Money remains undefeated, taking down “tradition” in blowout style once again.
The CFB Playoff committee sobered up and took the Rose colored goggles off (pun intended) and wisely moved their semifinal games from New Year’s Eve, dispensing what was termed in January of 2015 as a “new tradition” per Executive Director Bill Hancock.
To be fair, the committee deserves a pat on the back for coming to the common sense (and only) resolution to this stuff. The only people who wanted games on NYE or were ambivalent to it were media who have to cover it anyway and/or the select few who needed an excuse as to why they’re not going out on NYE to celebrate with friends.
“We’re not interested in changing for one year, then returning for the next 10,” said Hancock, long before the ratings bloodletting the event took in 2016. Ah, money, it’ll force you to undo dumb decisions quick, fast, and in a hurry.
Such that it was a lousy idea to begin with, there’s something refreshingly rare about seeing a bad decision get made and owning it quickly with change rather than toss it in the spin cycle and try to sell a cow pie sandwich as a gourmet cheeseburger when everyone can smell exactly what you’re peddling them.
Now, to the somewhat oily part of it.
With a ratings drop near 40 percent last season, ESPN was roped into having to make good on nearly $20 million in ad money for not meeting expectations in terms of viewership. That’ll get someone yelled at in the board room, understandably.
So the network, like probably a few other influences, lobbied for the common sense change to this NYE debacle and the right decision was made.
There’s still something mildly unsettling about the leverage a network has over how sports leagues run their operations, particularly collegiate ones, and if you put on even half a tin-foil hat, you may wonder just how far a network would lobby a league if financially the juice was worth the squeeze.
That’s probably taking it a bit far, but it is a bit concerning at any rate that a network which paid for a bill of goods on this playoff can say, “look, this isn’t what we signed up for, and you’re going to change it.”
Now, it just so happens that ESPN and whomever else lobbied for the change was doing so out of complete and utter common sense in every version of the phrase, so that makes a lot of this more or less complaining just to complain, but it’s a fair question to ask: where and when does that influence stop.
All in all, the CFB Playoff committee and everyone involved deserves a pat on the back. Games will now only be played on Saturdays or holidays, which is how it always should have been. Too often, either to prove a point out of stubbornness or out of being entirely tone deaf, people try to justify bad decisions by finding ways and reasons to spin them as good decisions.
The CFB Playoff committee surely felt like it was eating sand when they went back and looked at the comments they made about “new tradition” and not changing the thing, but it’s better to learn and learn quickly than keep digging that hole hoping you find gold only to look up and realize it’s too darn deep to climb out of all the sudden.
So we get college football games when we should get college football games, and ratings will rise. The easy answer is not to make bad decisions in the first place, but that’s easier said than done.
So everyone wins, and rarely does anything work out this way. Pop a bottle of bubbly to common sense.
