Moving on, if the SEC's dominance in the BCS era continues through the playoff era, do you see the game becoming regionalized . . ?
I don't think it would become regionalized entirely, because there is too much of a football tradition in places like Texas, Ohio and California, but I don't think it's good for the sport, big picture. I don't think it's something that we really need to worry about though, because the rest of the country is eating away at the structural advantages that the SEC enjoyed.
Ironically they were a "football powerhouse", not because they ran their student athletics like they were a minor league professional team with high paid coaches, but because nobody did back then. Much like public high schools that don't cheat, the coach was relegated to using whoever happened to be attending the college. The students were accepted based on their academic credentials, instead of a distinct lack thereof in many cases.
Lol, if you believe that, you don't know much about the history of college football.
There has been academic impropriety pretty much since the sport started, and football founding fathers Amos Alonzo Stagg (Chicago), Walter Camp (Yale) and Fielding H. Yost (Michigan) were notorious for being creative about rules for academics and eligibility. John Heisman, when he was coaching at Oberlin, used to bring in ringers and non-students to help his overmatched team. Other schools actually refused to schedule Chicago in the heat of the Maroon dynasty because Stagg was perceived to be a huge cheater (and also, incidentally, because others felt his program was all about the money. He was sort of a 1900s version of Dave Brandon).
Sure, a lot of this was at a much lower scale, because the sport wasn't on TV and wasn't truly national, but let's not pretend it was ever perfect. For a long as people have cared about the outcome, people have been trying to skirt academic rules.
The best book I ever read about this era was
Stagg University, and I got most of the juicy bits confirmed when I interviewed staffers at U Chicago.
I can look for links to the FSU and Paterno stuff, since I've only read about it in books. The most recent one I read, which talked about how Joe Pa pressed the university administration after Penn State's first title to build "championship caliber research and facilities" was i
n 4th and Long by John U Bacon, a book that is quite critical of college football in parts.
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