Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

It may not have been Big Ten commission Jim Delany's worst nightmare, but it probably didn't help his turkey dinner go down easily seeing the Southeastern Conference football trio of LSU, Alabama and Arkansas ranked 1-2-3 in the BCS poll last Thanksgiving week.

That scenario of one conference dominating the top three positions in the national polls had not been seen since the conclusion of the 1971 season, when the Big 8's Nebraska, Oklahoma and Colorado ranked 1-2-3 after the bowl games.

One has to imagine that anytime "SEC" is mentioned around Delany, he can taste the bile in his throat.

Delany at one time could have been considered the boss of bosses among confereonce commissioners. He threw his weight around with bowl selections, or with the NCAA basketball tournament committee, and he stood defiantly in the way of a national college football playoff.

He stressed the sanctity of the bowls, and most especially the Rose Bowl, which the Big Ten jointly operates with the Pac-12 Conference.

Delany is no longer the boss everyone in college football listens to, even if forced to. Quietly, his control has been undermined by his steadfastness to avoid a college football playoff — which the majority of fans want. He and the Big Ten grudgingly joined in the Bowl Championship Series, whose only goal was to determine two teams to play for a national championship. If the Big Ten or (now) Pac-12 didn't have a team playing for the national championship, they still had the grand-daddy of bowls, the Rose. The rest of the big-boy, high-dollar bowls in the coalition gave us such forgettable matchups over the years as Kansas-Virginia Tech and Georgia-Hawaii.

People now see the BCS for what it is, which is highly flawed. Whether it's through the great writing of the likes of Dan Wetzel ("Death to the BCS") and others, they also see Jim Delany as equally highly flawed.

Meanwhile, Mike Slive is stealthly moving into the power chair of college football. As Southeastern Conference commissioner for a decade, he's let his teams do the talking. The SEC will be seeking its seventh consecutive college football national championship this season. The debate about a four-team college football playoff has been a chief topic among coaches and athletic directors at the SEC's spring meetings in Destin, Fla., this week.

A few years back, Slive pushed the idea of a "plus-one" alternative to the BSC charade. At least with a "plus-one" — an additional, championship game after the bowl games determined a final two for the BCS — fans would have four teams playing their way into a national championship proven, at least over two weeks, on the field. It certainly beat having Nebraska or Texas campaign its way into a national title matchup. (The BCS' lowest ebb was featuring a Nebraska that wasn't the best team in the Big 12 meeting Miami for the 2001 title — not to be confused with an Alabama last year that didn't win the SEC championship yet proved every other week of a 14-week season that it belonged in the title game).

Delany led the charge to shoot down Slive's "plus-one" plan. Delany held the power then.

Now, even Delany accepts the fact that a four-team playoff is inevitable, particularly with the BCS contract expiring in two years. But, while doing his job as Big Ten commissioner and trying to get his league a place at the table, as well as keep himself in a power position, he proposed ONLY conference champions play in the four-team playoff.

Naturally, all of us around here realize that such a scenario would have excluded Alabama, the best team in the nation, from playing at all last year, had such a plan been in effect. Instead, with Delany in charge, we would have presumably had a college football Final Four of LSU, Oklahoma State, Oregon and a Michigan team that made a BCS bowl but wasn't deserving of a Top 10 ranking.