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and Ohio State, along with their infamous coaches Bo Schembeggler, Woody Hayes, John McKay, John Robinson and Terry Donahue.

These four teams within the two conferences enjoyed the largest TV exposure and appeared in the majority of the Rose Bowl match-ups. At the same time, the SEC, Big-8 and South West Conferences were regularly sending as many as five or six teams to yearly bowl games. Thus, the southern teams (especially the current members of the SEC and Big-12 Conference) can continually boost today about sending more teams to bowl games throughout the history of college football than any of the other conferences.

The modern day CBS slogan: "The SEC, tradition to you, tradition to me," gained its roots from the limited bowl opportunities extended to the PAC-8 and Big-10 schools.

As these southern teams were constantly on the airwaves during the birth of the television medium and have traditionally appeared in the featured bowl games throughout the history of the television revolution, they have become forever branded in the eyes of college football fans as superior programs, and continue to enjoy this prosperity today at the expense of the newer up and coming programs who are striving to become branded as elite schools in today's marketplace.

As this trend has evolved into the current BCS marketplace, these same schools continue to enjoy prosperous pre-season and mid-season rankings, and continue to be pursued by the television networks to drive up the price of corporate advertising for their bowl game packages.

This continues to be a major source of controversy as the financial stakes continue to rise in the BCS era. The game today becomes less about matching up the best teams of a given year in the feature holiday bowl games, and more focused on driving up corporate advertising by matching up the traditional powers of college football.

Thus, your traditional status in the game in determining ultimate power and supremacy is largely determined by your 30-50 year social economic status in college football, rather than your current day performance on the actual playing field. In this battle for television revenue there have been many key benchmark developments that have transformed the game into the spectacle that it is today and warped the ethical compass in the process.

It is a widely accepted fact that a great deal of cheating has occurred throughout the history of collegiate sports activities across the board, but as football developed a greater significance and importance in the lives of many, most specifically in the Southern sector of the country - the primary breeding ground for the CFA revolution - the seductive powers of television and a prominent bowl invitation took cheating to a whole new level. As academic cheating and payment to players became more regulated by the NCAA through the mid-1980's, the group of CFA schools has wielded the power of network advertising to further brand their elite status and identity, as well as successfully designed smear campaigns against their political competitors across the country via the press. Although largely mis-labeled today as an "East Coast Bias," it is more accurately described as a CFA alliance, which not only controls a great deal of the current telvision revenue , but the all important Harris Poll, which is a significant factor in determining elite level bowl invitations.

Learn more about this author, Ben Johnson.
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