As Ohio State gears up for the first-ever College Football Playoff National Championship game, athletic director Gene Smith opened up on concerns over growing financial burdens facing players' families who have have emptied their pockets to travel to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl and now Dallas.
It's a problem, he said, that should've been handled at the inception of the sport's new postseason format.
"It should’ve been done out of the chute with the original plan," he said. "But it wasn’t, so we’ll figure it out."
It's why Smith announced he will propose changes to address such concerns. He said he'll collaborate with fellow athletic directors to create a strategy, draft legislation, and present it to the NCAA board of directors in October.
"(I) don’t know even what it would look like except to try and find a way to allow institutions or maybe the College Football Playoff organizing group to actually find a way to do it," he said.
Smith said money isn't a problem, but getting different institutions with different interests on the same page is.
"We have to get enough people to be philosophically on the same page because we gotta get the votes right. Philosophically on the same page. And then we have to frame it to fit everybody’s particular interests when we finally frame it. Because we’ve gotta get enough votes. Because some people philosophically will be opposed to this," he said.
"They’ll be philosophically opposed to it and that’s based upon where they are financially as an institution because whatever funding exists, if it comes off the top, it’s less money that goes to your school and your school. So we just have to figure out how do we frame this and do it the right way."
While Ohio State has budgeted $800 out its Student Opportunity Fund for each scholarship player's family, it strikes little more than a dent in a larger problem.
"We’ve always been concerned with this. This is not new," Smith said, citing the men's basketball team's 2012 Final Four appearance.
"It’s not a new discussion ... this has always been an issue for us. This platform, however, provides us a larger platform to really talk about it and actually, as you all know, when the format was introduced last year for this playoff system there were concerns that some of us had and this was one of them — particularly the turnaround game."
The Buckeyes play Oregon at AT&T Stadium in Dallas next Monday night.
Notes:
- Why wait until the last-minute to address an issue that seemed that it would inevitably come up? "It’s just like our association always does."
- Smith on whether or not he worries about families taking impermissible benefits to ease financial struggles with traveling: "Of course you do. You worry about agents entering that decision-making process. You worry about all those things. Which is why we need to handle it. And so us handling it helps address some of those issues or the really probably the best model would be if the College Football Playoff organization handles it, keeping it out of the institutions hands."
- Smith on whether Ohio State would charter its players' families: "(It's a) possibility, but I doubt that would be it because you have to fly in from different places from New York and Florida, fly to Columbus and charter."
