Tuesday, January 25, 2011

View From Bennett Avenue

As a fan of the New York Yankees I find it funny that any move the team makes is qualified by the amount of money they have to spend. Virtually every baseball expert treats the Yankees as a team winning an unfair game. They win more because they spend more.
But that rule is never applied to another realm of the sports world that is unburdened by a salary cap: college athletics. Major powers dominate the roll call of national champions but no writer or broadcaster ever mentions the disparity in budgets among BCS teams. Of course Alabama spends more money than UAB, but they also outspend virtually every team from a BCS conference. Take the recent Fiesta Bowl where everyone bemoaned the match-up of Oklahoma and Connecticut, which is really like the Yankees squaring off with the Royals. But if that was a first round baseball match-up, all of the attention before the first pitch of the first game would center on a "have not' challenging a "have". But in college football the attention was based on a challenge of UConn's conference's right to have a BCS berth despite the fact that said conference, the Big East, had a top five ranked team entering the bowls last year and had a conference champion beat Oklahoma in a BCS bowl game four year ago.
Money fuels the sport.

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