Why The Southern States Play in More Bowl Games?

The modern day bowl experience began to take shape in the 1930’s. In an effort to stimulate the economy out of the depression era, administrators and civic leaders recognized the potential economic impact surrounding the flow of dedicated fans following their teams to the bowl sites. Thus, the Orange, Sugar, Sun and Cotton Bowls helped stimulate the evolution into the modern day bowl picture conducted each year during the holiday season. The inception of these bowls around 1935 is considered to have ushered in the modern bowl era.

As the bowl games became staples, a bowl game invitation became traditionally viewed as an honor, saluting a team’s successful regular season while simultaneously marketing the game to new audiences. The bowl games grew in popularity through the years, and they took on a more significant role in college football, becoming more important to all involved parties as money-making, prestige-building opportunities, while at the same time, becoming more regulated by the NCAA. Along with the television resolution in 1951, the NCAA implemented a certification process for the existing bowl system designed to protect the student-athletes and the universities. This certification process, still in effect today, requires the governing bowl committee’s to meet certain criteria regarding game rules, conditions, marketing and pay-out to participants.

In it’s early infancy stages, the television resolution was the great save for the NCAA, as the struggling bureaucracy was likened to a paper tiger as a result of the Sanity Code debacle. In 1948, the presidents developed a set of guiding principles, known as the “Sanity Code,” to cut down on the emergence of organized recruiting and under-the-table financial allocations that were rampant and occurring with alarming regularity in big-time college football, specifically in the southern sector.

In 1950, two years after the sanity code was developed, the NCAA identified seven members - Boston College, The Citadel, Villanova, Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Virginia Tech, Maryland and Virginia - as flagrant violators of the rules. Does the SMU debacle ring a bell to anyone?

At the 1950 convention, the NCAA governing bodies asked the membership to expel these seven schools (identified as the “Seven Sinners”), which the majority of the voting members failed to do because of their belief that the scholarship rules instituted by the NCAA were unrealistic and unfair, especially among the southern schools who viewed the football scholarship as an essential element in their system.

As commercial air travel increased during the 1960’s, the illicit activity mushroomed and the NCAA Enforcement Committee struggled to keep pace. Legendary coaches like Bud Wilkinson and Bear Bryant, as well as a legion of Southwest Conference coaches and administrators have been regularly identified in their role within a mountain of recruiting violations and scandals beginning in the early days of the sport and climaxing well into the CFA era in college football. Again, not much has changed. The theme of the day, very much like today, is mistrust and ambivalence towards like mindedness, fair play and regulations.

Over the course of the next 25 years the bowl games evolved from post-season games, considered separate and irrelevant to the regular season, into a spectacle of games that culminated the regular season. The bowls, once played after the national championship was determined by voted polls, were now being played to help determine the final polls and the national champion.

Meanwhile, a handful of the nation’s most prominent college football programs gradually stood out from the crowd, garnering more recognition, clout, and television exposure than most other programs. An elite class was established, capable of generating more money than their peers, and thus, rewarded with special treatment by the bowls and networks.

Energized by the popularity and emergence of television, the medium created a special brand or identity for certain schools and significantly promoted the match-ups between the power schools by tabbing them as rivalry games.

Notre Dame, USC, Michigan, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Texas, Arkansas, Alabama and Auburn prospered from this elite branding and special identity promoted by the networks. The rivalry games between Notre Dame-USC, Alabama-Auburn, Nebraska-Oklahoma, Arkansas-Texas and USC-UCLA captured and branded college football in the minds of many a generation. Thus, these teams enjoyed special privilege’s, (especially within the poll rankings and bowl invitations) and were financially rewarded with bigger bowl pay outs.

Although the NCAA over regulated and controlled both price and output of regular season television contracts, the bowls operated in a free market environment and could bid and pay higher sums to attract the elite teams. In the early era of the bowls between 1950 and 1960, there were as few as 18 bowl events.

Initially, each bowl negotiated participation agreements with individual teams. Eventually some of these agreements gave way to multi-year contracts, while at the same time, some bowls opted to remain free to negotiate with any team. To remain competitive in the marketplace, bowl organizations often selected schools prior to the conclusion of the season, frequently as early as mid-October. In some situations, bowls even made informal arrangements prior to the season with a particular team based on the historical success, or the notoriety of a particular coach.

As the bowl games became the status quo for post-season play, several conferences developed relationships with certain bowls to secure the conferences’ respective champions a berth in post season opportunities. For example, the former Big-8 Conference (currently the Big-12 Conference) cultivated a close relationship with the Orange Bowl, and sent its annual conference champion to this game. Other conferences, such as, the Big-10 and Pacific-10, secured similar relationships with the Rose Bowl.

Over time, nearly every conference champion had an automatic tie-in to a particular bowl game, which was under contractual agreement with a given conference. This is essentially the primary cause in preventing the number one and two teams in America from regularly playing in a season ending national championship bowl game prior to the inception of the BCS. Because this number one versus number two match up was most often prevented, it is the one glaring success of the Bowl Championship Series movement and is radically defended by the elite power structure of college football.

As the popularity of the bowl games and college football grew as a whole, so did television’s popularity and increasing capacity for broadcasting sporting events. The potential for revenue generated by televising college football games, particularly the popular bowl games, like all successful business ventures grew exponentially over time.

Naturally, different players in the college football market wanted a larger and more significant slice of the revenue pie, which had been exclusively controlled by the NCAA since the television resolution in 1952.

The Big-10 and PAC-10 Conferences essentially cut their own throats during this early era by limiting their bowl representatives to two teams and one bowl game, the venerable Rose Bowl. This hindered the schools within these two conferences as many people only identified the PAC-8 with USC and UCLA, while the Big-10 only branded two schools, Michigan and Ohio State, along with their infamous coaches Bo Schembeggler, Woody Hayes, John McKay, John Robinson and Terry Donahue.

These four teams within the two conferences enjoyed the largest TV exposure and appeared in the majority of the Rose Bowl match-ups. At the same time, the SEC, Big-8 and South West Conferences were regularly sending as many as five or six teams to yearly bowl games. Thus, the southern teams (especially the current members of the SEC and Big-12 Conference) can continually boost today about sending more teams to bowl games throughout the history of college football than any of the other conferences.

The modern day CBS slogan: “The SEC, tradition to you, tradition to me,” gained its roots from the limited bowl opportunities extended to the PAC-8 and Big-10 schools.

As these southern teams were constantly on the airwaves during the birth of the television medium and have traditionally appeared in the featured bowl games throughout the history of the television revolution, they have become forever branded in the eyes of college football fans as superior programs, and continue to enjoy this prosperity today at the expense of the newer up and coming programs who are striving to become branded as elite schools in today’s marketplace.

As this trend has evolved into the current BCS marketplace, these same schools continue to enjoy prosperous pre-season and mid-season rankings, and continue to be pursued by the television networks to drive up the price of corporate advertising for their bowl game packages.

This continues to be a major source of controversy as the financial stakes continue to rise in the BCS era. The game today becomes less about matching up the best teams of a given year in the feature holiday bowl games, and more focused on driving up corporate advertising by matching up the traditional powers of college football.

Thus, your traditional status in the game in determining ultimate power and supremacy is largely determined by your 30-50 year social economic status in college football, rather than your current day performance on the actual playing field. In this battle for television revenue there have been many key benchmark developments that have transformed the game into the spectacle that it is today and warped the ethical compass in the process.

It is a widely accepted fact that a great deal of cheating has occurred throughout the history of collegiate sports activities across the board, but as football developed a greater significance and importance in the lives of many, most specifically in the Southern sector of the country - the primary breeding ground for the CFA revolution - the seductive powers of television and a prominent bowl invitation took cheating to a whole new level. As academic cheating and payment to players became more regulated by the NCAA through the mid-1980’s, the group of CFA schools has wielded the power of network advertising to further brand their elite status and identity, as well as successfully designed smear campaigns against their political competitors across the country via the press. Although largely mis-labeled today as an “East Coast Bias,” it is more accurately described as a CFA alliance, which not only controls a great deal of the current telvision revenue , but the all important Harris Poll, which is a significant factor in determining elite level bowl invitations.