“The NCAA is wrong.”
It’s an immediate response. It’s a given. Grass is green, Kansas is good at basketball, and the NCAA is wrong. After years of exploitation, incompetence, and disingenuity, the immediate reaction from most corners any time the NCAA makes a decision on anything is, without need for thought, “The NCAA is wrong.” If not that, it’s the worst–person–you–know meme. Full-throated criticism or backhanded agreement. These are the only two ways many know how to interact with the NCAA.
People love to hate the NCAA, and it’s hard to blame them. The NCAA’s history is full of mistakes both moral and practical. There is a body of evidence from which the reflexive anti-NCAA opinion spawns, and the NCAA piled up that evidence itself.
The problem is, the NCAA isn’t always wrong.
Last night, the NCAA decided not to grant full postseason football eligibility to James Madison, Jacksonville State, and Tarleton State. James Madison and Jacksonville State are in the second year of a two-year FCS-to-FBS transition. Tarleton State is in the fourth year of a four-year Division II-to-Division I transition, playing at the FCS level. Under the rules—which apply to everyone—none of these teams are eligible for postseason play unless, in JMU and Jacksonville State’s case, there aren’t enough bowl-eligible teams after awarding spots to everyone with six wins.
Debates can be had about the merit of these rules; rules designed to keep FBS membership a scarce and therefore valuable resource; rules designed to keep schools from trying to compete unprepared at the FBS level and dropping back down; rules designed to prevent the scholarship-cutting such a self-demotion might entail. The NCAA has been debating its transition rules. It changed some of them a few months ago. But James Madison knew the transition rules in the summer of 2017, after it won its second FCS national championship, and it knew the transition rules in the summer of 2021, when it turned out to be two seasons away from a 10–0 start, and it knew the transition rules in the 2021–22 academic year, when it finally decided to make the leap.
James Madison knew these rules, and Virginia’s attorney general—Jason Miyares, who now says his office is exploring legal options against the NCAA—didn’t explore legal options against the NCAA until this season.
That’s not really our complaint, though.
Our complaint is that the NCAA is made up of NCAA schools.
This is the issue with the blind, numb, automatic response that “the NCAA is wrong.” What is the NCAA? It’s not college sports’ only governing body, established by God or the U.S. Constitution to rule everything in its domain. It’s an organization built by different universities to handle the administrative duties necessary to play the sports they play in a nationally competitive way. It’s not The Schools vs. The NCAA, as it’s often made out to be. The NCAA *is* the schools. Last night’s final decision came from the Division I Board of Directors Administrative Committee, a committee which appears to be made up of twenty university presidents or chancellors (including one from the Sun Belt Conference, of which JMU is a member), one athletics director, and three other figures. It didn’t come from Charlie Baker or any of the other NCAA employees. It came from the people who built the NCAA—the colleges against whom James Madison and Jacksonville State and Tarleton State play. Again: The NCAA *is* the schools.
This isn’t to say that the NCAA is without flaw. Persons within it have, historically, wrestled power away from schools and conferences, biting off more duties than any entity of the NCAA’s size and resources could possibly perform with competence. The association grew so fond of waivers and other exceptions to rules that schools now expect these exemptions, believing—perhaps rightly—that no rule is really a rule if you’re willing to throw enough lawyers into the breach. The NCAA has made plenty of mistakes. But James Madison? Jacksonville State? Those guys weren’t screwed by the NCAA. Those guys were screwed by their conferences—the Sun Belt and Conference USA—and by the College Football Playoff committee.
Here’s how:
Both James Madison and Jacksonville State are very likely to receive bowl invitations in the end. As our model has forecast nearly all year, it is highly unlikely that there will be 82 bowl-eligible FBS teams. The Sun Belt, Conference USA, and the CFP committee could all know this. They could consult the statisticians, looking at our model and models like ours. At the very least, they could know of the possibility. The rule stating 6-win James Madison and Jacksonville State will be invited before 5–7 teams is a very public rule, and invitations to 5–7 teams because of a scarcity of 6-win teams have been common in recent seasons.
Despite this, the Sun Belt, Conference USA, and the CFP committee didn’t build any contingencies into their plans. They didn’t prepare for this scenario. The CFP committee—an entity separate from the NCAA but also constructed by the schools—said it wouldn’t rank teams who weren’t bowl eligible. The Sun Belt—an entity distinct from the NCAA but constructed by its own schools—said it couldn’t justify allowing a team with no path to a top-25 ranking into its conference championship, given how valuable it is to produce the top-ranked Group of Five champion, a designation which comes with a New Year’s Six bowl bid. Conference USA didn’t say much of anything, but it handled the situation the same way. Now, ESPN—heavily tied to the CFP committee—is blasting the decision the CFP committee didn’t need the NCAA to make, providing cover for the committee while the Sun Belt and Conference USA breathe sighs of relief that they weren’t the ones who had to do something hard.
It would have been easy for the CFP committee to make clear that if JMU or a similarly transitioning team were to become bowl-eligible, they’d become ranking-eligible as well, leaving us all waiting to see if a hypothetical 12–0 JMU would be ranked after Thanksgiving weekend. It would have been easy for the Sun Belt and Conference USA to make a rule stating that FCS-to-FBS transitioning programs would be eligible for the conference championship *if* they became bowl-eligible thanks to a scarcity of 6-win teams, something that, again, we’d know the outcome of next weekend. It would still be easy for all three to do this, but none are, and everyone is instead pointing their fingers at the NCAA, whose hands they tied.
Why won’t the Sun Belt, Conference USA, and the CFP committee change course now? They’ve painted themselves into a corner.
Conference USA said New Mexico State clinched a conference championship spot before they’d clinched second place in the league. New Mexico State has no chance at a New Year’s Six berth, and Liberty’s chance (Liberty clinched first place) would probably be better through playing the true second-place finisher, whichever of NMSU and JSU that turns out to be, but Conference USA granted the privilege to NMSU before NMSU clinched finishing ahead of JSU in the standings. Conference USA could have decided before the year that it would do what was best for the league. Instead, it made hasty, short-sighted rules, then left the possibility open to changing them if the NCAA changed their own.
The Sun Belt likewise told its members this summer that JMU wouldn’t be eligible for the conference championship, a situation which currently leaves five teams in the Sun Belt East with a path to the championship game entering Saturday’s games. Had the NCAA ruled in favor of JMU last night? Three of those teams’ chances would have disappeared, and the other two would have seen their own likelihoods drop nearly all the way to zero. Like NMSU, none of the Sun Belt East contenders have a chance at being the top-ranked Group of Five champion, and like Liberty, Troy would likely be better served with the opportunity to play JMU for the conference title, but the Sun Belt says the NCAA shot its shoes while the Sun Belt stands there fiddling with the gun.
The CFP committee? It’s signaled repeatedly that Tulane, underwhelming though Tulane may be, is the leading candidate for this coveted New Year’s Six spot. It’s said it won’t rank JMU. It could pivot—I’m not aware of any NCAA rule that governs the CFP committee’s rankings—but that would require admitting it has responsibility. Everyone is mad at the NCAA for what Conference USA, the Sun Belt, and the CFP committee did to JMU and JSU. Had the NCAA ruled differently, everyone would be mad at the NCAA for what Conference USA, the Sun Belt, and the CFP committee did to NMSU, Coastal Carolina, Appalachian State, and whoever wins the AAC.
The NCAA is a front, and the NCAA is a scapegoat. The NCAA is college sports’ administrative body, responsible for running most national championship competitions and determining the eligibility of teams and athletes. It did not come out of any womb in this state. Schools built it to do all these things, and schools contribute to every decision the NCAA makes. Schools chose the NCAA, and they continue to choose it, and whenever the NCAA does something they don’t like, they act as though the NCAA is Adam and they are the birds in Eden, flying around in the NCAA’s dominion, waiting on their overlord to give them their very name. The NCAA is far from infallible. But dammit, it’s not the only one making these decisions. And last night, given the position granted it by the CFP committee and the Sun Belt and Conference USA, given a choice between leaving the power in those three bodies’ hands or taking the fall while those three bodies switched which stakeholders they screwed, it got the decision right.
The Carousel’s Spinning
Want to know something funny?
After Texas A&M beats Abilene Christian this weekend, they might be ranked.
I don’t think the CFP committee will do this—rankings are coveted, and Texas A&M does not particularly want to be ranked right now, and the committee is an organization built to be a people-pleaser—but it would be justified in doing so. At 7–4, Texas A&M would have victories over four SEC teams and losses only to Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Miami, the first three each by one possession. Texas A&M has a great résumé for a top-25 team. It’s two years removed from landing one of the greatest recruiting classes in history. It fired its head coach.
This is old news by now, and nobody is particularly surprised that Jimbo Fisher is gone. He was brought in to make Texas A&M a top-ten program, and he didn’t do that, and Texas A&M’s boosters acquired the talent for him to get it done. But I wanted to throw the ranking piece in there. I think it’s very funny. This is the AP Poll, not the CFP rankings, and it’s the final AP Poll, which comes after bowl games. But: Texas A&M only finished the season ranked three times in the eighteen years preceding Fisher’s arrival. Texas A&M set high expectations, and Fisher failed to meet them, and it’s fair to argue this was a bad performance by Fisher. But man, everyone seems to perform badly in College Station.
In other coaching news:
- David Braun has been named the fulltime head coach at Northwestern, taking a team that went 1–11 last year and bringing them to the brink of bowl eligibility despite assuming control at the last minute amidst what I believe was and is the biggest scandal in Northwestern athletic history. Braun’s performance does offer more explanation for North Dakota State’s dynasty falling apart (Braun was the defensive coordinator there from 2019 through 2022), but in future-looking territory, his promotion sets Northwestern up well for maximizing its meager potential.
- Mississippi State fired Zach Arnett, who took over a hard but not terrible situation in the wake of Mike Leach’s death. I will never understand why Arnett tried to completely change the program’s offensive identity, or why Mississippi State would make him the interim knowing he intended to do it. An inference, off of this, is that Mississippi State didn’t know, and when the team turned out so bad, this got Arnett fired.
- We’ve mentioned Boise State’s downfall under Andy Avalos, and Boise State evidently felt the same as us, firing the third-year head coach after a 5–5 start on the heels of 7–5 and 10–4 seasons. Ten wins is a lot, but the last time Boise State lost four or more games three years in a row was the mid-90s, over the program’s first three seasons in what is now the FBS.
- Brady Hoke is retiring, leaving San Diego State’s job open. What a strange career that man had.
- There are rumors that Chip Kelly is going to be fired at UCLA, but those came out hot and then walked themselves back to being contingent on the Bruins’ performances against USC and Cal, so we don’t know how much to believe them.
- Mel Tucker, of course, is gone. This is not news either, but we named everyone else on the list, so we felt we should include Tucker.
We’re curious, like everyone, about who will move first, and when. We would think that Texas A&M and Mississippi State view themselves as being at the top of their respective food chains. If taking a guess for the A&M job, we’ll guess they end up doing the expected thing and hiring Mike Elko. If we were one year in the future, we would guess Brian Kelly, because taking the A&M job would be a very Brian Kelly thing to do.
The Jim Harbaugh Latest
They say that you should only go to law school if you want to be a lawyer. It would be helpful for sports blogging, though.
Just now, the Big Ten and Michigan agreed that Michigan will accept the three-game Harbaugh suspension and the Big Ten will end its investigation. I don’t know the exact implications of this, but my impression is that the NCAA can still investigate and impose sanctions. The thing is, the NCAA doesn’t have the resources to thoroughly investigate with any strength. Which is fine! But this might mean we never get as full a story as we could have gotten.
That said, this was probably in the Big Ten’s best interests. Leagues have been torn apart by mass investigation before, and the Big Ten does not want to alienate Michigan, mad though its fellow schools may be. Michigan may be keeping more things covered, but Purdue is keeping its lifeline in one piece.
The OSU/WSU Latest
They say that you should only go to law school if you want to be a lawyer. It would be helpful for sports blogging, though.
The big news earlier this week on Oregon State and Washington State was that the judge in their legal dispute with the departing Pac-12 members granted them control of the board, pending presumable appeal. We still don’t know where this will land, but this presumably moves the needle a little bit in the direction of the Beavers and the Cougs.
In the meantime, Ross Dellenger reported this morning on the negotiations between Oregon State, Washington State, and the Mountain West, who will reportedly engage in a scheduling alliance the next two years before fully merging in the future:
Though there are many scheduling models, the most likely is what’s termed a “7+1” format where Mountain West teams play seven conference games — not eight — plus one game against either Washington State or Oregon State. They would rotate the game against either OSU or WSU home-and-away over the two-year cycle.
Games against OSU and WSU are not expected to count toward the league standings. The two Pac-12 members will not be eligible for the MWC championship and will compete as quasi-independents under the Pac-12 banner.
Also:
Part of the agreement includes a financial penalty that can be levied upon Oregon State and Washington State if the two programs attempt to acquire only a portion of MWC schools in the future.
Eventually, then, the implication is that all schools currently in the Mountain West will be joined in some conference (MWC, P14, other) by Oregon State and Washington State in the near future. There are financial details to work out, but that’s the situation. In the meantime, Oregon State and Washington State are more fully fleshing out their schedules these next two years, but not finding a shot at an automatic playoff berth. I’ve yet to see anything about what will happen to these guys in sports other than football.
(If you’re confused about the 7+1 format, as I was—Oregon State and Washington State already have some games scheduled against Mountain West teams these next few years, so my impression—and Dellenger backs this up, if I’m understanding his wording correctly—is that ten teams will play one of OSU/WSU a year while the other two play both OSU and WSU, thereby giving OSU and WSU their seven games apiece while reducing the Mountain West schedule to a seven-game season.)
Bally Going Badly
Diamond Sports Group, the folks who run all those Bally channels, will “probably” shut down after next season, according to Bloomberg*. It’s unclear if Sinclair Inc.—who owns Diamond Sports Group (and is a managing partner of Marquee Sports Network, the Cubs’ channel and platform)—released a statement on this or what, but that’s the report. Also, as reported by The Athletic, Diamond might stop broadcasting the Guardians and the Rangers before this spring. The reigning World Series champions may see their broadcasting rights in limbo.
This isn’t a bad thing in the short term. MLB might take over, and MLB taking over should lead to an end to local blackouts. Our cord-cutting readers in, say, Austin will be able to watch Rangers games next season if all goes as currently forecast. But it’s another indicator that the days of flipping through channels and catching local broadcasts of local teams are ending. That’s a little sad. I miss flipping through channels sometimes.
*We’re locked out of Bloomberg right now as we wait for the availability another promotional discount to coincide with the publication of an article on the dairy industry. When those things happen at the same time, we renew our subscription.
Miscellany
- From what we’ve seen so far in college basketball, I’d draw the “believable national champion” line on kenpom after Arizona, who’s ranked 6th by the system. That list: Purdue, Houston, UConn, Alabama, Arizona. Alabama is a little uncomfortable to include, but despite not receiving a ton of AP Poll love, they look almost as good as last year’s team that was often the best in the country. There are others who are fairly believable, but it feels like Arizona belongs in the top group right now and others don’t. This is all a judgment call and is merely an expression of how I’m conceptualizing the national landscape, with help from a very strong objective model.
- Justin Steele made an extra million dollars by finishing fifth in the Cy Young voting, which is a nice haul for a guy who’s only reaching arbitration this winter. Jesse Rogers reports the Cubs would be interested in a trade for Corbin Burnes, and while Burnes’s performance wasn’t spectacular this year, his track record is so good and his appetite for innings is so large and there’s such a convenient theory for a downturn available (Burnes and the Brewers had a falling out, goes the theory) that if the price isn’t exorbitant, it’d be a great pickup for the Cubs, who we continue to stress desperately need front-end starters in 2024.
- Patrick Kane’s market has started shaping up as he prepares for a return from hip surgery. There are evidently eight teams with interviews scheduled in the coming days. Reports say the Sabres, Panthers, and Red Wings have been involved. In other hockey news, the Kings are going to play two preseason games next year in Quebec City, perhaps bolstering the cause of a return of the Nordiques. The Blackhawks play a cold Lightning team tonight at the United Center.
- Zach LaVine’s market has also started shaping up, but it’s not robust, which makes sense for an overpaid player whose skill level necessitates being a second or third option but who’s used to a lot of time with the ball. Just as he wasn’t a good fit with the Bulls, the team which built itself around Zach LaVine, Zach LaVine isn’t a good fit on paper with much of the rest of the league. I suppose it’s better to trade him than not at this point, with his per-game future value unlikely to rise as games go on, but the return is not going to be exciting, and with last night’s loss to the Magic, the unintentional tank has reached full speed. It appears a full teardown is on its way, which stinks, partly because the Bulls just had one and never got out of it and partly because the guys on the Bulls to whom we’re most attached are also the ones who’ll be valuable as the deadline gets closer.
