USA TODAY: College football’s most powerful entities will assemble in Pasadena, Calif., this week for meetings that will determine several aspects of the new playoff system that begins in 2014. It will be a celebration of progress and riches for the schools involved and a validation of the bowl industry, which kept its seat at the table despite heavy criticism in recent years.
As college athletics sifts through an avalanche of foundational issues, the credibility and viability of its governing body has never been more in question. Among realignment that has deepened separation of the haves and have-nots, the legal challenges to the NCAA’s amateurism model, an explosion in football and television money and embarrassing misconduct in the NCAA’s enforcement arm, the calls to start over are louder than ever.
Although the notion that big football schools might eventually break away from the NCAA is not new, the overwhelming sense within the industry is that some sort of major change is on the horizon. Whether that change includes the NCAA completely, in part or not at all is now talked about openly and frequently among administrators, according to conversations with more than two dozen high-ranking college athletics officials across a spectrum of Division I conferences… (more)
