No matter the negativity, college football keeps churning along

By: Stewart Mandel (Sports Illustrated) -

NEW ORLEANS — Jim Delany had a flight to catch, but for the moment, he couldn’t even make it off the fourth floor of the Windsor Court Hotel. As a group of reporters surrounded the Big Ten commissioner in front of an elevator bank pestering him with questions — about the Fiesta Bowl, BCS antitrust issues and Ohio State’s NCAA case — one elevator after another stopped, but remarkably each one was going up, not down.

That’s pretty much how it is for college football these days. It’s been one negative headline after another for much of the past year, and each one brings a new round of columns, blog posts and tweets suggesting the sport is imploding. Surely its leaders must be in full-on crisis mode, right?

And then 90,000 people show up for a spring game. Or Fox Sports Net pays the Big 12 more than $1 billion for the rights to show 13 years of Kansas State-Missouri games. And you’re reminded that somehow, amid all its visible dents, the machine just keeps getting stronger.

“College football — it’s a tale of two cities. It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times,” said Dickens … er, Delany. “The best of times are the interest, the quality of play. Ten to 12 years ago, there were five to six sports grouped together in fan [popularity] studies [behind the NFL], now college football is in a different place. [But] whenever you’re successful you draw more attention, more scrutiny. You have flaws that get exposed from time to time.

“We’ve had a lot of that the past six months.”

The BCS’ annual meetings took place here this week amid a whole bunch of discussion about…..

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