Do you see any way that the ACC opponent and Big Five opponent go back to being open (other than Notre Dame at the Orange)?
Big XII commissioner Bob Bowlsby said yesterday that by “sweating all the details” the college football leaders working on the sport’s new playoff will keep the regular-season relevant and distribute revenue fairly. “I’m confident we’re going to get it right by the time it’s all done,” he said.
He also revealed what the current thinking on the selection committee’s make-up is:
“Some of them will be active people currently in the profession [and] retired people. I’m probably a little more trusting than some others might by having gone through the basketball committee process. The basketball process is a very honorable process. If you have a dog in the fight, you leave the room. You don’t try to influence the other people in the room for your own benefit. This will be the same way.
Will it be harder to come up with four teams than it is to come up with 68 [in basketball]? Yeah. Would we be any less confident in terms of integrity? No.”
Bowlsby said he expects the number of panelists on the committee to be about 18.
As for the new Big XII/SEC “Champions Bowl,” Bowlsby has revealed that Houston is no longer considered a leader for the new game (which will start in 2014, like the new playoff). Last week he said it was a “dead heat” between Arlington and New Orleans, as expected. Whichever city loses out on the “Champions” Bowl will likely get the seventh game that will be added to the playoff mix.
At MrSEC.com we’re still hoping for New Orleans to land the game because a) it’s centrally-located between most SEC and Big XII schools and b) the Big Easy is much better tourist destination than the area around Arlington, Texas. That’s no knock on the Metroplex, it’s just a fact.
Initially, there were supposed to be six bowl sites that would rotate through as host games for the semifinals, but the majority of those games immediately locked in big-conference partners. That made them so-called contract bowls and now the presidents of the various conferences are trying to add a seventh major game to the rotation in order to provide more teams from smaller leagues access to the “big bowls” and a greater portion of the loot provided by those contests. The threat of legal action on anti-trust grounds is the motivation for that move, just as it was when the BCS added a fifth-bowl game to its mix several years ago.
