Wow.  Opening up the MrSEC.com inbox today it was clear that many, many, many of you wondered why the heck three SEC teams always have to duke it out with one another for television bowl ratings on New Year’s Day.  “Why do they put the Gator, Outback and Capital One bowls on at the same time?”

There are two main reasons for the placement of those SEC/Big Ten bowls:

1.  The BCS bowls all air with zero competition from the other bowls.  With the Rose Bowl going at 5pm ET and the Orange Bowl owning the primetime slot, the kickoff options for the SEC’s New Year’s Day bowls are limited.  They basically have a window from about 11am ET to 1pm ET in which to kick off.

2.  The media term for what the SEC and Big Ten do on January 1st is “roadblocking.”  Basically, if a college football fan wants to watch a game on New Year’s Day — as in actual day part of the day — that fan will be forced to watch the SEC battle the Big Ten.  He’s roadblocked into it.  Oh, sure, there’s now something called The Heart of Dallas Bowl during that window as well, but there aren’t many folks who’ll seek that one out.

So while an SEC or Big Ten fan might prefer having his favorite league’s games spread out, that’s really not an option unless one of those three games moves off of New Year’s Day altogether.  And no one wants to do that.  Also, the conferences themselves like knowing that when people think “New Year’s Day football” they automatically think “SEC versus Big Ten” by default.  That’s great branding and it’s great for recruiting.

That said, starting in 2014 you’ll have to get used to a whole new lineup of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day bowl games with new start times and new conference tie-ins.  Yay?

Happy New Year, everyone!  And on day one of this new year, yes, I had to go back and change the date in the headline from 1/1/12 to 1/1/13.  Don’t be surprised if you still see a 2012 date pop up from time to time during January.  Trust me, I do the same thing inside my checkbook as well.

This morning’s mood-setting thought/lyric comes from way back in 1983.  And if you don’t remember what U2 looked like 30 years ago, you might get a kick out of seeing the clip below taken from the BBC’s “Top of the Pops” program.

“All is quiet on New Year’s Day.  A world in white gets underway.”

Here’s hoping you have a great holiday and that all the teams you pull for notch victories in today’s bowl games.

We’ve already quoted this piece from The Tennessean once today, but Jeff Lockridge jammed so much good stuff into it we wanted to go back for seconds.  Earlier today, we told you that Scott Ramsey — the Music City Bowl prez and top dog of the Nashville Sports Council — doesn’t believe Nashville has the stadium to make a play for college football’s new championship game (when the playoffs begin in 2014).  But Ramsey also told the paper that he believes the new playoff system will kill off a few existing bowl games:

“If you’re not in those six (big bowls), you’re playing an exhibition game.  It used to be the championship game and then some other BCS games which held some cache.  The way this is going, it looks like a lot bigger BCS to me, which is oging to make more of those bowls below that less relevant.

They are going to argue that, ‘Oh, December 31st and January 1st is going to be a football celebration.’  If you’re a bowl, do you want to be playing on that day against a semifinal?  I don’t know. … I think we’re on the cusp of bowls that can’t financially compete just dying out in the long term over this.”

Let’s be clear about one thing — bowls have always just been “exhibition” games.  The Music City Bowl, for example, has never had the cachet of a BCS bowl.  What it has had is a New Year’s Eve kickoff.  That’s where Ramsey’s point comes home.

Would any bowl out there be wise to schedule a game on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day against a semifinal game?  Sure, some network looking for any piece of the pie at all would still televise the thing, but would fans choose to stay home and watch a semifinal game rather than follow their own team on the road to a second-tier bowl?  Obviously, not all bowls are played on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, but those that are typically bring in more tourist dollars to their towns than the non-New Year’s games.  So is moving financially viable for those games?

The new playoff won’t make the bowls less meaningful.  They’re meaningless exhibition designed to bring tourism to an area and to promote said area to a large television audience.  Nothing more, nothing less.

The new playoff system will, however, force a few bowls to decide whether or not it’s worth going up against one of the big six bowls head-to-head.

Even more worrisome for bowl officials like Ramsey must be the potential success of the new “Champions” Bowl which — if it doesn’t merge in some way with an existing game — will be run by the SEC and Big 12 with the majority of profits staying right in house.  If that experiment works, you can bet more leagues will start fielding their own bowls.  And that will really change the college football bowl landscape.

Sorry for the slow start to the day.  Had some radio work to do this morning in Missouri and also had a little business to attend to after that.

But in between I started to make a mental list of all the issues that will now be argued and debated regarding college football’s new playoff.  Already today we looked at the possibility that a team ranked #4, #3, or even #2 in the human polls might not make the playoff field.  But that’s going with an obvious controversial topic.  We all know that any fanbase whose school is ranked in the Top 10 will squawk about “selection committee bias” if their school’s not invited to take part in a given playoff.  That’s easy.

But what about all of the following sore spots?

1.  Who’s selected for the playoff?

That’s obvious, see here.

2.  Who will be on the selection committee, how will that committee be chosen, what factors will they use in making their decisions, and how much bias will exist?

We’ll just lump 95% of the selection committee issues into one blurb.  All of the above will now be up for the Skip Bayless Vs. Stephen A. Smith, point-counterpoint treatment.

3.  Will the process be transparent?

For some reason, many people are saying a committee will be more transparent than the old BCS (polls and computers).  Have I missed the broadcasts when television cameras have taken us inside the NCAA Tournament selection committee meetings?  That seems to be a process shrouded in mystery.  Depending on how things are actually handled, this new process could be even less transparent than what we’ve had in the past.

4.  How consistent will the committee be year-in and year-out?

Every March some team gets red-roped at the door of the Big Dance when a team with a similar record from a similar conference made it into the same tourney the year prior.  This ties into the transparency issue, but will we have any idea from year-to-year what to expect from the selection panel?

5.  How will the money be divvied up?

No need for an explanation here.  This one will be very hotly debated.  The powers-that-be need to hope that the little guys of the world will be happy to get the same size slice — small — of a much larger overall pie.  If not, expect threats of lawsuits and legislation just as we’ve experienced in the BCS era.

6.  Will the playoff field truly be open to all?

Utah and TCU have moved into power leagues, but I’m still going to use them as an example here, based on past history.  I think a very, very strong argument could be made that non-traditional powers like Cincinnati, Boise State and TCU and Utah (in their small conference days) would have had a better shot at making a playoff with a combination of human polls and computer rankings.  A selection committee will be more likely to ask, “Yeah, but who did you really play?”

7.  Which bowls will be part of the rotation?

That’s still to be determined at this point.  Heck, we don’t even know if the SEC/Big 12 “Champions” Bowl will be its own bowl or whether it will be rolled into an existing game.  But you can be sure Big Ten and Pac-12 fans won’t be happy every third year — at least that’s the current assumed rotation — when the Rose Bowl becomes a semifinal game that might not involve a team from either of those conferences.  You can also be sure Big Ten and Big East fans would like to see a bowl in the Midwest or Northeast — good luck finding one — in the rotation, too.

8.  How will the seeding and bracketing work?

For television purposes, you can expect any rematches between teams or any in-conference battles to be played out in a semifinal as opposed to the championship game.  If 2011 were to be repeated and the top four-ranked teams were chosen (see: Point One above), then it’s likely #1 LSU would have played #2 Alabama in one game while #3 Oklahoma State faced #4 Stanford in the other… in order to set up a fresh title game to drive up television ratings.  Folks won’t just argue over who’s selected for the playoff.  They’ll argue over how they’re seeded.

9.  Which bowls will get which teams?

There was talk of “anchor bowls” tying conferences to their traditional bowl partners, but with a rotation of bowls now in the works, that’s likely dunzo.  So, in a given year, which teams will be sent to Pasadena and which teams will be sent to, let’s say, New Orleans?  Will a team be allowed to play close to home?  Will teams be bracketed so that both schools are as equidistant as possible from a given bowl site?  People won’t just argue over who’s selected for the playoff or over how the teams are seeded.  They’ll also argue over which teams are sent to which sites and how much travel is involved.  The bowls will be keeping a close eye on that one, as well.  The Rose Bowl wouldn’t want Florida State and Alabama in Pasadena if Southern Cal and Michigan were available.

10.  What about the kickoff times?

Reportedly, the Rose Bowl isn’t going to budge from it’s afternoon kickoff time on New Year’s Day (it’s big concession was apparently losing its yearly Big Ten/Pac-12 matchup, though it had already given that up as part of the BCS rotation).  As part of this new playoff consortium, the Rose likely won’t be forced to go head-to-head with a semifinal game in years that it’s not hosting one of those games.  Because of that, we’ll have semis on New Year’s Day some years and New Year’s Eve on others.  Is there anyone who doesn’t think the playoffs should be held on New Year’s Day each and every season?  And God help us if/when one semifinal is played on December 31st and the other is played on January 1st.  There will be some serious cries of bias from the January 1st group.   They won’t like the fact that their championship game foe will have had an extra day to travel, sell tickets, watch tape, practice, rest and/or heal.

That’s just a quick Top 10 list.  There are many, many other controversies that I’m sure I didn’t think of while driving around speaking notes into my iPhone this morning.

But here’s one last nugget just for kicks (that we also mentioned yesterday).  This new playoff is not run by the NCAA.  It’s not the NCAA Tournament of football or the College World Series of football.  It’ll be run by the schools themselves.  So while we’ll all know who the national champion is at the conclusion of the title game, that champ still won’t technically be “official” when it comes to the NCAA record book.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I like the idea of a playoff.  I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about that.  But anyone who thinks this new system will start fewer arguments and fistfights than the old system is beyond bonkers.

At MrSEC.com, we believe the new system will lead to even more bickering.

Enjoy.

This morning I was reading a razor-sharp attack on the Big Ten’s undying allegiance to the Rose Bowl by Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports.  In it, Wetzel treads awfully close to an argument that’s been used by dozens of Big Ten supporters during the recent push to put the semifinals of a new college football playoff — if we actually get a new college football playoff — on campuses, rather than at bowl sites:

“And what about the chance for the Big Ten to finally stop playing games in SEC/Pac-12 country, maybe see if one of those sunshine programs can handle a few flakes of Midwest snow?”

Ah, yes, the weather.  You know the line as you’ve probably heard it/read it as many times as this writer has: “SEC teams should have to go play in the cold instead of Big Ten teams always having to go play bowls where it’s hot.”

Whether you like the idea of on-campus semifinals or not — and the SEC would have hosted more games than any other conference under such a set-up, by the way — it’s time to drive a stake through the heart of the “it’s the heat” myth.

Currently, the Big Ten plays three bowl games against SEC teams in the state of Florida — the Capital One in Orlando, the Outback in Tampa, and the Gator in Jacksonville.  All are played on New Year’s Day.  According to Weather.com:

* The average high in Orlando on that day is 71 degrees with an average low of 50.

* In Tampa, the average high on New Year’s Day is 70 degrees and the average low is 52.

* In Jacksonville, the average high is 65 degrees with an average low of 41.

I’ll buy that Big Ten schools have farther to travel than their SEC counterparts when it comes to bowling in the Sunshine State.  I’ll freely admit that the crowds on hand for those games are likely to have a pro-SEC slant.  I’ll even admit that seeing SEC teams play in the snow of January would be darn fun.

But the idea that Big Ten teams melt in 50-70 degree temperatures like the Nazis in “Raiders of the Lost Ark?”  Sorry, not buying it.  Even the average afternoon humidity in January in those three cities is in the 53-57% range.

Look, if the bowl games were played in Florida on August 1st instead of on January 1st, those many Big Ten folks who’ve been beating the “we have to play in their heat” drum would get my support.

As it stands, however, not even the Saskatchewan Roughriders should wilt at 71 degrees.

Folks who want to make the case for on-campus semifinals — an idea which appears to be dead anyway — can pick from any other number of good reasons.  They just need to drop the bit about Big Ten teams playing in Deep South heat.  ’Cause in January, there is no Deep South heat.

Unbelievable Update — Those of you who read this site know that we often link you to the work of Jon Solomon of The Birmingham News.  We think he’s sharp as a tack (probably because we agree with most of his work).  Well, as we were putting today’s headlines together just now — 11:30am ET — we found his latest column:  “Big Ten fans: Chill the griping about SEC football weather patterns.”

No wonder we like that guy.

Yesterday we told you that Ole Miss had returned 2,000 of the 6,000 Egg Bowl tickets it had requested from Mississippi State.  For comparison’s sake, while the Rebels bought about 4,000 tickets to the game in Starkville, State fans bought about 6,000 tickets to last year’s game in Oxford.

That looks to be a pretty clear sign that MSU’s fanbase — coming off a 9-4 season and a New Year’s Day bowl rout of Michigan — is more excited about the future than the Rebel fanbase, which is coming off a 4-8 campaign.

Not so, suggests UM athletic director Pete Boone:


“If we had sent back some (tickets) it’s never been many.  I think the same with them here.  So I don’t know if that’s a signal one way or to the other.”


Okay, but when you couple those returned tickets with the various UM fan groups who’ve formed this offseason to call for major changes in the athletic department, I think it’s probably safe to say Rebel fans aren’t in the best of moods these days.  Whether Boone admits it or not.

Bowl records can be deceiving.  Let’s start right there.

Is it fair to say that Conference-USA is stronger than the SEC because the champion of one league inched by the 9th-slotted team from the other?  No.

Is it fair to say that the Pac-10 is better than the Big 12 simply because Washington topped Nebraska in the Holiday Bowl… when Nebraska crushed the Huskies in Seattle earlier in the season?  No.

Long layoffs have an impact.  Bowl pairings (SEC #5 vs ACC #2, for example) have an impact.  And motivation has a huge impact. 

But when two leagues go head-to-head in three New Year’s Day bowl games that are paired evenly, well, that’s a different story.

As you know by now, the SEC ran roughshod over the Leaders and Legends of the Big Ten on New Year’s Day:


Alabama 49, Michigan State 7

Mississippi State 52, Michigan 14

Florida 37, Penn State 24


Brutal.  Even Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany admits as much.

“The SEC has demonstrated over a period of time that they’re the strongest conference,” he told SI.com.  “The rest of us are looking to close the gap, but we’ve still got a little ways to go. … We got beat pretty good by Alabama, but that’s not a shock.  The one thing I knew for sure was that Alabama was not the 15th-ranked team in the country.”

Delany also admits that tomorrow’s Sugar Bowl between Ohio State and Arkansas taken on added importance.

“It’s more important now than if we were 7-0 (in bowl games).”

For the record, the Big Ten went an embarrassing 0-for-5 in New Year’s Day action.