GRIDIRON BRACKETOLOGY, Part 3: How College Football’s New Tournament-Playoff Saved The Bowls

July 12, 2012 No Comments

The King is dead. Long live the King.

As outlined in Part 2 of the Gridiron Bracketology series, fans were ready yesterday for a 16-team, college-football playoff-tournament. So when it was announced that college football voted to abolish the old “bowl-and-poll systems” that crowned national champions in the FBS division, in favor of a new playoff format, the majority of fans have seen this as a positive change for the better. (And even though it’s starting off as a relatively modest 4-team playoff – you have to crawl before you can walk, I guess.)

The people who designed the new college-football tournament system, went to great lengths to protect the tradition and heritage of college football as best as they could. And one of the ways they did that was to include the BCS Bowls into the playoff mix.

Building “major-bowl inclusion” into the new system shouldn’t come as a surprise, but considering that they were a collective group who were led kicking and screaming to the table of change, BCS Bowl organizers should thank their lucky stars that they ended up being invited to the party.

No matter if you’re a proponent of an expanded tourney that includes 8- or 16-teams, or more of a college-football traditionalist, the move to include the bowls into the playoff mix appears to be a best-of-all-world’s type of solution that everyone seems happy with.

Before these changes were announced, there is little doubt that college football’s bowl games were in a heap of trouble from a financial standpoint. In an era where the average U.S. citizen has a plethora of quality choices all vying for his or her entertainment time and attention – things like the Internet, hundreds of TV channels, video games, social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), on-demand movies, portable electronic devices (smart phones, tablet devices), etc. – people can afford to be picky about how they choose to spend their allotted leisure time.

The old days where there were only three major TV networks and times when televised college football games were considered a rarity, were over more than 30 years ago. And when it came to college football bowl games, fans were becoming increasingly complacent and disinterested in those events, seeing them as little more than competitive exhibition games without relevance to the major sports landscape.

As a result, bowl games were dying on the vine. Aside from college football fans who supported their particular team in a bowl (or those folks who spend the holidays in Las Vegas), a national, rooting interest in bowl games was dwindling by the year.

This loss-of-interest was both a sad reality and frustrating situation, because major college football, at its best, can be one of the most-exciting, adrenaline-filled events to watch in all of forms of entertainment.

Inclusion of Bowls Huge

As bleak as things were looking for the bowls, the announcement of the new tournament-playoff system in college football – with the inclusion of the major BCS Bowl Games built-in as a part of the tourney, however, changes the future course of these bowl events from an apocalyptic future of financial struggle, to an exciting road paved with unlimited growth potential and new, lucrative opportunities.

The time-honored bowl games were saved by this news. All the classic bowls that people hold near and dear to their memories, such as the Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Citrus Bowl and two other yet-to-be announced bowls (most-likely the Cotton Bowl and perhaps a brand-new bowl) – will ALL play a vital role in the new tournament. Better still, even more bowls become mixed into the playoff formula as the field of 4-teams inevitably grows into an 8- or 16-team tournament.

All is not lost for the other bowl games, either. Those bowl games deemed as below “major-bowl status” – I.e., the ones played well-before New Year’s Day – aren’t going anywhere. Accordingly, the other 48 or so schools designated as “bowl eligible” in a given year and yet who find themselves standing on the outside-and-looking-in at the playoff brackets, those teams won’t have a need to fret – because those schools will still have those other bowl games to call home.

When tournament expansion occurs (and it will), bowl officials and bowl organizers will undoubtedly transform into the most-jovial individuals on the planet. And considering that these are entities who long-feared and ferociously resisted changes to the system over the years, these major Bowl Games are almost certain to see significant boosts in several critical revenue-areas due to an expanded tournament format.

In studying the financial health of the bowls before the changes were announced, it became clear that a boost in revenue was not only desired by bowl officials, but it was mandatory for them to stay in existence. The true nature of the bowl’s rapidly declining health is stunning in both its severity and scope. A new playoff system is the heart transplant that Bowl organizers needed to stay relevant in today’s world of sports business. Categories marked for significant potential growth as a result of the new format include:

Overall Bowl-Revenues From Playoffs
Bowl Television Ratings
Bowl Ticket Demand
Bowl-Game Media Event-Coverage
Multi-Media Broadcast Rights
Bowl Game Title Sponsors, Corporate Partners

Overall Bowl-Revenues From Playoffs

Even though the Bowls no longer control the entire revenue-pie with regards to their own Bowl game (since others are now involved), the new tournament playoff-format offers the potential for a significantly larger revenue pie as a whole. And although the revenue pie is now divvied up amongst more pie-eaters, everyone involved will be served heartier slices of pie, slathered with a creamy topping of large bottom-line profits.

Sharing the revenue was a hard concept to sell to Bowl organizer’s at first. They needed to be assured that the new plan was better for them from a big-picture standpoint (even though the bowl’s own declining financial health was rapidly reducing any leverage they may have had to boycott or balk at any newly proposed ideas).

In a way, Bowl Officials are now looked upon as being similar to BCS Conference Officials, and viewed as organizations who made sacrifices within their own kingdoms, in a show of support, confidence and faith in a potentially better financial model as promised under the new system.

At this point, it’s unclear exactly just how the new system’s financial model and revenue-sharing formula will work, as the details of such things haven’t been openly revealed as of yet. But it’s safe to say, in general terms, that those Bowl games who are a part of the new system, will receive guaranteed revenue-sharing percentages of either, a) the entire tournament pie as a whole (acting as a single football-tournament entity) or, b) the shared revenue of the increased profits derived from their own “new-and-improved” bowl playoff game.

No matter how the formula is calculated, the bottom line is that the new playoff system is designed to generate larger revenues than the old system could ever hope to do. Primarily, this happens because these new bowl playoff games offer a changed dynamic that includes:

More meaningful playoff games
Games that are watched by many more people
Games that are significant, revenue-generating events – each and every year – for the foreseeable future

Contrary to the old system, where a major bowl game’s importance and the attention it garnered, fluctuated each year based on its relevance to the national-championship picture. In the old system (the BCS years, as well as the pre-BCS periods), in most years, only one or two bowl games, at most, would have virtually any impact or bearing on college football’s national champion.

Yes, the new plan required a leap of faith that profits from the new playoff system are going to be as big as everyone thinks. (And you better believe that the call to share these profits among several entities is going to be the driving force as to why the tournament-format will most-assuredly expand sooner, rather than later.) As a result, Bowls Officials, like the BCS, are now being applauded for their courage, foresight and faith in the new system.

But on the flip side, what choice did the Bowls really have?

Unlike the BCS Conferences, who were guaranteed to play a vital role in any new system, once the “railway-cars-of-change” gained steam and started rolling down the tracks, the Bowl game officials were left with the choice of either jumping on-board the money train, or getting left behind at a train station located somewhere between the crossroads of Afterthought and Irrelevance.

If Bowl Officials had decided to play “hard ball” and boycotted the new plan, the powers-that-be in college football could have easily instituted a “NCAA College Football Tournment” that didn’t include any of the bowl games, and grabbed the top 4- 8- or 16-teams every year – leaving the BCS Bowls with nothing but table scraps and match-ups featuring teams ranked No. 17 and lower to fill their holiday bowl-game schedules.

Faced with the prospect of losing the top 16 teams in the country each and every year, the Bowls would have faded into oblivion as quickly as you could say, “National Invitational Tournament.”

All things considered, the Bowls had no choice but to LOVE the new plan.

Fortunately, the new plan is a win-win for everyone involved in big-time college football.

Televised Bowl-Game Ratings

With the new tourney system in place, each of the major Bowl games will now air unopposed to one another, on national television and feature dramatic, meaningful elimination playoff-games – each and every year. Subsequently, the new system now makes each one of these bowl games, on their own, compelling, must-watch “television events” for college football.

The television situation for Bowl Games was bad and getting worse by the year. In fact, few people realize just how bad the TV ratings had really gotten.

To grasp just how dire college football’s bowl-game ratings were becoming, according to Nielsen, the bowl games played in 2011 and 2012 had overall average-ratings that fell to an all-time low in the 14-year history of the Bowl Championship Series.

Make no mistake about it, television money drives sports entertainment in the modern world. It is here where the Bowls found themselves in big trouble. The 2011-2012 bowl ratings numbers were stunningly bad, with Nielsen low-lights that included:

In 2011-2012, a whopping 21 of the 34 bowls tracked by Nielsen had lower ratings than the previous season, including 11 bowls that had their ratings plummet by 20 percent or more. (Ouch.)
Six of the seven highest-rated bowl games played in 2011-2012, saw their ratings drop from the previous 2010-2011 season (meaning that even the good news wasn’t very good).
Last season’s Orange Bowl (featuring West Virginia’s 70-33 blowout over Clemson) had the lowest-ratings ever for a BCS bowl game.

Don’t blame the Orange Bowl’s numbers on the 37-point blowout, either. Last year’s bowl games featured 18 games that were decided by a touchdown or less. Even the highly entertaining 2012 Rose Bowl match-up between Wisconsin and Oregon (which the Ducks won in a shootout, 45-38), saw their TV ratings drop from the previous year’s 2011 Rose Bowl (Wisconsin vs. TCU).

The major networks weren’t happy with these developments. ESPN, for example, paid big money for the broadcast rights to the Orange Bowl two years ago, and in that time, they have hardly gotten their money’s worth. In fact, three of the five lowest-rated BCS games in history, were Orange Bowls. To make matters worse, those three low-rated Orange Bowl contests all occurred within the last four years (in 2012, 2011 and 2009). Can you say “downward trend?”

When a network experiences disastrous ratings for a sporting event, two major things happen:

No. 1: It becomes harder to sell advertising for that same event the following season, which exacerbates the network’s problem over time.

No. 2: If the ratings do not reach certain levels of promised viewership, a network may even have to refund some of the ad-money back to the advertiser.

(Does ESPN, owned by Disney, seem like the type of company who tolerates airing programming that forces them to give refunds to advertisers?)

When the giants of network television, the ones who pay the freight for the largest chunk of your sports income, become disappointed and disenchanted over the performance of your sport, you have BIG problems.

It makes sense now, doesn’t it? Can you see why a new playoff system was suddenly and mysteriously pushed forward with renewed vigor and unexpected enthusiasm?

A tournament playoff for college football breathes new life into these BCS Bowls, transforming them from dusty, exhibition contests, to dramatic, must-watch elimination-game “events” with national-championship repercussions.

Don’t underestimate the impact that a tournament format can have as a rating’s influencer. The elimination-game dynamic is a game-changer for TV ratings. Take the following hypothetical case-study for a new-look Orange Bowl, as food for thought.

Case Study: New Life for the Orange Bowl:

It may surprise college-football aficionados to learn that the Orange Bowl has had a horrific history of bad television-ratings recently. According to Nielsen research numbers, as previously mentioned, three of the five worst-ever ratings for BCS bowl games, were Orange Bowls. The 2012 Orange Bowl had the worst ratings ever for a televised BCS bowl game and that game ranked as the lowest-rated Orange Bowl – since the 1993 Orange Bowl (a contest between Florida State and Nebraska).

All is not lost for the Orange Bowl, though. Quite to the contrary, in fact. Despite abysmal TV ratings over the past 4 years, the Orange Bowl’s future looks brighter than ever before. And it’s all thanks to the new tournament-playoff format in major college football.

Even if the playoff format is expanded to 16 teams, the Orange Bowl would still be considered one of the premier, crown-jewel Bowl games of the tournament. As a part of the 16-team playoff, the Orange Bowl is guaranteed one of the following three “good-news scenarios” each year – all of which occur as a result of being both a major TV sporting event and a stand-alone, big-time Bowl game played within the new tournament structure:

Good News, Part. 1: During its “lowest-seeded years” of the bowl-rotation, the Orange Bowl will feature an elimination match-up between two of the eight teams still alive in the tournament, with the winner advancing to college football’s “Final Four”

Good News, Part 2: Other years, due to the rotation, the Orange Bowl becomes a showcase event as part of college football’s “Final Four” – where two teams fight it out for the right to advance to the National Championship Game

Good News, Part 3: During its luckiest years in the rotation, the Orange Bowl serves as the National Championship Game

The details may change a bit with expansion, but no matter how you slice it, it’s now good to be the Orange Bowl – or any other major BCS Bowl grandfathered into the tournament rotation, for that matter. Those bowls are suddenly guaranteed to become entrenched as one of TV’s hottest sporting events every year, regardless of whether the tournament is 4-, 8-, or 16-teams.

It’s an amazing development. These Bowl-game officials, who, as of 2011-2012, oversaw bowl games that were being watched by fewer people with every passing season, now suddenly find themselves in the television catbird-seat of a college-football playoff system.

If You Build It, They Will Watch

With television being the key component to success in today’s world of sports, any ratings analysis relating to college football calls for a brief overview of sports ratings in general.

Ratings for televised sporting events as a whole, have been decreasing for years. This is mostly due to the fact that sports, as an entertainment category, has been rapidly fragmenting and segmenting into its own compartmentalized, group sub-categories.

Sports fans now have a wide variety of 24-hour sports channels to choose from, as well as specific sports-programming choices for things like the soccer channel, a golf channel, the MLB package, tennis channel, NBA TV, etc., to get their own fix of whatever sport they’re drawn to most. This ultimately means that sports fans have broken off into their own specialized, niche channels, and as a result, everyone’s TV ratings have decreased.

The irony is thick, actually, because even though more people are now watching sports more than ever before, the ratings don’t reflect it, because sports fans have fragmented and they are all watching different sporting events.

From a sports-marketing perspective, a sport’s fan who chooses to watch a golf tournament, instead of the Red Sox-Yankees baseball game, is still watching sports as a general niche category, but now, that person is choosing to watch one specific sports show over another – a “niche-within-a-niche,” in other words.

This isn’t just a TV sports phenomenon, either. It’s happening in all categories of television entertainment, not just sports. The person who tunes in to the game-show channel, instead of watching The Price Is Right on a major network, still loves game shows and falls into the “game-show lover” demographic, but in the modern world of television, The Price Is Right takes the hit ratings-wise.

College football has not been immune to this conundrum, either, and it’s one of the reasons why regular-season ratings have dropped over the years. In the 1960s or 1970s, fans of college football had pretty much one or two choices every Saturday – the college football “Game of the Week” airing on one or two major networks. Today, however, a fan of “Big Ten football” may choose to watch a game on the Big Ten Network, a Big Ten game that is airing on ESPN or ESPN 2 or airing nationally on ABC, and all airing simultaneously (not to mention if a fan has the game broadcast locally or subscribes to a special pay-per-view college football channel).

As a general rule, the more you fragment, segment and divide groups of people who fall into a specific category, into specialized sub-categories of niche interest, the more the ratings numbers for each channel and each program, decrease.

There are exceptions to the rule, however, as major-event sports like the NFL, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament and this year’s LeBron James-led Miami Heat world-title run in the NBA Playoffs have all proven, when there is an epic and compelling sporting event on television, people will tune in to watch and the ratings ultimately prove to be strong.

Accordingly, a major college-football tournament (especially with an expanded tournament format featuring 8- or 16-teams), will immediately join the elite list of compelling, must-watch televised sporting-events each year – transforming these traditional BCS Bowl games from ratings duds – into ratings studs.

Ticket Demands for Bowl Games

In recent years, college football and Bowl-game organizers have received a one-two punch combination of “bad sports-marketing news” – which features a left jab of rapidly declining television ratings followed by a right hook of steadily decreasing ticket sales.

For the 2011 season, major Bowl games played during late 2011 and 2012, saw their average bowl-attendance drop below 51,000 fans for the first time since 1979.

Steve Weiberg, of USA Today, wrote an excellent piece (“Major College Football Attendance Drops”) in late-January, 2012, which outlined big-time college football’s “turnstile dysfunction” issues. In the FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision), Weiberg pointed out several attendance statistics that should have sounded the red-alert alarms for both college football and BCS Bowl officials.

The average regular-season crowd fell by 415 from a year earlier, to 45,498.
The bowls’ average attendance dropped a fourth consecutive year to 50,435, down more than 3,700 from the 2008 season and the lowest since 1978.
The SEC’s average (75,832) was down 887 and the league’s lowest in four years. The Big Ten’s (71,439) attendance was down 667 and was its lowest in three years. Only the Big 12 and lower-echelon Sun Belt and Mid-American showed increases.

Surely there are economic reasons that have contributed to the recent downturn in ticket purchases, which also impacts people’s financial ability to travel and purchase tickets to events. There is also significantly more televised college-football to watch on TV than ever before, which may have also impacted game attendance.

But for the Bowls, declining ticket sales over four successive years, which have dropped bowl game attendance to a 33-year low, combined with steadily declining TV ratings to near-all-time lows, are warning signals that no one could afford to ignore – especially with TV networks and corporate sponsors all paying close attention.

Adding further to the drive toward systemic change, is the fact that lower-level college football, such as FCS (Football Championship Subdivision) and Division 2, saw modest increases to their game attendance in the same time span. It’s here where you note that every division of college football, except the FBS, utilizes a tournament-playoff format (of 16 teams or more) to decide its national champion (D3 uses a 32-team tournament, covering 5 weeks).

Now that major college football has joined the rest of the civilized gridiron world and enacted a playoff system, ticket sales to these single-elimination bowl-game events should sky-rocket.

“Fans Won’t Travel Argument”:

There’s been a long-held belief that’s still trumpeted by both those who have long-opposed a major college football tournament and those who argue against expansion of the 4-team playoff format, that it is asking too much of a loyal fan base to travel across the country, from game to game, in successive weeks to watch playoff football.

With an event the size and magnitude of a major college football tourney, however, that argument may have little merit. Let’s say that the tournament expands to 16-teams. A 16 team tourney requires that fans of a particular college team – say a team with a rabid, hungry fan-base like the University of Alabama – would hypothetically have to travel to attend games from week to week, over the course of four weeks. Even if you didn’t believe that Crimson Tide fans would travel four times in four weeks to watch Alabama playoff games, you’d still be discounting several other key facts…

Limited Number of Games: A 16 team tourney would have 8 games the first week, 4 games the second week, 2 games the third week and a championship game. That’s 15 tournament games in total – held across the nation and with 16 different teams – to decide the national championship every year. (An 8 team tourney has 7 games total.) These are hardly taxing numbers for a fan base the size and scope of any Top 10 college-football team. Ticket demand for playoff games will far outweigh ticket availability – a situation that did not exist in the old system.
Predetermined Dates & Locations: Even with bowl rotation, the dates and cities of these events are predetermined for YEARS in advance, which allows for bowl-event organizers, and even ticket brokers, the opportunity to sell tickets to playoff games dubbed “ the final 8,” “final 4,” “the national championship” etc., for years in advance. These games, no matter the tourney size, will have a demand for tickets, even if the game’s participants aren’t known in advance.
National Alumni of Major Universities: Virtually all of the schools with football programs labeled as a “Top 25 football team”, possess an alumni fan-base that’s significant on a national scale. That’s a wide net to draw fans from nationally to sell tickets to playoff bowl games played in various locations around the country. When you combine the 1) in-state fan-base who will travel, 2) with large numbers of national alumni, and, 3) add-in other fans of college football who wish to take in the game “as an event,” you’re talking a huge mass of potential ticket buyers.
Ticket Demand, Ticket Prices Rise – By Round: Even in a 16-team tourney, the ticket demand and asking price for tickets will start to rise as you move through each round of the tournament. This means that fans of a school (in-state and nationally), who can’t find or afford tickets to a “Football Final Four” event or the “National Championship Game,” will still have a chance at landing first- or second-round tickets at more affordable choices.

The naysayers will argue that most of those factors mentioned already existed for Bowls and Bowl organizers still had trouble selling tickets. Comparing the old-system bowl games with new system playoff bowl-games, however, is akin to an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Old system bowl games were essentially exhibition games with big money payouts to each school. A single-elimination playoff game – with national-championship ramifications – raises the stakes across the board and makes the game a must-see event.

And when the stakes are raised for a sport like football, get ready to watch the ticket-sales soar.

Bowl-Game Media Event-Coverage

With the advent of a playoff, college football has joined the modern era of sports marketing. Before long, the bowls will become one of the primary beneficiaries of this systemic change. Aside from a bigger pool of overall revenue to draw from, increased TV ratings and more robust ticket sales, there are other ancillary benefits that will assuredly pay dividends for the bowls, and this includes the media coverage and buzz that each playoff bowl game will generate.

As an example, look at the media event-coverage for a BCS bowl like the Fiesta Bowl. In the old Bowl system, the event would be promoted primarily by the TV network that’s broadcasting the game. The game-day highlights would be shown on all the national sports news channels, but that’s about it. In the 4 or 5 weeks leading up to the game, there was often very little done in the way of pre-game Fiesta Bowl hype or serious pre-game analysis (unless the Fiesta Bowl had national championship game ramifications that year).

Imagine the Fiesta Bowl as placed within the new playoff system, or any BCS Bowl for that matter, in terms of its relationship to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. More specifically, think about the hype that occurs the week before and week in-between the “Sweet 16” games and the “Final Four” (because tournament football games would always occur a week apart).

Networks would send teams of reporters to broadcast daily from the location of the event and to cover each game. There would daily analysis done for the upcoming games, there would be special editions newspapers dedicated to the games, a never-ending supply of website coverage and online stories, it’d be the topic of national radio shows, online bracket challenges would pop up everywhere, etc.

All the new-found media coverage and attention, ultimately leads to a bigger spotlight on these playoff bowl games as “events” and as a result, more revenue opportunities arise from corporate sponsors, advertisers and sales of bowl-related items. It’s a game-changer on many levels.

Multi-Media Broadcast Rights

It’s largely unknown how lucrative the non-television broadcast deals have been for the BCS Bowl games in the past (games that were not a part of the national championship), but most assuredly, the new playoff format is a potential cash cow, for everyone involved with these the tournament Bowl games in college football’s new system.

When everything increases around the Bowl event – such as the aforementioned TV ratings, the ticket-demand, the week-long media hype, fan anticipation, etc., – then other revenue-streams related to the event, grow accordingly, as well. This includes other potentially lucrative things like the bidding to air these bowl games on nationally syndicated radio and pay-per-view streaming broadcasts on the internet.

While these other media outlets don’t offer the ridiculously large sums of money that TV brings to the table, they still cannot be undersold as new-found revenue opportunities for each of these bowl games.

In the past, a nationally syndicated, radio broadcast rights for a BCS Bowl game like the Citrus Bowl, for example, probably hasn’t been a financial difference-maker on a yearly basis for bowl organizers. Along those lines, the demand for fans to purchase live, streaming feeds to watch bowl games online on a pay-per-view basis, most likely, has also not been a real factor to the Citrus Bowl’s bottom-line financials in years past.

As part of a new NCAA Football Tournament, however, where the Citrus Bowl winner advances in the tournament – the drama and importance surrounding the game – makes it a can’t-miss event, no matter the broadcast format. People will tune in to listen to a college football playoff game on the radio (just as they do for the basketball tournament) and more people would be interested in an option to purchase the online streaming feed of the game.

It’s the same mantra – growing demand a buzz-worthy event, almost always triggers positive financial growth.

Bowl Game Title-Sponsors, Corporate Partners

Similar to the way that television networks view things, when the TV ratings and ticket sales surrounding a bowl-game event begin to decrease year after year, then corporations ultimately begin to view the bowl as a less-attractive vehicle to attach their corporate identity to. This is one of the primary reasons that corporation’s seem to come-and-go as title sponsors for bowl games so frequently.

The naming rights (title sponsorships) have become almost a running joke with these college football bowl games. Fans and media alike make fun of bowl-game title sponsorships and how often they change. When a corporation pays big-money to attach its brand to a bowl game, becoming part of a running joke isn’t an expected return on the investment.

Corporations want to associate their name and corporate identity with something that’s going to, a) be viewed as a memorable, quality event that people enjoy (positive brand association), and, b) be seen by as many eyeballs as possible, for as long as possible and for as many times as possible (aka, brand impressions).

The new system is a game-changer for title sponsorships. Bowls who are a part of the tournament-playoff system will now have the ability to confidently sell the corporate world on the idea of sponsoring an event that offers unprecedented levels of drama, anticipation, viewership and riveting story lines. All of which directly impacts both the quality of the event and the potential number of brand impressions.

As a result, these new Bowl Playoff Games will see higher dollar figures for title-sponsorships and longer-term, multi-year partnership deals, as well as an increase in other corporate partnerships relating to these events.

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Editor’s Note: Gridiron Bracketology is a multi-part editorial analysis by editor-in-chief, Mike Podoll, exploring the full-scale impact and future ramifications of college football’s historic decision to abolish the BCS system in favor of a new 4-team tournament-playoff format to determine an a national champion at the highest level of college football.)

(Coming Soon…)
PART 4 of GRIDIRON BRACKETOLOGY: Explores the history of tournament expansion in the college basketball and the fascinating TV parallel that connects it to football playoff-expansion.

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Mike Podoll is the editor-in-chief of Football Coach Daily website. E-mail: mpodoll@threecyclemedia.com

Follow Mike Podoll on Twitter @fcDaily_Podoll

Follow Football Coach Daily on Twitter @fbCoachDaily

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Previous Chapter: (CLICK Link Below To Read)
PART 1 of GRIDIRON BRACKETOLOGY: “Ramifications of College Football’s New Playoff System Are Huge, Far-Reaching”

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Previous Chapter: (CLICK Link Below To Read)
PART 2 of GRIDIRON BRACKETOLOGY: Exploring the concept of tournament expansion and how expanding to 8-teams, 16-teams or even more teams, is not only inevitable, but why it also makes sense.

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