How the Supreme Court gave us the BCS

Submitted by LLG on

This article caught my eye:  "Rose Bowl more like Supreme Court Bowl with Georgia-Oklahoma matchup."

By way of background, the NCAA did not permit any of the schools to negotiate outside of the NCAA's agreement with ABC and CBS agreed to in 1981.  Under the NCAA's structure (explained more at the bottom*), only one game was guaranteed to be shown each week on ABC and CBS and 82 different teams had to be shown every two years.

The University of Oklahoma and the University of Georgia helped form the College Football Association (CFA), a group within the NCAA  to represent and promote the interests of the major football schools including, one would presume, the University of Michigan.

Edit:  My presumption is wrong. "The College Football Association (CFA) sold rights to broadcast live games of its [63] members from 1984 through 1995. It competed directly with the Big Ten and Pac Ten universities that sold an alternative broadcast package."

These schools, along with the other schools in the CFA, negotiated a separate contract with NBC that would allow for more televised games and greater revenues for the schools in question. The NCAA  announced that it would take disciplinary action against any school that complied with the CFA plan.

The Supreme Court eventually heard the case and held that the NCAA plan for televised football games imposed a restraint on the free market and thus violated the Sherman Act (the federal antitrust law).

“The Board of Regents decision fundamentally shaped the future of college athletics, and college football in particular, because it created a future denominated by the chase for TV sets,” Dunnavant explained. . . . “You can draw a line from the Board of Regents decision to the expansion of the SEC to the death of the Southwest Conference to the birth of the Big 12 to the emergence of the Atlantic Coast Conference.  Also, without the decision--and how it affected what I call a civil war political climate within big-time college football--you would not have the Bowl Championship Series today," he said.  (quote from The Business of Sports)

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*Here is how Frank Easterbrook, lawyer for the NCAA, summarized the challenged NCAA agreements in oral argument:

Two agreements are at issue.

One is the TV plan adopted by the NCAA's members and the other is a series of contracts signed between the NCAA and the ABC, CBS and Turner television networks.  These agreements collectively govern the TV appearances of college football teams.

They give ABC and CBS the right to broadcast football in 14 time slots each fall, or roughly one slot per network per Saturday.

They require each network to broadcast a total of 35 different games each fall, and they require each network to broadcast the games of at least 82 different teams, different colleges, over a period of any two years.

Colleges may telecast games outside the network contracts only in compliance with a series of rules called the exceptions rules.

Although the exceptions rules have permitted the telecast of more than 100 games a year in recent years, they reduce the number of stations that can carry each game and they restrict the ability of colleges to broadcast their games when other nearby schools have not sold out their stadiums.

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Interesting note:  The  NCAA  defended  the  restriction  as  necessary  to  sustain robust live attendance at games.  It is interesting to consider that point when looking at bowl attendances.

Also, former Detroit Lion Byron "Whizzer" White dissented and was joined by one other Justice (Rehnquist).  White was the runner up for the Heisman Trophy in 1937 (White played for Colorado).  He led the National Football League in rushing yards in his rookie season. White was admitted to Yale Law School in 1939 and played for the Detroit Lions in the 1940 and 1941 seasons. 

White wrote in dissent, " the NCAA's television plan seems eminently reasonable. Most fundamentally, the plan fosters the goal of amateurism by spreading revenues among various schools and reducing the financial incentives toward professionalism."

 

bacon

December 27th, 2017 at 12:51 PM ^

That’s really interesting. I can’t see the NCAA wanting to reverse this back to the old format nowadays. I blame Tom Osborne for the bcs though. Fucker.

Mpfnfu Ford

December 28th, 2017 at 11:44 AM ^

Was a massive improvement over the Bowl Alliance Game v. The Rose Bowl nonsense. It sucks that Michigan was the team when that doomsday scenario finally happened, but that ridiculous set up was bound to cause a disaster eventually.

That's kind of the deal with the history of college football picking a champion. Each time there's a change, it's an insanely good improvement over the past version, but not really the ideal best solution possible. Voting after bowl games was a much better idea than just picking a team before bowls and guessing at whether Notre Dame's schedule was better than Syracuse's or Alabama's.

Playing some kind of #1 v #2 or #2 vs #3 or #1 v #3 was an improvement over top teams getting random bowl opponents and then trying to decide if beating #5 by 10 was better than beating #20 by 30. And having #1 v. #2 was a big improvement over a cockamamie set up designed to preserve the Rose Bowl, which instead caused every fan who came of age in the 90s to resent it and hate Pasadena.

And now we have a 4 team playoff, and it's hard to imagine how stupid we all were to leave out that 3rd team with a near identical record even if it means some cannon fodder team gets in a 4. 

UMxWolverines

December 27th, 2017 at 1:55 PM ^

Notre Dame's TV deal is irrelevent these days. People can tune in to see their favorite team every week now, their TV deal isn't worth more than what Power 5 schools are getting from conference TV deals. 

Mpfnfu Ford

December 28th, 2017 at 11:49 AM ^

Because they're so obsessed with making the most money possible that they've sold away their competitive future for dollars, and their fans don't seem to care and have bought the marketing spin that being independent is a sign of superiority, not a sign they're being milked for dollars.

At some point, people at Notre Dame need to realize that their ability to consistently compete as an independent has been next to impossible in the major conference era, and that it's not 1988 any more with tons of other high level independent teams they can schedule every year as a loose quasi-conference. The ACC think helps a little bit because it gives their coaching staff some kind of "well we've seen these people before" vibe to go along with USC/Stanford/Navy, but they'd be way more competitive if they just realized it was 2017 and joined the Big 10 or the ACC and were stopped screwing around.

But asking for Notre Dame people to care about something other than money is a fool's errand. 

SFBlue

December 27th, 2017 at 2:13 PM ^

Or How the Supreme Court Gave Us Tuesday Night Football...



Still a foundational legal opinion for, inter alia, human rights recognition for college athletes

Charlie Bauman

December 27th, 2017 at 8:05 PM ^

Were arguably the two best programs of the BCS-era (USC at least before Bama) as sad as it is to admit. Given that, hard to believe this is their first postseason matchup since 1985