I drove past JMU's football stadium as I was making my way down Route 81 to Virginia Tech two weeks ago. It's a very nice little stadium. These arbitrary bans of teams making the postseason that are new to Division 1/FBS are so stupid.
As a general rule, I think people are far too quick to demand change which leads to disastrous consequences because we don't think through all of the impacts of the change, so I like to use the "Chesterton's fence" principle (that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood) to determine if a change is appropriate. In simple terms, don't remove a fence until you know why it was there in the first place.
The NCAA claims this is intended to keep teams from jumping up too quickly. However, they already just increased the move up fee from $5000 to $5MM - the fee would meet the need the NCAA had identified for the rule. Additionally, not allowing a team to go to a bowl adds a potentially additional financial burden beyond the now-$5MM move up fee.
Finally, it looks to be fixing a problem which doesn't exist anyway. Of the last 10 teams to make the leap, only Charlotte has a below-average winning percentage. They may have never been ready to make the jump in the first place, but the bowl ban didn't prevent it from happening. Of the other nine, three won conference titles within three years of promotion, and six (maybe seven with JMU) were denied or nearly denied a bowl opportunity in the first two years. In other words, its questionable it achieves what it is intended to do - and has negative consequences of punishing teams for being "too good" that should be avoided.
When I started to look into this, I wasn't sure if there was a strong reason for the bowl ban rule which we were just missing in the current discussion. I'm concluding there isn't - its a stupid and pointless rule which should be eliminated. Tear down the fence!
PS - While this is largely irrelevant, its still far more interesting than any possible discussion around Syracuse football right now.
www.espn.com
