Bowls, Polls, and Tattered Souls: Tackling the Chaos and Controversy that Reign Over College Football

272 Pages·2007·1.11 MB·english

by  Stewart Mandel

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Bowls,
Polls &
Tattered
Souls
Tackling the Chaos
and Controversy That Reign
over College Football
STEWART MANDEL
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
ftoc.qxp 7/10/07 11:39 AM Page iv
ffirs.qxp 7/10/07 11:37 AM Page i
Bowls,
Polls &
Tattered
Souls
Tackling the Chaos
and Controversy That Reign
over College Football
STEWART MANDEL
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
ffirs.qxp 7/10/07 11:37 AM Page ii
Copyright © 2007 by Stewart Mandel. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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ISBN 978-0-470-04917-4
Printed in the United States of America
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction 1
1 One Nation, Under the BCS 9
2 Pulling Rank 35
3 HeWon the Heisman? 63
4 FireMyCoach.com 87
5 What’s the Deal with Notre Dame? 111
6 Invasion of the Recruiting Geeks 135
7 How Boston College and Clemson Became
Neighbors 159
8 Tonight, It’s the MPC Motor City Car Care
Credit Union Bowl 185
9 That’s Great, Now Run a 40 209
10 Everybody Cheats—Just Not My School 231
Afterword 253
Acknowledgments 257
Index 260
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Introduction
W
hat do you do for a living? Me? I deal with confused people. Lots
of them. All day. Every day.
It’s true I also attend football games, conduct interviews, and write
stories. But the confused people—they’re the one constant throughout.
Their bewildered queries, their pleas for clarity await me nearly every
time I check my e-mail, filling my in-box by the hundreds. Their mes-
sages often start the same way: “How can you possibly explain . . . ,”
“Am I missing something here, or . . . ?,” “Maybe you can help me
figure something out . . . ,” or, my personal favorite, “How can you be
such an idiot?”
I cover the great sport of college football for SI.com and Sports Illus-
trated. Anyone who’s ever spent a Saturday in the Horseshoe (Ohio
State) or the Swamp (Florida), the Big House (Michigan) or Death Val-
ley (LSU), knows well that what makes college football so special is not
necessarily the action on the field but the collective energy of the ninety
thousand diehards in the stadium surrounding it. The depth of passion
among college football fans is unlike that of any other American sport,
surpassed in intensity perhaps only by that of other countries’ soccer
fans. Though many college football fans are certifiably nutty, fortu-
nately, they’ve yet to reach the point of assassinating a quarterback.
(Riots, on the other hand, are not out of the question.)
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BOWLS, POLLS & TATTERED SOULS
Since 2003, I’ve been interacting with these fans on a weekly basis,
thanks to the Mailbag column I pen for SI.com. The idea of the Mail-
bag is to answer several reader-submitted questions, usually pertaining
to particular events in the news that week. Most readers, understand-
ably, are primarily concerned about their own favorite teams and are
seeking my opinion about something. Do I think they’ll win this week-
end? Do I think their coach is the right guy for the job? Do I think their
star running back has a chance at the Heisman? And, of course, the
obligatory, “Why don’t you give my team more respect?” College foot-
ball fans seek validation for their teams from the national media the
way a two-year-old seeks attention from his mommy. They can’t help
it—they’re an extremely proud bunch.
They’re also, as I’ve found out, an extremely confused bunch, and
to be honest, I can’t say I blame them. If you stop and think about it,
not much about college football makes a lot of logical sense, from the
way its champion is determined to the schedules the teams play to the
fact the coaches can make $4 million a year while the players scrap for
laundry money. Truth be told, the entire sport is basically a season-long
exercise in chaos, which is why, when I filter through several hundred
Mailbag submissions each week, there are a host of recurring questions
that continually come up. Like, say, why is college football the lone
remaining sport on the planet without a playoff? And while we’re at it,
why the need for thirty-two bowl games? Why does the Big Ten have
eleven teams? How does recruiting work? Who exactly votes for the
Heisman Trophy? And why do so many Heisman winners flop in the
NFL? Why is it that a team like undefeated Boise State does not even
get the chance to play for the national championship? Why does
Notre Dame get its own TV contract?
And, oh yeah—tell me again why we don’t have a playoff?
I occasionally take stabs at these and other similar topics in the Mail-
bag, but the reality is, most are extremely complicated issues that can-
not possibly be summed up in a couple of paragraphs. And that’s why
I wrote this book. I figured it was long past time that somebody with
firsthand knowledge of the situation sat down and took the time to
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INTRODUCTION
explain, in detailed yet still (I hope) easy-to-understand terms, why
exactly college football is the way it is. Each chapter of Bowls, Polls &
Tattered Souls tackles a different hot-button issue that I know from
reading all those e-mails is a source of much consternation, confusion,
and, in some cases, even anger and resentment among fans from
Miami to Minnesota, Cal to Clemson. The much-despised BCS is
obviously the most pervasive and divisive of all college football topics,
which is why it’s also first on the list of chapters, but in truth, there’s
almost no element of the sport that does not generate its own share of
controversy.
Before we get into the meat and potatoes, I think it’s important to
understand one underlying truth about college football that digs to the
heart of the sport’s prevailing sense of chaos. And that is: Nobody’s in
charge. I’m serious. There is no commissioner in college football like
there is in professional sports. There isn’t even one central office or
organization that oversees the sport. You might think it’s the NCAA,
but that’s not true. While all of the schools that participate in football
are NCAA members that abide by its rules and participate in its cham-
pionships for every other sport, football is the one sport that has man-
aged to basically remain a free-for-all.
Think about it. At the start of the year, Major League Baseball draws
up the season schedule for all thirty teams, which all play an equal
number of home and away games. In college football, each conference
constructs its schedule differently depending on the number of teams,
and each school decides for itself whether to play a hard or easy non-
conference slate. Some teams open against Texas A&M and Clemson,
others against Texas State and the Citadel. There’s no confusion in the
NFL as to how the playoffs work—the owners of all thirty-two teams
agree to the rules and the league office administers them. The BCS, on
the other hand, is basically run by the six richest conferences, much to
the chagrin of the other five. When a brawl breaks out during a Knicks
game at Madison Square Garden, it’s NBA commissioner David Stern
who levies the suspensions. When a brawl breaks out during the
Miami-Florida International game, it’s left to the two teams and their
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