: A coach shouldn't be "penalized" for having used all his timeouts. That ought to be a totally separate issue.

OSU's Mike Riley should have the leeway to stop the game and call attention to an injustice — and if he's wrong and out of timeouts, then assess a 15-yard penalty. Pac-10 associate commissioner Jim Muldoon says that will be discussed in the offseason.

And what's more ...

• Mike Price's Texas-El Paso is 4-6 and loser of four in a row, and Price felt compelled at his weekly news conference to defend coordinator Tim Hundley, the former UW aide, because the defense ranks 116th in the nation.

• Dan Hawkins, the Colorado coach, didn't have the best 47th birthday at Iowa State. Ahead 21-0, he elected to go for it in the third quarter on fourth-and-one at the CU 43. It got stuffed and ISU rallied to win 31-28.

• Georgia's previously stoic coach, Mark Richt, recently has gotten players excited with the intentional celebration show against Florida, and last week against Auburn, putting his team in black jerseys. Said RB Thomas Brown, "That was probably the most electrifying moment I've been a part of at Sanford Stadium."

• Les Miles of LSU, paid $1.8 million a year, has a contract stipulating he must be one of the top-three-paid coaches in the country if LSU wins a national championship. That means he would get a raise of more than a million.

• Some 191 former Tennessee players took out a full-page ad in the Knoxville News-Sentinel last week to show support for Vols head coach Phil Fulmer.

• Wonder how amped NBC is for its Notre Dame offering Saturday? It's a dream matchup of the 1-9 Irish against 1-9 Duke.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com