BCS Math is the New "New Math"

Back when I was in school, the craze sweeping through the classrooms of middle America was something they were calling "New Math". Fortunately for me, I was already past the stage of school where the "New Math" was being taught, but I came to understand that is was a re-imagined ways of adding and subtracting numbers. It never made sense to anyone, and it was eventually abandoned. Today the Bowl Championship Series released it's "New Math" problem for 2011.

"College football conferences will get a record take of about $170 million from this year’s Bowl Championship Series games, including a new high of $24.7 million for the five conferences that don’t get automatic bids to the BCS bowls."

On the surface the statement above looks like a windfall for college football and the teams that participate in it. The BCS and it's fearless leader Bill Hancock wants us to believe that the BCS is better for college football than anything else out there. However, upon further scrutiny, the math just doesn't prove the point it is supposed to.

The non-automatic qualifying conferences share 24.7 million dollars in revenue from the BCS. The don't each get 24.7 million, they share it. So each league gets roughly 5 million dollars. Still sounds pretty good, but once you take into account that each of the leagues has some type of revenue sharing model in place to evenly distribute money, the number drops even further. To keep my math easy, let's assume an equal split in each league, and that each league has 8 teams in it. That means that each team will net roughly $625,000. That number is a whole lot less impressive than the first one isn't it. This means that TCU will take home roughly 18.4 million dollars less than the advertised Rose Bowl payout once things are said and done.

The math doesn't look much better on the automatic qualifier side either. Let's take the ACC for example. The ACC received roughly 24 million dollars from the BCS this time around. That sounds like a pretty good payday, but once you divide that into 12 equal parts, each team only takes home 2 million dollars. Considering that a team traveling to a bowl game will have over 1 million dollars in expenses right off the bat, and that number drops even more. But those per team numbers aren't going to be anywhere in the BCS press release. They're just too small to be included in their formula.

Bill Hancock says, "...the numbers demonstrate the strength and fairness of the current system. The fact is that all of Division I football is better off because of the BCS, financially and otherwise."

Is it Mr. Hancock? If the NCAA added just one home game to the regular season schedule, most schools in the country will be just as well off, or better off financially than under the BCS, and that doesn't even take into account the windfall that a post-season playoff will provide. A big school like Ohio State or Alabama will net 6 or 7 million dollars for a home game. They certainly didn't net 7 million dollars for playing in the Capital One Bowl. Mr. Hancock, your numbers add up, but the math is still fuzzy. Let's hope that Hancock's "New Math" goes the way of the old "New Math" sooner than later.