June 26 is a day that will live on in college-football history as arguably the most influential day in Division-1 college athletics. It is the day that the fooball committee announced plans for a four-team playoff system that would effectively take over the current bowl system starting in the 2014-2015 season.
The decision comes as a highly anticipated change by fans in college football and those directly involved alike since the BCS’ introduction in 1998.
There has been a lot a positive feedback about what is now being dubbed the National Championship Series, including Iowa football head coach Kirk Ferentz, who said, "While it appears that details still need to be worked out, I would imagine this development will be well-received and will continue to enhance the growth and popularity of college football," as reported by hawkeyesports.com.
But much of the controversy regarding the methodology for choosing teams to play in its bowl games revolve around issues of conference associations, potential revenue generation, and the discrepancy between team rankings in the BCS and AP polls, respectively.
What the new system seeks to accomplish is to preserve some of the existing bowl-game elements in semifinal matches, in which the winners are pitted together for the championship title. The top four seeded teams in the country, picked by a committee, will theoretically have the chance to prove their worthiness of the championship title by duking it out against each other.
This is big news for the Iowa football team, whose success in the last decade of the BCS makes it a viable contender for the new system.
The Hawks finished their 2002-03 season winning their last nine games, tying Ohio State for the Big Ten title, and ranking third in the polls before losing to USC in the Orange Bowl. In the 2009-10 season, the Hawks started off 9-0 and beat Georgia Tech, 24-14, in the Orange Bowl, putting them in seventh place in the national rankings. If Iowa football is able to keep producing numbers such as these, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be a serious contender for the National Championship Series.
Yet Iowa’s game, a mainly defensive one, has depended largely at times on the talent of its offense. This doesn’t seem problematic, until one is forced to reflect on the recent string of unfortunate events surrounding Iowa’s offensive hopefuls.
Shonn Greene, Brandon Wegher, Adam Robinson, Darrell Johnson-Koulianos, Marcus Coker, and newcomer Greg Garmon have all had their stint with trouble during their athletics careers with the Iowa football team (with the exception of Garmon, who was technically arrested for marijuana possession before his first official game as a Hawkeye).
Despite this recent trend in the Hawkeye offense, the National Championship Series could in fact be the determining factor in providing players with an extra incentive to do well.
One of the things the new system will try to accomplish is distribute revenue generated by the games in a way that will "reward academic performance of student-athletes," according to the football committee.
Not only is this a good thing for the Iowa football program, it is a good thing for all college football players and departments across the country. On the one hand, critics argue that college football players receive an education as compensation for their commitment to play ball. Detractors claim that players often get enrolled into special classes, receive extra help, or plainly aren’t putting forth any effort to deserve the education they are receiving.
For a team such as the Hawkeyes, which have consistently had the talent — but maybe not so much the guidance or moral rectification — this measure, and the real possibility of getting into the National Championship Series, could potentially be used as the ultimate recruiting tool for new offensive players.
