4th Annual National College Football Day
November 2, 2007 by bcsbusters
“The Grass Ain’t Blue in Georgia - The Story Behind The BCS Controversy”
Author: Ben Johnson
Co-Author: Mark Hales
Forward: Dr. Lynn Lashbrook
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
“The Grass Ain’t Blue in Georgia - The Story Behind The BCS Controversy”
Copyright © 2005 Benjamin Earl Johnson
All rights reserved.
No portion of this report may be reproduced, copied or altered without the
permission of the author. The author reserves the right to use the full force ofthe law in the protection of his intellectual property, including the contents,ideas and expressions contained herein.
Copyright © 2007 Benjamin Earl Johnson
Forward
Dr. Lynn Lashbrook,
Founder and CEO of Sports Management Worldwide.
Having the opportunity to spend the first twenty years of my career in college athletics (8 as an Athletics Director) I am convinced the only way we will have a college football playoff system at the Division I level in the NCAA is by empowering the students as stakeholders. In the middle of the 2004 football season it became apparent that the BCS was truly a pathetic excuse for those elite schools who do not want to share the wealth with the Boise States of the World. When ESPN began to refer to those schools as BCSbusters I immediately secured the website and quietly began a grass roots campaign for students to use as a platform for change.
Little did I know there was a man two hours down the highway in Oregon who became so frustrated with the system he too chose to try to change the system. When Ben completed the draft of this book he went to create a website BCSbusters.com and was shocked to see I had already registered the domain. I will never forget when I received his email (Ben, I think we might want to include it in the forward). I loved the idea of a book and we immediately began combining our efforts to create this campaign for change. Needless to say the final chapters have not been written, but what Ben has done has laid the foundation for fundamental change in college football. I predict this book will be enshrined in the college football Hall of Fame.
As for the website, his site was created to rock the current BCS system and create a grassroots campaign to give the students, alumni and fans a forum for their voices to be heard. Around the country, people are speaking out against the BCS as an inefficient way to crown the king of college football. BCSbusters.com has decided to do something about it! History has shown that the students, fans and the alumni are stakeholders who can demand change on their campus. We are asking those who have seen the shortcomings of the BCS and think a playoff system is overdue to stand up and speak out.
College football fans are among the most passionate about their team in any sport or league in the country. What can be worse than a system that can hurt the chances of your school getting a fair shot at settling “ON THE FIELD” who is the best of the best! We have created letters and emails that students can send to the President and Athletic Director at their school. We have created petitions so signatures can be gathered to show the numbers of those interested in a playoff system instead of the BCS.
Students and alumni are the most important part of a healthy university and most importantly, they contribute financially to their school. This means they also have the right to organize and ask for change. Be a leader on your campus and let’s bust up the BCS before it’s too late and your team becomes the next victim!
I urge everyone to read the book and register on BCSbusters.com. The world is changing rapidly through the seeds of democracy. Lets democratize Division I NCAA football with a playoff system just like the rest of the football world.
Reviews and Recommendations
Spencer Graham, West Coast Cross Checker - Kansas City Royals
I’ve been around college and professional athletics now for 16 years and I have to say that this book is one of the most interesting and controversial subjects that has been written on since I can remember. This book is not only extremely well written but it touches on this controversy in areas the general fan base of college football isn’t aware of. I believe this book will captivate fans across the country and create a true “grass roots” movement to force college football and the NCAA to create a better system. This book will be a huge seller once late August and early September rolls around and the juices of every college football fan start to flow.
“The Grass Ain’t Blue in Georgia - The Story Behind The BCS Controversy.”
Introduction
Special Note: On the eve of College Football’s 4th Annual College Football Day, created and first implemented by the Cotton Bowl Association, I thought I’d give you my historical perspective of college football and my connection to the Cotton Bowl together with a sneak preview of my book manuscript project which is in the final stages of production.
Although it had been welling up inside me for years, when Texas football coach Mac Brown campaigned for votes and overtook Jeff Tedford and the the California Golden Bears during the final week of the 2004 College Football season, the dam had been broken. Something finally needed to be done in regards to the BCS controversy, and since I had just ended my coaching career as a high school football and baseball coach several weeks earlier after a tough loss in the second round of the Oregon 5A high school football playoffs, I needed a new project in my life.
Several years prior, in 2001, my hometown University of Oregon Ducks were left out of the BCS National Championship game as a result of one of the most bizarre and controversial happenings that have occurred in the 120 year history of the sport. The Nebraska Cornhuskers, an elite power house school, who built their identity in an era when stock piling players was the norm, was quite simply one of the Top-20 all time television darlings operating within the sport. Little did I know at the time, that they were, and still are, part of a significant alliance, a union if you will, who still controls the monopoly called the BCS today.
Due to the fact that the Huskers were voted number one in the pre-season polls, and carried this ranking right up until the end of the regular season, before being shellacked (63-36) by a two loss Colorado Buffalo team in the regular season finale, the mighty Cornhuskers still maintained the vaunted, and much sought after number one ranking after all the dust settled in December of that season. The skunk of it was the fact that Nebraska not only didn’t win their Big-12 North Division, they didn’t even play in the Big-12 championship game, yet incredibly and inexplicably, were voted into the national championship match-up with Miami in the Rose Bowl venue.
Coupled with the fact that in the season prior (2000), undefeated Oklahoma (12-0) ended up playing one loss Florida State, most likely due to the fact that All-American Seminole quarterback Chris Wienke was about to hoist the Heisman Trophy as well, the newfound BCS model was beginning to reek with fraud. The skunk of the matter here was the fact that Miami, who had the same record as Florida State (11-1) beat the Seminoles by three (27-24), but hold the phone. The University of Washington Huskies - out of the PAC-10 Conference - had the same (11-1) record and beat the mighty Hurricanes by five (34-29), in the latter part of September that season.
In comparing the three teams, Florida State finished (4-2) against the elite teams on their schedule that season (defining elite teams as those who won 9 or more games that particular season), Miami finished (3-1) against the elite, while the Huskies finished a mere (2-1) against the same standard. In addition to losing to Miami, as discussed above, the Seminoles beat Georgia Tech (9-3) 26-21, Louisville (9-3) 31-0, Clemson (9-3) 54-7 and Florida (10-3) 30-7, before losing to Oklahoma in the BCS national championship game 13-2. This particular national championship game, as it turned out, was one of the worst all time BCS National Championship game performances as it was marred with a barrage of penalties, turnovers and inconspicuous play calling by the Seminoles. In hindsight, which is very inauspicious now, Florida State hasn’t been the same since.
Miami, in comparison, finished three and one against the elite that season, beating Virginia Tech (11-1) 41-21, Florida State (11-1) 27-24 and Florida (10-3) in the Sugar Bowl (37-20). Their only loss was to Washington, as discussed above, which didn’t carry any clout for the Huskies as they performed poorly against Oregon (10-2), losing 23-17, while beating Oregon State (11-1), 33-30, and finishing only two and one against the elite teams on their schedule.
At the time, 6 years after the 85 scholarship rule was enacted in 1994, Oregon and Oregon State were just climbing out of mediocrity, and I wouldn’t even go that far for the Beavers (my alma matter) as they had recently just ended a dubious streak of futility, climbing out from under the ashes of 28 consecutive losing seasons. This will likely be an NCAA record that will never again be broken.
So in the eyes of the pollsters, Washington’s victory over Miami carried very little significance to the East Coast television markets, because USC and UCLA, two programs who dominated the conference for nearly two decades were a combined 11-13 that season.
As a matter of fact, if you look at the Trojan and Bruin records the seasons before and after 2000, the three year record for the Men of Troy was 17-19, while the Bruins weren’t much better, 17-17. Is it any wonder that this was the first year on record that the “Bash The PAC” smear campaign orchestrated by the television and radio networks really began to bombard the airwaves?
Eye of the storm: Miami’s Edgerrin James ripped apart the UCLA defense for 299 yards and three touchdowns AP - Although we did hear a smattering of this PAC-10 inferiority in 1998, when Miami Hurricane running back Edgerrin James ran roughshod over, through and around the UCLA defense like a pack of mice running through swiss cheese, eliminating undefeated UCLA from the national championship picture in the final week of the regular season, we now realize that Edgerrin James was a pretty good back and ran through the Bruins much like he did to a lot of teams, including those found in the NFL.
House of pain: Brian Poli-Dixon looks on in disbelief after the Bruins’ 20-game win streak and national title hopes died AP
Not enough: McNown (right) torched Miami for a school-record 515 yards and five touchdowns, but couldn’t complete the comeback AP - What has been long omitted, due to the media’s insistence of PAC-10 inadequacy and inferiority on defense, is the fact that Miami gave up 43 points in their 47-43 victory over the Bruins and in comparison with the results of the Hurricane schedule that season, UCLA, nor the PAC-10, didn’t exactly embarrass themselves.
The mighty Hurricanes played three, count them, three elite teams on their schedule that season and lost to two of the three, and had to come from two scores down in the final quarter in upsetting the Bruins. Other than their four point victory over the Bruins, and their 12 point loss to Florida State (11-2) 26-14, the Hurricanes only played one other opponent that season who won nine games, and they lost that game 27-20 to (9-3) Virginia Tech. While the scores were low against the Hokies and the Noles, the margin of victory and defeat was similar to their match-up with UCLA. The PAC-10 on the other hand has been smeared repeatedly in the press, as a conference who is a fraud due to the fact that they can’t play elite level defense.
What the media failed to recognize or report back then was that UCLA played seven elite teams that season, in comparison to Miami’s three, and the match-up in Florida occurred at the end of the season, moved from a previous engagement due to a violent and destructive Hurricane in September, and came on the heels of UCLA’s titanic rivalry with cross town giant USC. The Bruins, tabbed as the Panda Bears by the East Coast television markets, beat Texas (9-3) 45-31, Arizona (12-1) 52-28, Oregon (8-4), who started 6-0 that season 48-41 in overtime, their cross town rivals USC 34-17, before succumbing to the Canes and a Ron Dayne led (11-1) Wisconsin club in the Rose Bowl that season.
Compared to all the hype coming out of the SEC in the current 2007 season, that’s a juggernaut of a schedule, despite the heckling of LSU coach Les Miles in modern times, who once again, for the umpteenth time in the last decade, was yet another to call out the inadequacy of the PAC-10 slate. So as you can see, by the time we rolled around to the end of the 2004 season, I was hot under the collar with all the hype surrounding the media’s constant insistence that the PAC-10 is nothing more than the Pathetic-10.
While watching Texas coach Mac Brown gleefully accept the last BCS bid to play in the Rose Bowl for 2004, I mentioned to my wife that someone should really write a book or create a documentary to uncover what is really going on here. My wife looked me straight in the eye and said “Why don’t you do it - I don’t know of anyone who would be more qualified to write it because I continue to be amazed as I hear you continually saying the same things the network analyst’s are saying as they describe the action, only I hear it from you seconds before they actually say it on TV.”
“More importantly, I hear you constantly correcting the analysts and providing information in regards to what should be reported. I don’t think you’ve ever just sat and watched a game… you actually play it, analyze it and coach it while watching the action. I’ve learned more from you regarding college football, or high school football for that matter, than you realize. You would be the perfect person for such a project.”
So here we are, four years later, coming down to the stretch run of the 2007 season, a season that will live in infamy as parity has arrived on the scene, yet we face many of the same barrier’s of bias that continue to plague the game. Little did I know at the time I began the project, the current BCS mess that we are in today actually derived from the geographic region that I followed the most in college football while growing up.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
My father, Earl, was a concrete construction worker who drove truck during the rainy winter season in Oregon to make ends meet. The ends rarely met. By early 1973, the national economy was in the toilet. With Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters Union controlling the trucking industry and the national recession limiting the real estate and construction fields inside the confines of the State of Oregon, a blue collar man like my father - who had a limited education - had a hard time surviving, let alone succeeding.
By 1975, my mother and father had divorced due to the poor economic conditions affecting the work force, which caused a significant financial strain to the their relationship. I don’t remember much from those years, but what I do remember was the stress and the fights. Rarely was there a happy moment in our family. The divorce forced my mother, Charlotte, to work two shifts, six days a week, at Dunkin Donuts to make enough from minimum wage to raise my sister DeAnna and myself.
My father returned to his roots, as he has lived the majority of his life between Fayetteville, Arkansas and Muskogee, Oklahoma. When I was three, we actually lived in Springdale, Arkansas for a little over a year, but I don’t remember much from the experience, although I vaguely remember the sultry humidity and the summer thunderstorms that would roll through the hill country.
Although I had a decent relationship with my father, I didn’t really know him very well due to the fact that the divorce was a bitter divorce, complicated when both my mother and father remarried quickly and you could say that both sides of the equation didn’t take to each other very well.
In 1976, I visited my father for the Christmas holidays as my Sister and I, ages 10 and 9 respectively, boarded a Continental Airlines jet by ourselves, and traveled cross country from Portland, Oregon to Tulsa, Oklahoma for our holiday visit. It would be the first time both my sister and I had seen my father since he walked out of the house after a bitter and ugly fight, which led to the divorce.
After this two week holiday hiatus, I wouldn’t see my father again until visiting him once again for the Christmas holidays, in my junior year of high school, eight years later. Other than an occasional phone call once or twice a year, and a Christmas gift and birthday card, I didn’t hear much from my father.
To this day it has been something that I have sorely missed, and I constantly wonder if I am a good father for my own kids, since I have very little to go on in terms of what a father should truly be. But one thing I do know, is my family is very happy, my wife and I have steady careers and my children perform exemplary in school. We are not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but we are very comfortable, live a good lifestyle and our house is full of love and harmony.
As a Christmas gift, my father bought us two tickets to the Cotton Bowl that season as his hometown Arkansas Razorbacks went on a late season 5 game winning spree and won the Southwest Conference for the first time in nearly 10 seasons. Like all citizens who reside in the State of Arkansas, the Razorbacks are the team of choice.
My father remarried a wonderful woman named Linda, who has lived her whole life in Muskogee, Oklahoma where the team of choice in the Okie state was the juggernaut of all juggernaut’s of the era, the Oklahoma Sooners.
I was very athletic at a young age, as I was generally the fastest, threw the ball the farthest and was the premiere player on just about every team I played on when I was in elementary school. I probably gained this from my father, as he played a couple of seasons worth of Class D ball for the St. Louis Cardinals organization when he was young and was a three sport athlete himself in high school, before entering the United States Navy for his tour of duty.
The 8-hour car trip we took from Fayetteville to Dallas occurred in the wee hours of the night. After working a ten hour construction shift that day, my father drove all night to get to the Texas State Fairgrounds, home of the Cotton Bowl, gaining only a couple hours sleep in the parking lot before the game began at noon. This was a walk in the park for my father, for he drove truck on and off for nearly 30 years.
His main run as a professional truck driver was from Dallas-to-Los Angeles and from Los Angeles-to-Boston, where he would turn around and make the trip over again. Sure there would be other stops along the way, but this was his bread and butter run. Up to his death, which occurred in the spring of 2003 due to complications from Diabetes resulting in congestive heart failure, my father drove over 4 million miles across America’s road ways and never recorded even a single fender bender. A rarity in the industry today, and he did 90 percent of his driving at night when the traffic was minimal.
He was a true professional in his field, because he was one of the few who made a significant income traveling the roadways. Although it was tough on a family, and one of the main reasons why I didn’t hear from him very often, it was one thing he took great pride in.
When I awakened that New Years morning in 1976, rising up in the back seat and gazing out the back window to see the gigantic 10-story wall, still the main symbol of the Cotton Bowl today, it was the greatest thing I had ever seen. For a kid who rarely experienced much happiness growing up, and rarely received a treat such as this, it was truly a sight to behold. I couldn’t have been any happier for I was a total sports nut and the only thing I knew was my two favorite teams were the Oregon Ducks, who were pitiful at the time, and the Arkansas Razorbacks, who were at the other end of the spectrum, a national power, and I had front row seats at one of the great New Years Day Bowl venues I had watched so often on television.
We had great seats, about 25 rows up right smack in the middle of the 40 yard line. It was one of those beautiful, warm, sunny and splendid days you usually see on television when the Cotton Bowl comes on and the Hogs were playing another SEC power, Vince Dooley, and his Georgia Bulldogs.
Riding a wave of enthusiasm into the game after upsetting second ranked Texas A&M 31-6 on national television over Thanksgiving weekend, a game to this day I still remember watching, Hog Nation was on fire and the stadium was a sea of Red, whooping PIG -SOOEY - Razorbacks all through pregame and the opening quarter.
I slumped in my seat early on, pouting like any 9-year old would do when his team was getting it handed to them. The Dawgs started out the game driving 53 yards in 12 plays, settling for a 35 yard field goal and a 3-0 lead. Arkansas didn’t help itself, fumbling twice and punting in their first three possessions, and I was just about in tears when Georgia threw a 21 yard touchdown pass to take a 10-0 lead well into the second quarter.
Less than two minutes before half-time, with the Hogs still trailing by 10, I nearly jumped out of my seat when Arkansas recovered a fumble deep within Georgia territory. Traveling backwards in three plays, the big red got on the board with a 39 yard field goal to draw within 7 with a little over a minute in the half. I was on top of my seat screaming three plays later when Georgia fumbled the snap and Arkansas recovered with 40 seconds and the ball on the Georgia 13.
As Mike Jones of The Dallas Morning News wrote on January 2nd of that year, “THE GAME turned on a Georgia silk purse that turned out to be a sow’s ear.”
All-time Cotton Bowl Classic results
The Games
• 1930s | 1940s | 1950s
• 1960s | 1970s | 1980s
• 1990s | 2000s
Cotton Bowl Classic record book
Leading 10-3 with only 50 seconds left in the first half, the Bulldogs reached into their towsack of tricks and the joke turned out to be on them. It was the old shoestring trick.
With the ball on the Georgia 22 following a 39-yard Steve Little field goal, Bulldog quarterback Ray Goff sauntered back to the line of scrimmage, where he offensive front had casually lined up following a 2-yard keeper by the signal-caller. Kneeling as if to tie a shoestring, Goff quickly reached out and flicked the ball off the ground, a legal maneuver so long as it is one motion, in the general direction of flanker Gene Washington, who was off to his right.
Washington, who had scored on a similar play earlier in the year against Vanderbilt, never got the handle, and alert linebacker Hal McAfee came up with the loose pigskin on the 13.
HOG QUARTERBACK Scott Bull then flipped a short pass out to the right to Ike Forte, voted the game’s outstanding offensive player, who moved it down to the 1. Next play, Forte took a pitch for Bull deep in the backfield and skirted left end for the touch.
Little’s conversion made it 10-10 and suddenly a game that Georgia had dominated both in score (10-0) and possession until the final two minutes, made an about-face.
So armed, the Razorbacks came out for the second half and, led by McAfee, easily the game’s top defensive star in press box balloting, turned in a fanatical defensive effort that limited Georgia to two first downs and left the Bulldogs’ jowls sagging. That had only 60 yards total offense in that period.
It was no contest the second half, though Arkansas didn’t assume scoreboard command until the 21-point fourth quarter.
“You, the players, all of you, won this game,” victorious coach Frank Broyles told his squad in the post-game dressing room. “I’ve never seen such an effort. That’s the finest second half we’ve played against a good team in a long time.”
“THE SECOND half,” he noted, “was played mostly on their end of the field. When this happened, it allowed us to play recklessly while they had to play cautiously.”
Yes, the second half was all Arkansas as the Hogs rolled on to a 31-10 victory and I still consider this one of the happiest Christmas moments in my life. It was a wonderful moment to experience between father and son, and one of the few that I got to enjoy with my father in the 37 years I knew him.
Oddly and ironically, I returned to visit my father once again in 1994 as my wife and I traveled by plane from the Seattle, Washington area with our new daughter Jordyn, who was born that spring, and we journeyed to Dallas to watch my hometown University of Oregon Ducks play the Colorado Buffalo’s in the Cotton Bowl. It was a disappointing affair, as the Ducks got Col-O-Routed by the stampeding Buffalo’s (38-6) as they were headed into the newly created BCS conglomerate called the Big-12 Conference in the coming season.
Controversy would soon follow the next time these two programs met up in a New Years Day bowl venue, some eight years later in 2002, when both were voted out of the BCS Championship game in favor of a brand name tradition.
Oregon and Arkansas were very similar programs, even though both were on different ends of the spectrum in the early 1970’s. Due to the cultural significance of football in the South, Arkansas was a very prominent program, and even though they had a very loyal fan base, most were pessimistic of the Hogs success. They almost expected defeat against the elite programs, and I think this was largely due to the 1969 “Game of the Century” with the University of Texas, their longtime bitter rivals from the South, who snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, demoralizing Hog Nation once again.
Father & Son: James and Houston Street - THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS
With both teams ranked number one and two respectively, the Hogs led 14-0 late in the ball game, which was aired over Thanksgiving weekend before a national audience. President Nixon was in attendance due to his allegiance toward his home state of Texas. With less than 4 minutes remaining, Texas struck for two quick touchdowns, led by quarterback James Street, who is the father of Major League Baseball’s Houston Street, and after going for two inside a minute remaining, the Horns stunned the Fayetteville faithful as they looked on in sad disbelief.
Once again, they would lose to the mighty Longhorns. The fan base remains pessimistic to this very day, even though the Hogs have had a significant degree of success since moving to the SEC Conference in 1992, especially over their longtime rivals from the now defunct South West Conference.
Both Oregon and Arkansas have also suffered from a bit of an inferiority complex. Arkansas has long harbored bitter feelings for Texas, as the Longhorns have dominated their feuding rivalry, just as Oregon has felt the similar sting from being treated like Washington’s red headed step-child. Even though the Razorbacks and Ducks have more than held their own lately in the bitter border rivalry wars, the stigma of being dominated in years past still carries significant clout and importance in the eyes of the nation. In the modern era of the BCS, a programs branding identity derived from the birth of the television revolution takes on more significance than a teams actual on field performance in many cases.
In a hypothetical world, if all four teams - Oregon, Washington, Arkansas and Texas - had the same 11-1 records entering the 2007 season with the majority of their players returning from the previous season, which teams would gain the pole positions in the race for BCS glory before a single game was played within the preseason polls?
I think you know the answer to that question.
Oregon, as compared to the Razorbacks back in the mid-1970’s was on the opposite end of the spectrum and would suffer woefully when lined up against the upper echelon teams, from not only the PAC-10 Conference, but other significant foes from around the country. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, with the Ducks struggling for survival, Oregon was often on the wrong side of 56-7, 63-7 or 69-0 scores against juggernauts like Nebraska, Oklahoma, USC, Washington and Texas. It was simply a payday game for Oregon as they received just enough money to maintain their miserable existence, while licking their wounds all the way back to obscure Eugene, Oregon.
This began to change in 1976, when the University hired Rich Brooks. Although it took him 8 years to truly get it going, by 1985, my senior year of high school, the Ducks (like many other teams of similar historical limited stature) were on the rise, upsetting many of the elite teams from not only the conference, but around the country as well.
The scholarship reductions, shaved down from 125 -to-95 helped to level the playing field, preventing the upper echelon programs like USC and UCLA from dominating the conference due to the recruiting practice of stock piling players.
By 1989, the Ducks bought their way in to the Independence Bowl, located in Shreveport, Louisiana, where Mighty Oregon defeated the Tulsa Hurricane, completing an 8-4 season. Not to be outdone, they followed up the next season with a close loss to Colorado State in the 1990 Freedom Bowl, once again completing an 8-4 season.
At the time, I was well on my way towards earning the first of three All-PAC-10 Conference awards while playing baseball for Oregon State University, but I’ve always bled Green and Yellow, especially during football season because during my collegiate days the Beavers were perhaps the worst team in America, mired in the middle of 28 consecutive losing seasons.
My freshman year in high school, due to financial crises extending over a significant period of time in higher education - first occurring in the 1970’s - the Ducks dropped baseball and Oregon State dropped Track and Field, maintaining the proud tradition of Oregon Track, and the rising tradition of Oregon State baseball. If given the chance to choose between the two schools, I would have no doubt been a Duck as it was my school of choice.
I was one of the die-hard duck fans who enjoyed the festive atmosphere of Autzen Stadium, following Dick Harter’s Kamikaze Ducks at MAC Court and following Steve Prefontaine and Alberto Salazar at Hayward Field. Despite Oregon’s limited success in football and basketball during this time period, it was a great place to follow sports from a fans perspective as we got to witness John Wooden and his mighty Bruins stroll through town on an annual basis, while witnessing John McKay, John Robinson and Terry Donahue waltz through as well.
Oregon Track on the other hand, was a national, and soon to be world power (as a result of Phil Knight and his Nike empire) and Eugene would soon be tabbed “Track Town USA.” With the Olympic trials coming to town next year, this honorable tradition has continued to maintain its elite standard, now going on 4 decades.
Friends from my own home state as well as others around the country have always had a hard time understanding how I can bleed Green and Yellow, as well as Orange and Black at the same time. You’re either one or the other is a common response, but people just don’t understand that this allegiance was one born as a child and it is hard to change old stripes that have now been painted for over 40 years.
Could you imagine an Alabama fan bleeding Navy and Orange?
I have been fanatical regarding Oregon football ever Rich Brooks came to town in 1976, even though fate would send me down the road 50 miles to Corvallis nine years later. I enjoyed my experience at Oregon State, although my baseball memories are a bit tempered as I played for perhaps the most bitter human being I have ever been around, head coach Jack Riley.
I am very proud of the fact that Oregon State has gone on to win back-to-back national championships in Omaha during the last two seasons, but I don’t have a lot of warm memories towards the baseball program because my experience over the 5 years I was involved in the program was quite miserable as the climate of our program took on the bitter personality extended from our coach.
You could say that Jack was a poor people person, and was quite simply the worst human motivator I’ve ever been around.
But little did I know at the time growing up that there was a civil war brewing, not only in my home state during this pivotal 1976 season as our annual rivalry game between Oregon and Oregon State is widely known as The Civil War, but around the country as well.
A group of 63 power schools would form a unionized alliance in an attempt to challenge the NCAA’s restrictive television resolution. Oregon and Arkansas would wind up on rival sides of the argument and this unionized divide has extended well into the BCS era.
As I sat in stunned disbelief that December day in 2004, much like the Arkansas faithful who witnessed the 1969 “Game of the Century,” when Texas came back in the latter moments of the game, I was equally shocked when Texas overtook California in the final stages of the season, ultimately winning on the BCS Scoreboard rather than the actual playing field, and this after Texas coach Mac Brown campaigned for votes.
Something smelled fishy and the stench didn’t quite sit well with me. When a team wins on the field like Texas did in 1969 its hard to question the outcome, although the championship being awarded via the presidential palace due to the fact that Nixon had an allegiance to the Horns is a bit fishy as well. Considering that Penn State and USC were both undefeated, the 1969 version of the national championship would fit right in with the annual BCS version, and it would be just as controversial today.
One thing most college football fans do not understand is college football has never gotten it right when crowning its annual champion.
I vowed to research not only the current BCS issues, but to get to the very root of the problem by probing its past, in an effort to understand the controversy behind the Bowl Championship Series methods of determining national prominence.
At the time I began the project in December of 2004, I vaguely remembered the formation of the College Football Association (CFA), nor did I understand the significance behind the sequence of events that set this critical time period and movement in motion, but as we head down the stretch run in the 2007 season, I can tell you that the events that precipitated the CFA movement are behind much of the controversy we are going to witness in December of 2007, for we are headed for unprecedented controversy this season as this perfect storm of a season heads to its conclusion.
You see, I am a fan of college football who, just like you, sits on the couch or in the bleachers every Saturday in the fall and witnesses the passion, pageantry and tradition of college football, only to be disappointed every Holiday season because college football cannot crown a true champion. Unlike most people, I have chosen to do something about it, because I believe that not only do the young men and coaches who sacrifice so much deserve better, but the fans who foot the bill for it all are left with empty purse strings at the end of the season.
Parity has arrived in college football, at unparalleled levels, yet we have two spectrum’s operating inside the same football model, which produces highly controversial and invalid outcomes.
Join me for the next 400 pages, as we stroll down one of the most memorable carnival rides you will ever experience in an effort to understand the mystery behind the BCS Controversy.
Oddly and ironically, the Oklahoma Sooners, Arkansas Razorbacks, Georgia Bulldogs and Oregon Ducks have been embedded in the controversy as well, which lends me to believe that I was destined to write this book. Not only due to the fact that I wrote this Introduction to my book project on the eve of the 4th Annual College Football day, which was orchestrated by the Cotton Bowl Association itself, but the fact that I have had a front row seat throughout the meat and potato’s of the ever brewing BCS controversy.
