Admit it: When Mark Cuban initially floated his plan to personally grease the wheels of a college football playoff back in December, you wrote it off as the fleeting lark of an earnest yet slightly scatterbrained billionaire with a little too much time and cash on his hands. "Right," you thought. "He'll get a playoff off the ground right after he gets around to buying that baseball team." Au contraire, my skeptical friend. As proof that he means business about his bracket, the dot-com bracket and Dallas Mavericks owner started a business devoted to making a playoff a reality. From the San Diego Union-Tribune:
The billionaire entrepreneur has [...] 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 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."
No word on whether Radical Football is hiring, but if Cuban's looking for investors, I suspect he could fetch some decent share prices in Boise, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Austin and anywhere else where the hometown team has ever been screwed out of a legitimate title shot by the BCS. Senators, Department of Justice, attorneys general, university presidents, the president of the United States, and more than big-name head coaches may be interested in getting in on that action themselves.
Of course, Cuban's fundamental assumption – that a playoff doesn't exist because of "a lack of capital," which he can provide – doesn't gibe with the consistent acknowledgement by key playoff blockers that a playoff would generate significantly more money than the BCS through gargantuan TV contracts, and that their opposition has "never been about the money." But maybe they've just been holding out for the right sugar daddy.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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