The 11 Division I-A football conference commissioners (and Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick, can’t forget him, reminding us that Notre Dame answers to no one) are reportedly close to announcing what the new college football postseason structure will look like.
This comes about after Iowa State’s sixth victory of the 2011 season resulted in Alabama weaseling its way into ending up in the BCS championship game against a team it had already lost to. (Utah State’s collapse against Auburn is a likely second factor that pushed Alabama over Oklahoma State.) There will no longer be “automatic qualifier” conferences, but the separation will exist by fact if not by law. There are the Big Five and everybody else. It’s too late to tell that genie to give up TV contracts.
Will the loss of “AQ” designation put a pause to conference musical chairs? Maybe. But there is still money to be had, and lots of it. That brings me back to an Andy Staples column from earlier this month, dealing with his fear that the power conferences would secede from the NCAA and form their own group, creating basketball tournaments without “Cinderellas.”
No more Lehigh over Duke. No more Northern Iowa over Kansas. No more Hampton over Iowa State. A division of strictly economic heavyweights might not want to split the take with have-nots. That’s exactly what happened in football when the BCS was created.
Take a look at the three victims he uses in his examples. One of them is not like the other two. One does not have gobs of basketball championship trophies. One has only been a 2-seed twice in its entire history.
Why bring attention to this? Because two years ago, Staples suggested expelling Iowa State from the power conference ranks.
So, which are the Cyclones? Are they one of the economic heavyweights, a team that everyone enjoys seeing fall to a plucky mid-major? Are they a small-budget have-not who shouldn’t be sitting at the adults’ table? Or are they the Schroedinger’s Cat of college athletics, existing in both states and becoming one or the other only upon observation?
The answer lies somewhere in the middle. But after seeing “Iowa State” used practically as a synonym for “college sports bottom-feeder” across the Internet, please forgive those of us who aren’t quite done looking over our shoulders.