Unfortunately for Mark Cuban, College Football Isn't a Business

Filed under: Bowl Games, BCS Championship Game

If college football was run like a business -- that is, to maximize profits -- then there would be a college football playoff. We know this thanks to the Yahoo! Sports trio's book Death to the BCS.

Conservatively, college athletics is leaving in the neighborhood of a half a billion dollars on the table each year by continuing to adhere to the bowl system rather than embracing a playoff. Instead of a playoff, college football has created the BCS, a mechanism that severely undervalues college football's most lucrative asset, a playoff. That decision is infuriating to most fans, but it's downright mind-boggling to businessmen like Mark Cuban.

That's why every few years, a businessman looks at college football, compares the revenues that are produced without a playoff to the revenues that could be produced with a playoff and commences foaming at the mouth. How, the businessman wonders, can we have created a system where capitalism doesn't rule? In every other industry in America, I mean every single one, the goal is to maximize profits. Thus when Mark Cuban told ESPN, "It's (college football) an inefficient business where there's obviously a better way of doing it. The only thing that's kept them from doing it is a lack of capital, which I can deal with," he was wrong.

The only thing that keeps college football from creating a playoff isn't a lack of capital. It's the fact that despite what we may think, college football isn't actually a business.

 

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