Coaches talk BCS, recruiting, climbing the ladder
Editor’s note: ESPN.com senior writer Ivan Maisel moderated three college football roundtable discussions during the Coaches’ Tour 2008. The questions in the panel discussion came from Maisel and from the military personnel in attendance. The answers are condensed and edited for clarity. There are fewer answers from Richt than the other coaches because he missed one session due to a speaking engagement.
Three times in five stops on the Coaches’ Tour 2008, Mark Richt of Georgia, Randy Shannon of Miami, Jack Siedlecki of Yale, Tommy Tuberville of Auburn and Charlie Weis of Notre Dame sat for a panel discussion of college football. There were a total of more than three hours of questions and answers from which these were selected.
What stood out about the questions from the enlisted men and women and officers is that not one question brought up next season. The military wanted to know about leadership, about strategy, about how teams and careers are put together.
Where do you stand on the BCS vs. a plus-one?
Richt: I think a four-team playoff, you could do it within the time frame that we have right now. I think you could keep the bowl system the way we have it right now. I think you could even keep the BCS National Championship Game as it is right now. … But anything beyond four teams in a playoff is a long, long way off.
Weis: I think there will always be some subjectivity. But I think as coaches, I think we’d always like championships to be decided on the field, not by computers. So I think usually, almost every one of us would vote to play it out on the field rather than play it out in the media or play it out on the computers.
Tuberville: In the SEC, we’d like to see that because each week we beat each other up and we tend to knock each other out of the possibility of getting to the No. 1 or No. 2 spot. Probably in all of our [coaching] lifetimes, except for Randy Shannon, who just started as a head coach, we won’t see a plus-one for a long time because the presidents and the commissioners right now are just not for it.
espn.com
6/2/08
Magnolia Tribune
