Home field advantage
- Thread starter Bucket Getter
- Start date
See college baseball and basketball, although venue size is smaller. I hear you, though. Lucas Oil would have been perfect for IU/ND.
The object is to create an outcome that everyone involved can sign on to and not sue for anti-trust (and either win or be granted a TRO).
The SEC and B10 can’t simply ride roughshod over everyone else (in either access to competition or financial reward). While the Big XII and ACC are obvious partners, there is also the Group of 5 conferences and Notre Dame.
Most often overlooked is the continued fealty to the Rose, Orange, Sugar, Peach, Cotton and Fiesta Bowls. Each entity has its own goals and priorities. Why the latter three are considered on par with the first three is a mystery, but the Rose Bowl continues to have at its biggest priority that 20 second return from commercial break visual of sunset bathing the San Gabriel mountains and insisting that its game be played at 2pm PT to accommodate this. Equally perplexing is the B10 continuing to enable the folks in Pasadena rather than use its institutional muscle to create a bowl in Indianapolis , Minneapolis, Detroit or St. Louis -likely soon to include Chicago (indoor stadia in the B10 footprint) that can serve as the home field bowl for the B10 that New Orleans/Atlanta serve for the SEC, a bowl league fans might be able to drive to rather than book another set of flights/hotels and rental cars.
With so many entities, the agreed upon solution is likely to contain many compromises and concessions rather than expecting everyone else to bend the knee to the SEC.
There’s a lot of data that can be gathered (quality of competition, attendance, TV ratings, general vibe, etc.) to be gathered over the next two years to guide the next iteration of the playoff.
Of course one solution would be for the B10 and SEC to create its own tournament and let everyone else do their own thing and maybe offer to play the two championship against each other (which was the notion of the first four Super Bowls before the merger).
