The Big Ten held a conference call Monday morning, and Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman took the opportunity to make sure the most unflattering stereotypes about the venerable conference remain in place for many years to come. By stating that his fellow league presidents' official preference for college football's postseason is "the status quo" just one day after his Pac-12 equivalent, Oregon State president Ed Ray, said "no one is talking about the status quo," Perlman ensured that the rest of the country will continue to view the conference of Legends and Leaders as a stodgy, out-of-touch band of cigar-smoking reactionaries. This is an embarrassing development for Big Ten fans, the great majority of whom embrace change and couldn't view the college football world more differently than their leagues' overlords. It's also a disservice to the conference, which has actually been a leader in innovation, from popularizing the spread offense in the late '90s and early 2000s, to creating the landscape-altering Big Ten Network five years ago, to forming a forthcoming scheduling alliance with the Pac-12. The Big Ten's own athletic directors were the first to propose holding semifinal playoff games on campus sites, an idea so radical that other conferences rejected it. But thanks to comments like Perlman's, most of the country will go on viewing the Big Ten as the one conference still using dial-up modems. Worst of all, the inevitable backlash will result from something we already know is an empty gesture. In the ongoing turf war over the future of the BCS, the Big Ten presidents wanted to get their official preference on the record: "If we were to vote today, we would vote for the status quo," said Perlman. Yet in nearly the same breath, Perlman acknowledged, "We're also realistic." As in: We know no one else feels this way, so we know we'll end up making compromises; and despite commissioner Jim Delany insisting a plus-one, our second preference, is very much "on the table," we know we're still heading toward an inevitable four-team playoff as soon as we get through a summer of posturing and grandstanding over the details. "We have tried to not put a stake in the ground and say, 'Over our dead bodies,'" said Perlman, which is so considerate of him given his conference's proud legacy of winning one-and-a-half national titles in the last 40 years. To that end, the more important details that emerged from Monday's call related to the conference's preferences for a playoff: The league wants semifinals played within the bowl system and a championship game bid out to other cities, just like everyone else. That no longer seems a point of debate. More notably, commissioner Jim Delany made the surprising comment that "I totally agree we should have the four best teams" in a playoff. To this point we assumed the Big Ten was in lockstep with the Pac-12, whose commissioner Larry Scott is pushing the hardest of anyone for a conference championship requirement. Instead, the Big Ten is now apparently more in line with the SEC and Big 12 -- to a point. The problem, said Delany, is the method for determining the four best teams. The commissioner whose league is purportedly fine with the BCS status quo proceeded to rip the very polls and computers synonymous with the current system. "Everybody recognizes the present poll system is not a good proxy," said Delany, calling the system biased and non-transparent. It's hard to argue with either description. [Sports Illustrated.com].
