Cuban starts business for college football playoff

[Mooche]

Mark Cuban wants to create a true national championship for major college football.

To make it happen, the billionaire entrepreneur has taken a bold formal step. He’s formed a limited liability company called Radical Football “to impact college football so that the last two teams playing are the best two teams,” Cuban said in an e-mail.

Radical Football was registered in Texas on Dec. 28 and already has at least one person working for it: Brett Morris, 40, a former Los Angeles-based digital media consultant. Morris previously served as president of a national marketing agency focused on sporting goods and has worked in the Notre Dame athletics department as promotions coordinator.

The company has no website yet, and Cuban declined to say how big the staff is.

“He’s real engaged in this,” said Morris, who has a degree in sport management from UMass.

Asked why forming an LLC was necessary for the cause, Cuban said in his e-mail, “Because that is what the lawyers told us we should do. I pay, I listen.”

The agenda for the company in the next year is to “advance towards our goal,” he said.

Morris was in San Diego last weekend representing Radical Football as a judge in a competition among college business students who pitched their plans to change the college football postseason.

The winning team from the University of Oxford in England will get a chance to make a presentation of its 16-team playoff format to Cuban later this year.

Cuban, who owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, said in December that he was interested in funding the creation of a playoff system in college football. He said then that he planned to contact school presidents and other power brokers to move the effort forward. More recently, he's also pondered the idea of having a mid-season playoff lead to a final championship game.

The postseason in major college football currently comprises 35 bowl games and no playoff. Voters and computer formulas instead determine the top two teams to meet in a final Bowl Championship Series game that has excluded undefeated teams such as Texas Christian, which finished 13-0 but had no shot to play Auburn, which finished No. 1 at 14-0.

The college presidents and chancellors who oversee college football have resisted changing this system because they said it could undermine several significant parts of the game, including the regular season, the traditions and revenues of the bowl system, plus the academic calendar.

To change or replace this controversial system, Cuban has suggested persuading college presidents by using financial incentives. For example: In exchange for favoring a playoff, they’d get funding.

San Diego State President Stephen Weber reached out to Cuban in the past two months after learning of Cuban’s interest in changing the postseason. That led to Morris becoming a judge in SDSU International Sports MBA Case Competition at the San Diego Yacht Club. MBA students from 10 universities competed and had just 24 hours to develop a viable postseason alternative: SDSU, USC, Notre Dame, Texas, Florida, Georgetown, UCLA, Duke, Oxford and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

“Mark was receptive to the idea,” said Scott Minto, Director of SDSU’s Sports MBA Program. “His inbox has been filled with ideas from people. This is nothing new. There are a lot of websites out there. Obviously a book has been published that has its own solution (“Death to the BCS”). The information is going to be really valuable, but it’s really Mark supporting the scholastic endeavor we undertook.”

Morris deferred questions about Radical Football to Cuban, who described its mission and agenda as simply getting the best two teams to meet in a final game.

Follow sports writer Brent Schrotenboer on Twitter @Schrotenboer

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Interesting.

 

[DJT]

I saw this on twitter the other day. Quite interesting. Not feeling the name...Radical Football??? C'mon.

 

[Mooche]

Sounds cheesy as fuck.. But hey, if it is going to have a nice following and do some damage to make this situation better, why not?

 

[Brutalis]

Cuban continues to be a dumbass, what's new.

A college football post-season playoff is not going to work.

This has been a topic ever since the BCS came to be in 1999 I think it was. After 12 years what makes people think it's going to ever be seriously considered again?

 

[andy]

Cuban continues to be a dumbass, what's new.

A college football post-season playoff is not going to work.

This has been a topic ever since the BCS came to be in 1999 I think it was. After 12 years what makes people think it's going to ever be seriously considered again?

I'm curious as to why you think it wouldn't work?