SunCoastBlueHen
December 19th, 2006, 11:35 AM
Gregg Easterbrook gives a nice little plug to FCS / I-AA in his weekly column...
In college news, the NCAA wants us to stop saying "Division I" and "Division I-AA," instead saying "Football Bowl Subdivision" for Division I and "Football Championship Subdivision" for Division I-AA. Scholarship athletes are getting As for classes they never attended at Auburn, but this is what the NCAA Board of Directors is wasting its time on! Supposedly this exercise in euphemism was triggered by I-AA schools feeling the AA suggested they were of lesser status. To me it always just made them sound like batteries. Anyway, many colleges that play AA football -- the Ivies, Bucknell, Colgate, Davidson, William & Mary -- are of substantially higher quality and status than the bowl-eligible crowd. From my standpoint this name change is Division I-AA doing Division I a favor by lending it prestige, not the other way around.
At the non-bowl levels, someone actually wins the championship.Also, note how the new euphemism moves the word "championship" away from the biggest schools. While the BCS system isn't exactly a part of the NCAA, the two exist symbiotically: The football-factory conferences rely on the NCAA to ensure they maintain control of money flow to the major bowls, and money flow is far more important to the football-factory conferences than choosing a true national champion. Which is what Division I-AA does, and congratulations to Appalachian State University of Boone, N.C. So the new euphemism -- which the NCAA itself isn't yet using -- in effect makes it official that the bowl system does not even attempt to determine a national champion. At least now that's official!
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061219
In college news, the NCAA wants us to stop saying "Division I" and "Division I-AA," instead saying "Football Bowl Subdivision" for Division I and "Football Championship Subdivision" for Division I-AA. Scholarship athletes are getting As for classes they never attended at Auburn, but this is what the NCAA Board of Directors is wasting its time on! Supposedly this exercise in euphemism was triggered by I-AA schools feeling the AA suggested they were of lesser status. To me it always just made them sound like batteries. Anyway, many colleges that play AA football -- the Ivies, Bucknell, Colgate, Davidson, William & Mary -- are of substantially higher quality and status than the bowl-eligible crowd. From my standpoint this name change is Division I-AA doing Division I a favor by lending it prestige, not the other way around.
At the non-bowl levels, someone actually wins the championship.Also, note how the new euphemism moves the word "championship" away from the biggest schools. While the BCS system isn't exactly a part of the NCAA, the two exist symbiotically: The football-factory conferences rely on the NCAA to ensure they maintain control of money flow to the major bowls, and money flow is far more important to the football-factory conferences than choosing a true national champion. Which is what Division I-AA does, and congratulations to Appalachian State University of Boone, N.C. So the new euphemism -- which the NCAA itself isn't yet using -- in effect makes it official that the bowl system does not even attempt to determine a national champion. At least now that's official!
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061219