Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Scott Cowan was on the other end of the telephone. Not Tulane University president Scott Cowan. Not, by his own description, "The Guy Fighting The BCS" Scott Cowan. Rather, he merely identified himself by a name now famous or infamous, a name now publicly derided or privately defended, depending upon your college-athletics perspective.

On a Monday morning when the Pitt folks were bitterly assessing the fact that one of their Big East founding fathers was ditching its family, plain-and-simple Scott Cowan remained the only voice of reason.

"No surprise there," Cowan said of Boston College's sudden defection, some five months after the initial raid by the pillaging, plundering Tobacco Road bunch that swiped Miami and Virginia Tech in the summer.

Indeed, there is no honor among NCAA thieves. The Atlantic Coast Conference stole away three Big East members so it could spruce up its football identity with a few major players, beef up its television package with a vital conference championship game and, most important, cram its wallets with more money. So the Big East follows the same road to ruination by courting -- with Conference USA's tacit approval, as if that makes it right -- Cincinnati and Louisville for football along with Marquette and DePaul for basketball.

Now with Boston College's vacancy opening space for another Conference USA member, most likely South Florida, that leaves Cowan and his conference holding fast to their blueprints for realigning or restocking or ... what is the word hunters use, harvesting? "We have a pretty good handle on our expansion plan," he said. But he has an even better plan for everybody everywhere.

Blow up the BCS.

Rebuild with a democratic playoff system, much like the one that peacefully and successfully coexists in every other NCAA sport, most notably basketball.

If logic and loyalty and geography and tradition no longer have a place in college football's conference system and its Bowl Championship Series, why continue to allow the infighting, greedy ruling class to still rule? Like the fans, the television networks and the NCAA itself should keep on trusting these six conferences. Especially if they cannot trust one another.

"When you sit in a room eye to eye, face to face, and they make a commitment, you tend to believe them," Pitt Athletic Director Jeff Long was saying yesterday, trying not to spit about Boston College.

"I don't think that ... speaks very well about who they are," Pitt football coach Walt Harris said.

Yet all these big boys keep deluding themselves, denuding the system.

It's up to Cowan and the rest of the college-football underclass to rise up and smite the Philistines.

Go, Davids, go.

"This system was concocted by 63 schools at the expense of the 54 others," Cowan said. "Listen, I know there are 54 presidents who feel this way. The others? If you could get them to talk privately, I think there's a large percentage of BCS presidents who would admit that it's not a good system for the future of the NCAA.

"I find that a lot of them believe privately in what we're doing."

Seems this would be a perfect time for Pitt's administration, for the Big East's bosses, to come out of the closet of exclusionary behavior and publicly join Cowan's revolution for the masses. True, the "New Big East," as Pitt's Long calls it, is brilliantly staking out a prime piece of real estate to call its own: the best damn basketball league in the land. With an Ethereal Eight of Marquette, DePaul, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Providence, Seton Hall, St. John's and Villanova alongside such hoop powers as Connecticut, Syracuse and Pitt plus invitees Cincinnati and Louisville, the new conference could flex some serious December-to-March muscle that just might merit a lucrative commercial-network package of its own. So basketball can tote football's load, which it must, given the fact that Cincinnati and Louisville in football don't come anywhere close to Miami, Virginia Tech or even Boston College.

Basketball is the blueprint the NCAA should follow with football. Cowan talks about a modified playoff format, something to give the Little Guys a fighting chance. Use mid-December bowl games as regional qualifiers between other conference champions and teams ranked Nos. 5-8 in the consensus poll. Have the Rose, Fiesta, Sugar and Orange bowls stage the quarterfinals where the regional qualifiers play the top four. Hold two semifinals and, the Saturday before the Super Bowl, a true college championship game. The student-athletes miss only a couple of extra class days they might normally skip, anyway.

Cowan's Presidential Coalition for Athletic Reform met last month in Chicago. It elicited Congressional hearings that decried the current system. It is playing host to a national conference Nov. 11 on Tulane's New Orleans campus.

"If we're not successful," Cowan said yesterday, "I think there will be a move toward superconferences, with four or five conferences doing their thing at the highest level and the rest of us at a lower level."

And, if they doesn't join Cowan's proper fight for a playoff system and rid the world of this BS that is the BCS, Pitt and Big East football could easily find themselves in that underclass.

Chuck Finder can be reached at cfinder@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1724.

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