For nearly 14 years, Charles Bloom has kept a secret. On the campus of the University of South Carolina, inside his office, buried within a cabinet, tucked beneath some old newspapers, are handwritten relics of one of his career’s most important—and clandestine—missions. The 13 pages of white easel paper are proof of the secret five-person committee charged by a group of conference commissioners in 2007 with exploring a College Football Playoff.
Bloom, 59, a longtime athletic administrator who is now the Gamecocks’ executive associate AD, sifts through the papers. “Some of this looks like chicken scratch,” he laughs. “Hey, it’s not my handwriting!” Then he comes to a line reading, “Some of the issues brought up today, I look at them and say, ‘We talked about this 15 years ago,’ ” Bloom says.
Indeed, as college football launches into the latest effort to revamp its postseason, the people who have led the previous endeavors are quick to remind us of something important: We’ve been here before.
And in every previous case, a playoff proposal ended in rejection.
In 1976, the first instance of serious deliberations, the 17-member NCAA Playoffs Feasibility Study Committee presented two- and four-team proposals. They were never even put to a vote. In ’88, DeLoss Dodds, the former Texas athletic director, chaired a playoff subcommittee that saw a one-game playoff voted down by a 98–13 margin. In ’94, as a member of a 25-member NCAA committee exploring a playoff, John Sandbrook, a former UCLA administrator, authored a 300-page tome arguing for an eight-team playoff. The proposal failed due to an old-fashioned power play. “There was a significant number within the membership that resisted the NCAA having control of the playoff,” recalls Cedric Dempsey, the NCAA executive director from ’94 to 2002.
On those occasions, schools could have granted the NCAA authority to manage a football playoff as it does March Madness. “If they had, I don’t think college athletics would be in the place it is now—a place of disaster,” says Chuck Young, the former UCLA president who chaired the 1994 committee. “I think it’s all coming apart.”
