Much is being made of the Seattle Seahawks winning their National Football League division with a losing record, 7-9. The Seahawks will be the first team in NFL history to walk into the playoffs a “loser.” This offends purists. To make matters worse, the Seahawks went 3-7 in their last 10 games, not an especially auspicious way to get into post-season play.
But statistics aside, the Seahawks won their final game, won fair and square, and, well, won the division. The team earned its playoff berth by being the best in a weak division. So I say “Congratulations.” Not every team can be the New England Patriots in the same way not every quarterback is a Tom Brady.
There’re several lessons here: you don’t have to be perfect to be the best in your corner of the professional world; you should never, ever, give up; don’t listen to naysayers; keep working, getting better than yourself on each new professional effort; even less talented people sometimes win with desire, work ethic, and grit, things more talented people don’t always evidence—watch the Olympics for more lessons.
Contrast the Seattle Seahawks debate, though, with the annual intercollegiate NCAA Division I football bowl series fandango. Given the proliferation of bowl games in recent years—we now suffer through 35 bowls, all wishing they were the Rose Bowl and all longing to be scheduled on New Year’s Day.
Here we’re not talking about one team in a professional league. We’re talking about a self-defeating bowl explosion that dumbs down post-season intercollegiate play.
For 35 bowls you need 70 teams. Check the win-loss records of this year’s bowl participants and you’ll find 23 of 70 teams sport records with 7 wins or less, almost one-third, including once-vaunted Michigan. In 4 bowl games, both opponents featured 7-win or less records. In the 7-or-less club are 3 teams with .500 records. Still more mindboggling—and now we’re finally to the Seahawk comparison—6 bowl teams have losing records: Clemson, East Carolina, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Tennessee, Texas El Paso, all (6-7). Yet they made it to the show.
If people are going to become agitated by the Seattle Seahawks’ 7-9 losing record, perhaps to be consistent, at a minimum, we need to eliminate teams with losing records from collegiate bowl games. I’d even go one step further and suggest the NCAA would be better off if it increased bowl-eligibility standards from 6 to 8 wins in a season. This raises the bar and helps assure top achievement is rewarded.
But this won’t happen. Reason being is that the number of bowls is not about quality football but about money. Raising the bowl-eligibility standard would probably force bowls out of existence, thus universities with football programs would have fewer places to go to pay for the exorbitant funds they’re pouring into programs, trying at almost any cost to produce a winner. This includes most prominently the off-the-charts multi-million dollar, multi-year contracts head coaches are now commanding with even rather average records. It makes you want to ask whatever happened to academics—and I’m a football fan.
So do we get bugged at the Seattle Seahawks who played by the rules and won one for the Gipper? I don’t think so. At least they’re professionals and a losing record team can only get into the playoffs when other teams competitively don’t make the grade. It’s not really a system that rewards mediocrity.
On the other hand, I think the NCAA and BCS system is rewarding mediocrity each year. I’d radically readjust intercollegiate NCAA Division I football, which ultimately might produce better athletic contests and, who knows, maybe graduate more top-tier student-athletes who actually stay in school long enough to earn their degrees.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2011
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