Utah is going to the Sugar Bowl, where they will have no shot at winning the NCAA football championship, despite the fact that they may finish the season as the only team without a loss.
The NCAA says it supports sportsmanship. But is it sporting or fair to tell a team that it cannot win the championship, no matter how well it performs on the field? Of course not.
The real reason we don't have a college football playoff can be found in the work of one of the 2007 Nobel Prize winners in economics. Roger Myerson and Mark Satterthwaite's paper on bargaining shows that two parties can fail to reach an agreement even if it is common knowledge that gains from trade exist. The necessary ingredient is asymmetric information.
That's exactly what's going on here. Everyone --- everyone --- in college athletics knows that a college football playoff would be a huge moneymaker. Huger (is that a word? if not, it should be) even than the current bowl system. It's common knowledge that a playoff could make everyone better off.
We don't have it, for the following reason. Suppose the current system nets $9 Zillion for the BCS conferences, and $1 Zillion for the non-BCS conferences. Suppose everyone knows that a playoff would result in at least $10 Zillion, but that nobody knows exactly how much.
The extra money needs to be split among the schools. But how? Should the non-BCS schools get half? Should they get a 10%? Should they get a payment that's proportional to their current revenues?
It's simply not clear how this extra should be split. The BCS conferences want a large share of it. So do the non-BCS schools. So no one is willing to make a deal.
Posts
1 comment:
"It's simply not clear how this extra should be split. The BCS conferences want a large share of it. So do the non-BCS schools. So no one is willing to make a deal."
- I would place my bet that the BSC schools don't want to make the trade. Right now there are 6 BCS conferences and 5 non-BCS conferences (who's teams can qualify for a BSC bowl game). If the $ is divided up by a playoff, then there is less of a chance that the current BCS schools would their current cut of the money.
Non-BSC schools have less to lose, and the BCS schools are obviously risk-adverse. They payoff for a few schools could be bigger, but the the distribution to the BCS schools would likely be smaller.
Post a Comment