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NCAA Division 1 Football: Playing catch-up with the rest of the sports world

Winning and becoming a champion is an educational experience where groups of people adopt a common goal, make a commitment with each other (including their coaches), have intense and dedicated training sessions, and ultimately find ways to be successful during game day competitions. The journey is not a smooth transition. It is a bumpy ride full of turbulence with significant peaks and valleys.

This is the winning spirit of becoming a champion: becoming the very best that we are capable of becoming, while persevering along the way. It is this journey and experience that makes failure and the potential for loss tolerable. Knowing that by being responsible and accountable to others, our best efforts, combined with those of our teammates, grow into something far greater and more satisfying than anything we could have achieved on our own.

All of these joys, pains, and experiences are present in all levels of athletic competition, except within the ranks of NCAA Division 1-A college football. From the ranks of Pop-Warner, Little-League, Babe Ruth, middle School, high-school, Divisions I-AA, II, III and NAIA, as well as all other professional athletic entities, athletes and coaches can work together and put their hard work into creating the thrill, excitement, and possibility of achieving greatness.

In achieving the absolute success of a championship. However, given the history of college football and the methods of determining a champion in Division I-A (both past and present), this simply is not possible or achievable for the majority of participants who are involved in coaching and playing the game.

The major benchmark event which triggered this landslide of controversy during the BCS era occurred in 1976. In a bid to obtain more autonomy than the mighty NCAA decision makers were willing to grant, a group of 63 college football programs united together to form the College Football Association.

During a five year effort to negotiate its own television deal independent of the NCAA, the CFA entered into its own television agreement with NBC in 1981. The NCAA (specifically Walter Byers - President of the NCAA - and his legion of generals), was significantly threatened by this action, and purposefully and openly vowed to discipline any CFA members who entered a contractual agreement with this network.

Most CFA members backed out of this agreement in fear of retaliatory measures threatened by the NCAA, even though they won a court injunction preventing the NCAA from disciplining


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