I will go back and cover the late Dan Jenkins's playoff proposal from "Sports Illustrated" a little later. Now we come to the fallout from the 1969 national championship and a certain head coach who would later say he could not understand how President Nixon could know so much about football but so little about Watergate. It's sort of like wondering how that same man would know so much about a playoff but so little about what was going on in his shower stalls at Penn State.
In 1969, Texas and Arkansas played the final televised game of the college football regular season in early December. With both teams undefeated, President Nixon weighed in with his opinion prior to the game that the winner would be the national champion. (How much clout Nixon had, well, probably none). When Texas won the game and the national championship, the howls of protest from State College, PA were almost as loud as the protest that Preston Gothard DID, in fact, catch that ball cleanly for a touchdown in 1983. The Penn State coach, oblivious to the fact his team didn't really face anybody at that time during the regular season, began calling for a playoff as well. Naturally, the discussion....pretty much never happened.
In February 1970, Walter Byers announced that the colleges did not want a playoff. Of course, given his clout at the time, you can rest assured that if BYERS wanted one (e.g. felt it was financially better), we'd have had one then. The idea he was listening to the schools - the ones who wound up suing him for violating antitrust laws with his constant threats of sanctions against teams who wouldn't toe the line on the TV deals - is hilarious. Byers - like Jim Delaney in later years - was a smart man who knew how to keep the money coming in but like most guys in that roll said garbage the most naive rube would never actually believe. Kind of like Jeff Long and Kirby Hocutt and Bill Hancock and Ari Fleischer (BCS).
And then - like pretty much everything involving college football - a game with Alabama got everyone's attention.
In 1971, Nebraska and Alabama finished the regular season ranked 1-2 in the AP poll, with unbeaten Michigan ranked fourth. Because there was no Sugar Bowl obligation for the SEC in 1971, college football wound up with the two top-ranked teams playing each other in the Orange Bowl. This was only the 15th "one versus two" game in NCAA history, and it was about like the Super Bowls of that era, a 38-6 Nebraska blowout of the Tide's brand new wishbone. But a confluence of events was forcing a re-evaluation. ABC television wanted to reduce the monies being paid out for college football - despite ratings going up 7% during the 1971 season. This wasn't because of ABC but because the advertisers were demanding a lower per 1/2 minute rate. ABC came up with two proposals to combat the problem that "ratings for college football fall off in November as the season comes toward the end." Their two proposals? 1) Select the games to be televised ONLY for the first half of the season and then make choices based on attractive matchups for November; 2) have a special "playoff type" game the first weekend of December. The first one was pretty easy but the last one...well, it would take Roy Kramer to come up with that one.
Why not a national championship game?
The reasons for this can be boiled down to money, money, money. The bowl games - who were consolidating their clout - were adamantly against such an arrangement. If ONE GAME meant the world, the other games necessarily meant, well, nothing. Immediate questions broke out. "Who would select the two teams? Where would the game be played? Would it be rotated among the bowl stadiums with more than 75,000 seats? What about the already existing bowl contracts? Would this violate them?"
CFB thus in 1971- fifty years ago mind you - had a problem: "What do we do with our ratings going down knowing full well that one championship matchup will likely lower the ratings of the other bowls we depend upon even more?" In a column in "The Sporting News," Tom Siler wrote that college football KNEW the right answer to the entire thing back in 1971 when TV appearances were limited. Just show the big names on national TV every single week - Notre Dame, USC, Alabama, Ohio State. But, of course, we can't do that because the rich will get richer and CFB will be destroyed in the process.
So one played two on 1/1/72. And Bob Devaney, the Nebraska coach, expressed regret that there was not some sort of college football playoff, although his game was basically a precursor to the BCS. Thanks to bowl contracts, Michigan and Penn State were in different games. Why not have Michigan and Penn State (the other undefeated teams) play each other and have the winners of that game and the Orange Bowl face off for a championship?
And then on January 8, 1972, we got the musings of Cleveland, Ohio sportswriter "Sheep" Jackson, who began his column thusly:
"During the past ten years, one of the most discussed topics in collegiate athletics is the possibility of having a national playoff to determine a college football national championship."
Bear in mind this conversation continued for another 40 years...and even then they wanted a larger one. (Guess what's coming in 2030 y'all? Yep - 24 team playoff).
Per Jackson, two factors dominated discussion:
1) should we do away with the bowl games because there are too many now? (There were 12 then....)
2) should what we now call HUBCs be included? (of course not, but I have to admit segregation was a much bigger issue then than now, too; a Grambling would have had a much better shot at beating the late 60s Alabama teams than nowadays, and even that would have been iffy)
Bill Miller of N Texas supported a playoff, Bob Woodruff of the Univ of Tennessee opposed it. Miller's argument was the big schools opposed it because scholarship limitations would be tied to any playoff. Jackson also writes, "..for some time there have been some talk of super schools moving out of the NCAA and forming a new super alliance." Miller then says football is the only NCAA sport without a way to determine a champion - and then says "the present setup of the NCAA" prevents the adoption of such a concept.
Woodruff then says he's opposed to it because it would require a separate exam schedules for athletes (I love how he pretends Tennessee football players actually take their own exams, but I digress). Of course, this so-called problem did not prevent the Vols from playing in the 1971 Sugar Bowl against Air Force. Woodruff also fell back on the old "okay, how do you determine which teams play?" Woodruff also said that because of the time involved, anything larger than an eight-team playoff was impossible.