Requiem For The Conference Executives
Here’s a line from a piece I wrote about Northwestern and Iowa earlier this season that feels applicable today, as the bowl executives, also known as the unimpeachable protagonists of the American Dream, are back again:
“At its most simple level, college football is about taking (often disadvantaged) kids, giving them brain damage by having them get into countless car wrecks over their four or five-year career, not paying them for the privilege, then taking the money those kids earned and giving it to Bowl Executives named Bartholomew Chesterfield Esq. who take the payment in the form burlap sacks with dollar signs on them and use a pushcart to escape the scene via the Intercontinental Railroad.”
This is and has always been true. But in this preposterously stupid season, it feels more true than ever. In a season where competitiveness has as much to do with your team’s ability to not hose each other down with aerosols as it is to do with how strong your nickelback is in pass coverage, the uncomfortable realities that usually linger on the peripheries of college football move to the front and center of the conversation. There’s no need for it to hide. You’re watching. I’m watching. Let’s drop the crude idea of a pretense and get down to brass tacks.
The Big Ten tried, at least for a while, to keep a veneer of respectability this year. It was slower than the other power conferences to restart athletic competition. That careful consideration ended up putting the conference in a position where it felt it had to schedule 9 games in as many weeks for each team.
That was never going to be possible. Not in a country where hundreds of thousands of people are contracting coronavirus daily. It was plain to see the need for delays, reschedules, and cancellations. No matter. The B1G went forth anyway.
What Wednesday’s decision illustrates is that this wasn’t an oversight from the Big Ten. It was always part of the plan.
Big Ten Athletic Directors took a short recess from cosplaying as Uncle Moneybags from the Monopoly board game in their wood-paneled offices to vote to remove the Big Ten’s minimum game requirement to participate in the Big Ten Championship. This would allow Ohio State, who will only have played five football games this year due to COVID-19 outbreaks on Maryland’s roster, Michigan’s roster, and their own roster, to represent the Big Ten East. It also meant Indiana, who did meet the minimum game requirement and, yes, did lose to Ohio State, would have to settle for a consolation bracket game against Iowa.
The only surprise is that it took so long for the Big Ten to calcify what should have been tacitly understood by anyone who has ever followed Big Money College Sports.
Is Ohio State more deserving of a Big Ten Championship appearance than Indiana? Obviously. They beat Indiana after all. Was the 6-game minimum a random requirement set by the conference that can be easily broken and adjusted? Sure. Does any of that mean that the Big Ten should be given a pass or taken at face value for their decision?
Not a chance.
This isn’t even, really, a decision about money. The amount of money Big Ten partner institutions will scoop thanks to Ohio State’s inevitable College Football Playoff appearance (which, in theory, should be made more of an inevitability with a Big Ten Championship) is probably less than $200,000. Purdue will pay Jeff Brohm that sum 30 times over this year.
It’s an inconsequentially small amount of money, for these people.
What it is, though, is a reminder about who Conference Executives work for.
Ohio State fans took the better part of the last two weeks posting online about how the Very Unfair And Sick Big Ten Conference was colluding against them and their Buckeyes, working in shadowy, smoke-filled back rooms, rubbing their hands together, and planning how to get Big Indiana Football a bigger lick on the lollipop. Ohio State fans, who even in the best of times lean uncomfortably close towards accusing Cable News Analysts and Playoff Committee Members of ordering bulk amounts of “Cheese Pizza” from joint concert venue/pizza shops in the Washington DC area, worked themselves into a froth at the idea that the College Football Universe is out to get them. Much of their argument centered around teams canceling games due to COVID-19 outbreaks in a conspiratorial fashion (thanks Kirk Herbstreit).
It’s unbearably tiring discourse to watch.
The Conference Executives, wielding Nielsen spreadsheets and budget printouts, gave Ohio State the college football version of a “Too Big To Fail” bailout. Conference Executives did not need the money from one extra College Football Playoff appearance. Conference Executives did need to kiss the ring of the program that makes the ship sail. Ohio State is too valuable and holds too many cards for them to be skipped over and replaced by a ragamuffin group of Hoosiers who are coached by a man who looks exactly like Dril.
Ohio State didn’t need any of this.
Ohio State would have made the College Football Playoff anyway.
Ohio State doesn’t judge its success by whether or not it gets to put a Big Ten Championship trophy in a diamond-encrusted display case in its football facility which you can get to from the athletic cafeteria on magnet powered fast transit.
Ohio State is fine.
In bending over backwards to get them into a Big Ten Championship they don’t need, the Conference Executives at least did the world a service in ripping off another band-aid. Even the rules they set can and will be adjusted when it suits their purpose.
(A quick aside: what remains unanswered is why the other athletic directors in the conference would be down for this plan. What do they get out of it? Why do they want to get a taste of some Columbus style smoked boot? There’s no good answer here.)
The argument offered most often for sliding Ohio State into the Big Ten Championship is for the sake of competitiveness. Ohio State is the best team, after all.
But that can’t be the reason. It can’t be true because this whole season is a mockery of what “competitiveness” actually means. Clemson lost a football game in no small part due to the fact that the best football player in the country couldn’t play because he contracted the plague. Wisconsin never got their feet under them this season after half their roster tested positive. The same goes for Minnesota. Coaches missed games due to being too damn sick and too damn contagious to be entrusted to be anywhere near other people. College football, from top to bottom, east to west, has been a preposterously stupid snafu, with teams bumbling around playing uncharacteristically sloppy and unrefined football because there’s a pandemic going on. If Conference Executives really cared about awarding the best team championships this year, football wouldn’t be happening.
Football is happening. And football will continue to happen. It will continue to happen because dammit there’s still some juice to wring out of this orange and there are emperors walking around who need to be told their robes are beautiful.
And now here we are. Northwestern, a team that clinched its division during a week in which its football game was canceled due to a coronavirus outbreak, will play Ohio State, a team that clinched its division when a conference changed its rules it set due to coronavirus outbreaks, in the Big Ten Championship.
I’d love to say that the just endpoint is Northwestern dragging Ohio State into some unwatchable 21-17 rock fight that ends on a post-penalty ten-second run-off after Pat Fitzgerald spends 45-seconds castigating a line judge for downloading too many apps onto his cell phone. But that’s not true.
This is not a good versus evil game. It is not even a haves versus have-nots game. It is a game between a pawn and a queen of the same color. It’s Northwestern’s job to clog up the middle of the board and open a route for Ohio State to play for checkmate.
It’s what the Conference Executives require. It’s what they will receive.
