Hindsight is a beyotch sometimes.
Back in January, on the day when two of his schools (Georgia and Alabama) would again compete for the national championship, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey made a final pitch for the establishment of a new College Football Playoff.
It featured 12 teams. The field would be made up of six guaranteed bids to the top six conference champions, plus six more selected by a committee. The top four champs would receive a first-round bye. The opening-round games would be played on the campus of the higher-seeded team, the rest would take place at neutral sites, mostly established bowl games.
… This was a life preserver to specific leagues, and the sport as a whole.
Yet the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 formed a so-called “Alliance” to block it, puzzling and insulting Sankey and the others who worked on the plan (Bob Bowlsby of the Big 12, Craig Thompson of the Mountain West and Jack Swarbrick of Notre Dame).
Six months later the Big Ten blew the alliance up by raiding the Pac-12 for USC and UCLA.
At this point, the ACC and Pac-12 would crawl across smoldering coals to get Sankey’s 12-team model back on the table.
Yeah, well ($$)…
The other piece? Sankey didn’t say this, but UCLA and USC’s move to the Big Ten provided the punchline to the joke that was the ACC/Big Ten/Pac-12 “Alliance” that stood in opposition to the 12-team format designed by Sankey, Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson and then-Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby. That realignment move earlier this month effectively guaranteed that the power the next time around would be consolidated within two leagues. You’ve read in this space for more than a year that the only two leagues that must be included for a Playoff to be considered legitimate by most people are the Big Ten and the SEC. After the Bruins and Trojans bolted the Pac-12, there is no doubt about this. Not even a coalition of the other eight FBS leagues could overpower the Big Ten and SEC if those two conferences fundamentally agree on what they want in a postseason format. And the Big Ten and SEC don’t have to be in lockstep. If they agree on enough points, what they want will happen.
“How you like me now?”, in other words.
Seriously, in a sport dotted with incomprehensible decisions over the past quarter century, the ACC and Pac-12 move to form an alliance with one of the P5s two wolves in a lame attempt to thwart the other has to be at or near the top. I used to compare the suits running college football to Jed Clampett, but I’m becoming convinced that’s an insult to ol’ Jed himself.
Get The Picture 
Sports World made the SEC and Sankey Villains. When it was Oklahoma and Texas that came to them.
Then said nothing, when the Big 12 went and out right raided smaller conferences for their best teams – total of 4.
And has given the Big 10 a Pass, after stabbing the Pac 12 in the back – taking their biggest franchise and other franchise in the L.A. market from them – a move they clearly made.
With that said, I have zero sympathy for the Big 12, Pac 12 or ACC. They had a perfectly reasonable option on the table and they didn’t take it. The only question is how much influence the Big 10 had over them in this decision?
I’ve had dogs that are smarter than some of these people..
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“If the other side is for it then I have to be against it” is about as simplistic as thinking gets, yet it seems to be guiding an increasing portion of decisions made at every level in this country. And it appears to have driven the ACC and Pac-12 to turn their backs on a playoff solution that would’ve preserved whatever shreds of relevance they have remaining.
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I’ve really never understood why the ACC wanted to ally itself with the Big 10. The natural rivalries and scheduling benefits with the SEC made a whole lot more sense to me. Phillips was so focused on reopening his GOR with Notre Dame that he didn’t realize the Big 10 had no interest in really teaming with the ACC and Pac 12.
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The Pac 12 casino boss and Kevin Warren’s lackey in Greensboro should both be fired for what they did to scuttle playoff expansion (and I’m not an expansion advocate). Even Bob Bowlsby knew that the expansion proposal would benefit his conference if he could keep it together in the wake of Texas and Oklahoma’s departure.
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Jed was an honest man. That excludes most of the CFB power brokers.
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Jed also had common sense and experience dealing with doofuses (Jethro and Milburn).
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Common sense and experience dealing with doofuses? He had all that money and let the doofuses convince him to move to Beverly Hills? We laughed at it because of the fish out water jokes, but my dad always thought the premise was stupid. He also wouldn’t watch Hogan’s Heroes because he said there wasn’t anything even remotely funny about a German POW camp.
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Helga(Cynthia Lynn) made Hogan’s Heroes worth watching. You know, like how the best thing about The Beverly Hillbillies was Ellie Mae(Donna Douglas).
Yeah, I have a type.
😉
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The Common Touch.
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That’s right, Scoob. But, hillbillies are the last of the ethnicities still fair game for ridicule. Jed was a Hollywood representation of the honorable hillbilly. The reality lives north of Fannin and Murray county. Those Snuffy Smiths wear orange overhauls, drink rotgut ‘shine, fight their dad over a romp behind the pig pen with their little sister and incessantly sing Rocky Top out of tune.
Fuckn losers.
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Ahh…music to my ears, RR!
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You, Sir, are a national treasure.
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Dammit, aim260, we’re regionalists here!
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Hey, ‘ol Jed had some common sense and street smarts. That’s more than the suits running CFB have.
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The ACC and Pac 12 tried to appease the crocodile that is the Big Ten, in the hopes it would eat them last. Maybe Neville Chamberlain should apply to be commissioner for the Alliance.
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I completely expected a new playoff roll-out along the lines of Sankey’s rejected proposal. It seemed inevitable given where the power resided. Instead, we got the bizarro murder/suicide pact with the Big-10, ACC and PAC-12. I didn’t get it then and, reading this, now I really don’t get it. Logan Roy’s kids from Sucession would have handled things better.
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+1 for Succesion reference.
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Sankey’s comments yesterday at SEC Media Days that he would not support an 8 team playoff format with AQs pretty much says it all. Everyone had their chance and decided instead to pout and stomp their feet like children. The Pac-12 is a shell of what it was just a few short weeks ago. The ACC is like a character in a horror movie hiding in a closet waiting on the next shoe to drop. And the Big XII is desperately trying to keep some sort of relevance. Well played, guys.
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Somewhere, Larry Scott lights a cigar with a Benjamin and shrugs
But the real Dummy Award has to go to the ACC. That conference has real media markets and some high-level brands – and somehow parleyed all that into Dead Conference Walking status.
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I get the rage at raiding the Big 12.
But when that was the proposed format, I don’t see how scuttling it hurts the new SEC. On one hand you’re upset that the SEC would obviously get more at large bids with OU and Texas. But that also removes the Texas/OU shoe-in from winning their weak Big 12 and opens that spot up to the leftovers from the Big 12. And now OU and Texas (the biggest villains) have a much tougher road to the playoff, whether from winning the SEC or at large.
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At this point the Big 10 and SEC have the leverage to demand three guarantees each. If they see any need for 12 teams at all.
Or just reduce the field to 6, with the top Big10/SEC teams getting a bye, and the next best from each playing first round games against two at larges from the rest of the field. Which basically means Notre Dame and Clemson if they have less than two losses, or maybe some other school if those have down years.
Yeah, nice alliance you boobs. Really stuck it to the man.
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As in everyone but the ACC and Notre dame are now completely reliant on the Big 10 and SEC’s goodwill to even have a shot at staying relevant. Which as we know is simply a math problem: what value does giving those other schools the illusion of a chance add to the product, and is it more than the cost? There is no other consideration anymore. Everyone else is dangling from the cliff by the tips of their fingers and it’s a matter of whether the big boys profit more from helping them up, or stepping on their fingers.
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Blowing up the 12 team CFP last year never made sense. It was obviously dumb at the time because it hurt the Big 12 and Pac 12 much worse than it would ever hurt the SEC which obviously was already in great position to have two teams in the four team CFP in a lot of seasons. Looking back now that we see how stupid it was for the ACC, Big 12, and Pac 12 to trust the Big Ten to be a good ally without feeling the need to put of the Alliance’s principles down on paper with anyone’s signature, it looks even more dumb.
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They’re really earning those seven figure salaries. Showing off those intangible skills they get paid the big bucks for.
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Unless I misread something, the Big 12 was in agreement with the SEC. They were NOT responsible for blowing it up. It was the Big 10, PAC 12, and ACC.
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“On Aug. 24, the commissioners of the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 held a joint video conference to announce the Alliance, a new partnership between three of the five most powerful conferences in college athletics.
…
The Alliance popped back onto fans’ radar last month when College Football Playoff expansion negotiations collapsed after an 8-3 vote, with the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 later revealed as the only dissenters against a proposed 12-team model. The leagues were portrayed as obstinate toward a more inclusive system many had been clamoring for, and while each maintains that it voted independently because of its distinct concerns, their link through the Alliance made them easy targets.”
https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/33413775/the-alliance-explained-acc-big-ten-pac-12-cfp-vote-scheduling-comes-next
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So you’re right, the Big 12 wasn’t part of the vote to blow up the playoff, but I was under the impression that they were really leaning into the hopes that the other leagues were going to hold fast to the promises not to cannibalize each other.
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That’s true. I was thinking it went beyond those three leagues. I had forgotten that a lot of the rub was that the big 12 had just been completely relegated to G5(now6) by the SEC, and they all saw what could happen to them. Turns out the Big 10 was the true villain. The enemy is the enemy, but a turncoat? Pure evil.
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The Alliance = Judean People’s Front Suicide Squad
https://media1.tenor.com/images/e4d2f009bc65949fb094ff04dd68d384/tenor.gif?itemid=11527220
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Well dammit. Sometimes you eat the gif pasting bear, and sometimes the gif pasting bear eats you…
https://media1.tenor.com/images/e4d2f009bc65949fb094ff04dd68d384/tenor.gif?itemid=11527220
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Concern now is that the money grab will still push for playoff expansion. Creating 2 super conferences = NFL Lite. 6 team playoff with existing conferences means SECCG is a fight for home field or maybe even inclusion. 8 teams devalues SECCG. 12 teams is again a fight for home field. All but a 4 team playoff bring 2 and 3 loss teams into play. I would bet overall TV ratings go down in an expanded playoff format and the suits will stand around wondering what happened. That opens the door wide for a streaming service to buy the rights (for maybe all but the final championship game) just to sell their other content. There seem to be few paths these idiots are looking at that will make things better. Those in favor of expanded playoffs have missed this point entirely…college football won’t be ruined by the playoffs, but what it takes to get there will.
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Old Jed was a sly fox. These guys are just bumbling idiots.
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Jed: I’ve heard of gold dollars, silver dollars, paper dollars, but he said he’s gonna pay me in, what’d he call ‘em, Granny?
Granny: Millions dollars.
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You should see Jed’s daughter!
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Granny: Well, the first thing to do is get her in a dress. She’s getting to old to be wearing a man’s duds. Lookee here – she done popped the buttons off her shirt again.
Jed: Well, Elly Mae carries herself proud…with her shoulders throwed back.
Granny: It ain’t her shoulders that’s poppin’ these buttons.
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Homo homini lupus….
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