Big Ten favors bowl tradition

Associated Press

CHICAGO

Big Ten officials came out in favor of keeping bowl games as sites for college football’s planned playoff on Tuesday, preferring to keep the Rose Bowl as the conference’s postseason tradition.

Conference athletic directors as well as commissioner Jim Delany said Tuesday that many details must be resolved before a national playoff is established. Big Ten presidents and chancellors will determine the conference’s official position early next month.

“There was a pretty strong consensus among the ADs that we’d like to have the playoff within the bowl system,” Nebraska athletic director Tom Osborne said. “It would be a competitive advantage to have semifinal games at home fields ... But the bowls have been good to us. If you took them out of the playoff, it would pretty much destroy the bowl system.”

A four-team Football Bowl Championship system debuts in the 2014 season, replacing a current No.1 vs. No. 2 BCS championship game that has rotated among the Sugar, Orange, Fiesta and Rose Bowl sites.

Delany and Big Ten administrators will continue meeting on Wednesday. The sessions at a downtown hotel include conference athletic directors, senior women administrations and faculty representatives.

Options for selecting the four teams include taking the top four teams in a poll, the four highest-ranked conference champions or a combination of both.

“I do think there’s room for conference champions — and this is a personal observation — as well as highly-rated non-conference champions and independents,” Delany said.

Delany also doesn’t want to water down the college football season.

“The regular season has been and will continue to be the bedrock of college football,” he said. “I don’t want to adopt a model that discourages playing good opponents or any way belittles the regular season championship process,” he said.

The new format would schedule semifinals after Christmas and a national title game around Jan. 1.