This past Thursday night, at a random diner in Buffalo Grove, Illinois I overheard two old men discussing how Florida State football had got totally shafted five days earlier. Such is the impact of the College Football Playoff and its ranking system- everyone, everywhere wants to debate and discuss it.
Controversy sells and ESPN, who pays rent on the CFP, knows this. You see it in the theme of their promos.
From the old school days of the national champion being crowned by UPI/AP/USA Today Coaches Poll to the BCS to the current system, it’s always been about “who’s out?” and “who’s in?” It’s deeply engrained within the sport of college football and always will be.
ESPN, if it were an actual human being, would be a malignant narcissist, so it is only fitting that they run this dog and pony show. A narcissist thrives on attention, and many, if not most, create chaos in order to do so.
https://t.co/PvVs21ss9L pic.twitter.com/92pL2F6iiF
— Taylor Kurtz (@RealTaylorKurtz) December 6, 2023
When an undefeated power five conference champion is left out of the playoff that is the textbook definition of pure chaos. When a college football blue blood, the marquee program of the 1990s, is left frozen out, it’s the kind of chaos that will generation attention all over the country, for days on end.
Taylor Kurtz is a SEO Professional who earned both his undergraduate degree and his MBA at Florida State University. We spoke with him by phone about search engine optimization and college football. Kurtz, the Founder of Crush The Rankings, said he’s “never been as emotionally invested in a season, in any sport, as much as this one.”
He continued:
“Zero losses is zero losses, until the day of, I didn’t think they were going to be left out of it, but looking back, I think it was pre-determined the day our quarterback got hurt that we weren’t going to make it.
“Because you can’t have the so-called world wide leader, and the one who puts on this charade, campaigning for teams for weeks.”
Kurtz, who is always willing to talk/debate FSU sports on Twitter @RealTaylorKurtz, described ACC Commissioner and former Northwestern A.D. Jim Phillips thusly: “really bad leadership in our conference…he’s gotta go!”
Before continuing on this train of though, however, we need to make sure we’re running on the appropriate track. We have to debunk the conspiracy theory circulating among Florida State football fans, everywhere, right this minute.
While yes, ESPN is straight up ESECPN, they don’t actually receive any additional income from having a SEC team in the CFP.
Yes, ESPN and the SEC are direct partners, and the network obviously does make the SEC the cornerstone of their college sports programming. However, some of the ideas making the rounds on #FSUTwitter are wrong.
As Alex Kirshner wrote in Split Zone Duo:
The Playoff gets a set annual amount of money from ESPN. It’s about $470 million, which it mostly sends back to conferences. That figure does not go up or down depending on who’s in the field.
compromise it enough to justify going to war with another TV partner, the ACC, and opening up a mystery box of legal exposure. ESPN cares about the SEC more than the ACC, but the Mouse would rather not get into a major fight with a conference that co-runs a TV channel with it. Because the ACC comes fairly cheap and generates pay-TV carriage fees via the ACC Network at a moment of ballooning sports rights fees
Exactly- ESPN is in bed with the ACC, just like they are with the SEC, and it’s clear that they care much more about the latter. However, there is still no cabal, or quid pro quo kind of corruption going on here. (I’ll now wait for ESECPN to send their men in dark suits, via black helicopters, to come take me away.
More importantly, Florida State football fans just need to forget about the lawsuit that was filed. Just let it go, and Kurtz agrees with me that this suit will go nowhere.
All it does is provide one of America’s least likable politicians, Florida Gov. Ron De Santis and technically, “a presidential candidate,” a chance to posture for political points.
Forget the suit, and instead focus on the two lessons learned from this crazy debacle:
1. It is a Power Two now, not a Power Five (Texas will be in the SEC next season and Washington in the Big Ten, so it’s an-all Power Two Final Four) and unless you are in the Power Two, well, you can easily get left out in the cold.
2. Sadly, even results don’t even matter sometimes. Like the life and times of Brian Ferentz, this isn’t a meritocracy.
“It made me very disenchanted, because of course it was my team that got screwed, but at the end of the day it could have happened to anyone,” Kurtz added.
“So it said to me- what is the point to playing any of these games? A resume clearly doesn’t matter, so why not just start the season in mid-November?”
Kurtz is a Tampa native, and a huge Buccaneers fan, so he truly knows what pain from sports fandom can feel like.
The Florida State football program and the Florida State football community needs to move on now and just look ahead to the off-season, and further utilizing Name, Image & Likeness (not “God’s Name, Image & Likeness” like the overly theatrical Dabo Swinney likes to call it.) is the way to do that.
“We were a women’s only school until the 1950s, so we don’t have oil and ag, old money alumni in our donor base,” Kurtz continued.
“We don’t have Texas A&M donors or things like that.
“The Battle’s End, our NIL collective, I’d say they are one of the better collectives in the country, all of our biggest playmakers, on offense and defense, were brought here, not solely for that, but somewhat by NIL, and without that collective, we’d have been a 7 or 8 win team last year.”
The Battle’s End is now breaking their own records, when it came to donations, in the wake of the Florida State football program getting utterly shafted by the CFP committee.
Between NIL and the transfer portal, Florida State football will be just fine. And any program that wants to establish/maintain position in this current college football landscape will have to do the same.
“Every single year you’re kind of re-recruiting your own roster,” Kurtz said.
“At the end of the day, football pays the bills and runs the economy here in Tallahassee.”
Exactly- it’s all about football, and the television revenue it generates. Nothing else matters (sometimes, not even win-loss record) in college athletics these days.
Paul M. Banks is the owner/manager of The Sports Bank. He’s also the author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” and “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”
He’s written for numerous publications, including the New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune. He regularly appears on NTD News and WGN News Now, while writing for the International Baseball Writers Association of America. You can follow the website on Twitter.