In Playoff era, conference title games become a harder sell
Colin Thompson has been attending Clemson games since he was 6 years old, has 10-12 friends who go to every home game together and typically makes two or three road trips a year with his crew. Last season they traveled to Miami for the College Football Playoff semifinals and Phoenix to watch Clemson in the national championship game and plan on hitting Tampa if the Tigers make it back this year.
But Thompson is skipping this weekend’s ACC championship game in Orlando despite the fact StubHub had a get-in price as low as $7.50 as of Thursday and first-row tickets in one of the corner sections listed for $25.00.
“It was quite expensive to make both of those (playoff) trips,” Thompson said. “Plus season ticket costs this year and then I live in Charlotte, so I was banking on a cheaper expense here then the game gets moved. I probably won’t go to Phoenix (if Clemson makes the Fiesta Bowl), but factoring in the costs of what I’m expecting for an Alabama-Clemson ticket in Tampa, it makes sense to me to skip Orlando.”
Thompson isn’t being a presumptuous Clemson fan; rather, he represents a new normal where conference championship games are a much harder sell as fans weigh whether to save their money for potential playoff games.
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Aside from the SEC, whose championship game has the geographic advantage of being close driving distance from Alabama, it appears attendance might be an issue this weekend for the ACC in Orlando, the Big Ten in Indianapolis and the Pac-12 in Santa Clara, Calif.
As of Thursday, upper deck tickets in Lucas Oil Stadium were less than $20 on the secondary market for Penn State-Wisconsin and the Washington-Colorado game was not yet a sellout.
With Ohio State likely to make the playoff while sitting at home this weekend and uninspiring matchups such as Florida-Alabama, perhaps it’s time for a wholesale re-evaluation of the conference championship game concept.
Now that college football is asking fan bases to spend money on playoff semifinals and finals, there are two ways to make conference championship games more relevant and enticing. The first is to put them on campus sites of the higher-ranked team, thus attaching an incentive to the regular season. The second is to eliminate divisions, as the SEC, ACC and Big Ten have seen severe power imbalances in recent years that devalue the championship games and do nothing but put their best teams at risk of losing playoff spots.
When conference championship games began in the early 1990s, the NCAA rule was that leagues had to have at least 12 teams and be split into divisions. That rule no longer exists as of early this year, which is why the Big 12 is doing one next season despite having only 10 teams.
The Big 12 opted not to split into divisions and match up their two best teams, which will not only differentiate the Big 12 but could help it in the playoff race.
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As other leagues have expanded, however, the divisional structure has brought diminishing returns both in the championship games and the regular season. Texas A&M fans, for instance, won’t see Georgia at Kyle Field until 2025, at which point it’s hard to argue you’re really playing in the same league.
If conferences scrapped divisions, assigned teams one or two permanent rivals they play every year while rotating the rest and had their top two teams play a championship game on the No. 1 seed’s home field, you’d get rid of some scheduling imbalance problems, bad matchups in conference championships and empty seats if fans choose to save their money for the playoff.
This year, for instance, Clemson fans got the double-whammy of having the ACC championship game moved out of Charlotte, where it’s an easy drive for fans who live in the Carolinas, due to the House Bill 2 controversy, and a matchup with 9-3 Virginia Tech, which isn’t as sexy as a potential rematch against Florida State or Louisville.
“It’s not the ticket price, it’s the 10 hours it takes to get to Orlando with the game being moved from Charlotte,” said Clemson fan Luther Baker, who lives in Tega Cay, S.C. “It would have been different if it would have been Clemson vs Louisville or Clemson vs. Florida State but I’m not traveling 10 hours to see Virginia Tech play.”
Of course, the risk is that Clemson loses to Virginia Tech and ends up in a meaningless bowl rather than the playoff. But most people only have so much money to spend on travel and game tickets, and even a fan base that traditionally travels well like Clemson may get stretched thin in this situation.
“We’re just kind of fingers crossed they beat Virginia Tech,” said recent Clemson graduate Kyle Macchi, who would have gone to Charlotte but is skipping Orlando. “It’s not a joke of a team, so we’re kind of taking our chances.”
COACHING CAROUSEL CLIPS
Given the public comments of Houston super-booster Tilman Fertitta, it’s worth wondering whether Houston is on the precipice of making a mistake that has been fairly common for schools that lose multiple successful coaches in a short period of time by turning their search into a self-esteem exercise.
“I've put it out there, if you want a cheap buyout the first couple years, then don't come apply,” Fertitta told the Houston Chronicle, the suggestion being that Houston plans to make it extremely expensive for a coach to leave.
As we saw in 2014 with Jim McElwain leaving Colorado State for Florida despite a $7 million buyout written into his contract, that typically doesn’t work. Plus, when a school like Houston believes it should be a coaching destination rather than a place for talented people to make themselves attractive to the elite programs in the country, it will be far more likely to make a bad hire.
The classic example of this is Tulsa basketball, which was an NCAA tournament regular in the 1990s but kept losing coaches as a result: Tubby Smith after four years to Georgia, Steve Robinson after two years to Florida State, Bill Self after three years to Illinois and Buzz Peterson after just one year to Tennessee. Tulsa got tired of the next hot up-and-coming coach going in and out the door, so it promoted John Phillips, a 53-year old assistant on the staff who had been a longtime high school coach in the area and didn’t view the job as a stepping-stone.
Four years later, Phillips was fired and Tulsa went a decade without getting back to the tournament.
Where we stand on college football coaching hires and firings
The point is, being upset that Tom Herman left for Texas after two years is pointless for Houston, and the reality is that even the school had scored an invitation to the Big 12 it’s highly unlikely he would have stayed. If Houston remains one of the top programs outside the Power Five, elite programs will be coming after its coach every two or three years and most of the time that’s a battle Houston won’t win.
Fertitta seems determined to make a splashy hire, but the mistake here would be deviating from the formula that got Houston this far just because someone might leave down the road. Hiring 63-year old Les Miles, for instance, would essentially signal that Houston wants to do the exact opposite of what it has made it successful for the temporary ego boost of getting a big name.
Finding the next Art Briles or the next Kevin Sumlin or the next Tom Herman is the way to go for Houston, even if it means having to do it again in a few years.
FAUX PAS OF THE WEEK
Oregon’s Tuesday night announcement that it fired Mark Helfrich was a case study in what can go wrong when schools try to blend public relations and journalism.
In 2013, Oregon hired longtime Register-Guard (Eugene, Ore.) sportswriter Rob Moseley as the editor-in-chief of its official Web site, GoDucks.com, one of several schools and pro teams that have attempted to build an in-house news operation.
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When Oregon football’s official Twitter account announced that Helfrich had been let go, Moseley’s byline was on the story. What immediately grabbed most people’s attention, however, was a six-paragraph section at the end that detailed some of Helfrich’s failures from Oregon’s sinking defensive statistics to the end of Autzen Stadium’s sellout streak to going 1-for-5 on two-point conversions in a three-point loss to Nebraska this year among other issues.
Nothing Moseley wrote was untrue; in fact it was the kind of passage that could have easily been included in a newspaper story or column about the firing. But as part of Oregon’s official announcement to the world that it had fired its football coach, it came off as though the school had unnecessarily thrown him under the bus.
Moseley initially explained that he was hired to write “in the tone of my news background” and not put out press releases. But after seeing the reaction on social media, he very quickly edited the story and took out the controversial passage, Tweeting an apology that said it “wasn’t the time and place for more than a simple acknowledgement of the decision.”
In theory, it’s not a bad idea for schools to hire experienced journalists to run their Web sites, as the content will be more interesting and likely draw more readers when it comes to things like feature stories. But for breaking news, and particularly a sensitive situation like firing a coach, it’s an almost impossible quandary.
Jim Harbaugh reprimanded for officiating rant, Michigan fined $10,000
YOUR WEEKLY HARBAUGH
At least something good came out of Jim Harbaugh’s blistering critique of the officials who worked Michigan’s 30-27 double overtime loss to Ohio State last weekend. In response to the $10,000 fine the Big Ten levied against Harbaugh, a group of Michigan fans posted an online fundraiser for the ChadTough Foundation, which raises money and awareness for pediatric brain tumors and Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma. Roughly a year ago, that disease took the life of 4-year old Chad Carr, the grandson of former Michigan coach Lloyd Carr.
Almost instantly, fans matched Harbaugh’s $10,000 fine and had contributed more than $25,000 to the foundation as of Thursday.
DUD OF THE WEEK
Poor Baylor. The Bears have lost five in a row and mentally checked out of the season the minute they took their first loss on Oct. 29, a 35-34 heartbreaker at Texas. Given all the negativity and uncertainty that has been swirling around the program since late May, you can’t really blame them for being ready to pack it in.
But because the Big 12 doesn’t have a championship game until next season, its season extends to Saturday and Baylor has to play one more time at West Virginia. Not only does this feel like a long, unnecessary trip for the Bears while most of the country is done with the regular season, but they’ll also be facing temperatures in the high 30s in Morgantown, W.Va.
A long day out in the bitter cold as 18-point underdogs probably isn’t what Baylor coaches and players are looking forward to, but they’ll at least be glad the season is over and can turn their attention to a new era as early as next week.
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