Commissioners Wright Waters (former Sun Belt), Britton Banowsky (Conference USA), Mike Slive (SEC) and Ted Gumbart (Atlantic Sun) gathered Monday in Birmingham. (Daily Bama Blog photo)
It was a two-story day in this morning’s newspaper. Here’s No. 2 that addresses the bigger issues in college athletics today …
BIRMINGHAM — Changes are a coming.
Four current and former conference commissioners agreed on that much regarding postseason college football at a Monday forum sponsored by the Associated Press Sports Editors. Various topics on the state of college sports were discussed, but the volatile issue of postseason football was the hot issue.
Specific opinions remain close to the vest, but the conference leaders took turns addressing the fringe topics in play.
SEC head Mike Slive said previous discussions among the commissioners were “30,000-feet thinking” as the criticism mounted of the Bowl Championship Series. But the serious work was coming soon with a meeting set for April 24-26 just miles from the 2013 BCS title game site in south Florida.
Options including a plus-one championship game have been discussed. That would allow four teams to play a small playoff to determine a champion. The idea is to simplify the system, and Slive isn’t in favor of all the proposals.
The Big Ten and Pac 12 hope to preserve their traditional Rose Bowl matchup, but their plan could meet resistance next week.
“It’s not one of my favorites,” Slive said after a brief pause and a slight smile.
Automatic qualifiers, another point of debate, was discussed by Conference USA commissioner Britton Banowsky.
“From our conference’s perspective, it’s been one of the real negative, unintended consequences of the BCS when it was formed,” he said. “With the AQ, unranked teams leapfrog teams that are high quality and put a lot of strain on the events themselves in terms of quality of the ratings and attendance. And what we’ve done is create divisiveness among the conferences.”
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