Bowl Championship Series proponents frequently cite academic concerns as a major obstacle to creating a college football playoff. Playoff PAC has rebutted that general excuse before, but it is worth now addressing an often-used subset: playoffs are undesirable because they would inevitably conflict with final exams. As the BCS argument goes, missed finals will compromise student-athletes’ academic success and place undue emphasis on athletic concerns. Bill Hancock, the BCS Executive Director, resorts to this argument repeatedly, stating “Conflicts with final exams, it’s a real deal. It would happen.”[i]
For now, we’ll ignore the obvious elephant in the room—the fact that Football Championship Subdivision, Division II, and Division III teams all host playoffs during November and December, which may conflict with many schools’ final exams. Instead, we’ll focus on the current bowl system and whether it “conflicts with final exams.” Mr. Hancock might be surprised to learn that a number of schools’ pre-bowl game practice schedules already conflict with final exams under the status quo.
During the 2009 bowl season, six bowl games were played before December 25th. The table below lists, for each of these six games, the game dates and competing schools’ final exam periods.
Of these six pre-Christmas games, the bowl preparations of six teams (Rutgers, Fresno State, Middle Tennessee, BYU, Utah, and Cal) affected their final exams—that is, teams had four days or less from the end of the final exam period until the day of the game. Notably, Rutgers played in the exact middle of its finals period, yet the school accommodated the members of the football team, at least according to ESPN’s Mark Jones who mentioned this during the game’s broadcast.
Bill Hancock appears to be fine with bowl exhibition games affecting the final exam studies of six out of 12 teams. Somehow, though, he vehemently objects to the exact same scenario if playoff games are involved.
Below are the dates of the first round for a hypothetical eight-team playoff featuring six automatic-qualifying conference champions (Alabama, Texas, Cincinnati, Oregon, Ohio State, Georgia Tech) and 2 at-large teams (Boise State, TCU). Since the final regular season game (Army-Navy) is currently scheduled for the second weekend in December every year, a reasonable first-round date would be the third weekend in December. A 12- or 16-team playoff would obviously require an additional round and thus, may pose additional conflicts depending on its structure and on which weekend the first round would take place. The table below shows game dates and final exam periods for each participating school.
Under this hypothetical scenario, only three of the eight participating teams (Boise State, TCU, and Texas), or 38 percent, would have had four days or less from the end of final exams until the day of the playoff game. If Florida, which had a finals period of 12/12 to 12/18, participated in the playoff instead of Georgia Tech, four of eight teams would have been impacted--identical to the 50 percent of teams that played in pre-Christmas bowl games and had significantly overlapping bowl and final exam preparations.
Now, it is perhaps true that the team sampling this year caused the number of “finals-affected” teams under a playoff scenario to be randomly low. But the same could be said for teams that participated in last season’s pre-Christmas bowls. The point is this: one cannot raise the specter of missed final exams under a playoff system without acknowledging that the BCS similarly impacts student-athletes’ academic efforts. If Bill Hancock and the BCS are worried about missed exams, why were they unconcerned about Fresno State playing the New Mexico Bowl only two days after the finals period? Why did they not object to Rutgers facing Central Florida in the middle of its exams?
“Conflicts with final exams” may make a good poll-tested, anti-playoff talking point, but like so many of the BCS arguments, it fails to withstand even the lightest scrutiny.