Bowling for paychecks.(College Football)

The old man has won more than 600 basketball games. His extensive and entertaining coaching career includes leading football schools Georgia and Florida State to the Final Four. So what, you ask, does a college basketball coach know about the state of college football?

Listen to Hugh Durham, a 66-year-old sage finishing his career at tiny Jacksonville University in something called the Atlantic Sun Conference, and understand the enormity of what he says--and why college football will never change.

"My last team at Georgia, we went to the NIT and we got fired," Durham says. "In college football, you take your team to the Peach Bowl, and you get a raise."

Now you know why college football coaches, while huddled in Orlando for their annual convention, pleaded their case for the sanctity of the bowl system and asserted that a national playoff wouldn't be good for the game.

Before we go any further, let me say that I'm a bowl proponent for the right reasons: history and tradition, intriguing interregional matchups, the anticipation of the New Year and the overload of games. College coaches are bowl fans for one reason: job security.

There were 28 bowl games this season; that's 56 coaches--really 55; there was Frank Solich--who can claim a successful season, no matter how ugly it looked. A national playoff means just eight or 16 or however many teams--and their coaches--have successful seasons. The other 100 or so coaches are left squirming and saddled with the thought of their president and athletic director taking clandestine trips in a booster's plane to find another coach.

Consider Clemson coach Tommy Bowden. Before his team's late-season run, he was the coach who couldn't win a game against a ranked team. An emotional defense of his program during the season included tears at a press conference and a mention that he had taken the Tigers to four bowls in his first four seasons.