In my many years covering college football, this rather banal unspoken truth about its underlying competition structure never failed to amaze me. It’s incredibly fine margins, and the result is that schools from what are known as ‘Power Five’ conferences – the SEC, the Big Ten, the ACC, the Big 12 and the Pac-12 – enjoy an overwhelming advantage, especially those with massive stores of cultural and economic capital like Alabama, Ohio State or Notre Dame. So unlike its basketball counterpart, where winning your conference tournament earns you an automatic bid and the selection committee argues over which of two or three mediocre teams deserve the last of 36 at-large spots, you’re parsing the relative strengths and weaknesses of programs that have won all, or all but one of, their games. Only four teams of the 130 who compete at the FBS level will be selected to participate in the College Football Playoff, and decisions regarding who deserves those coveted spots are left to a 13-member panel that acts as sole arbiter. It’s a matter of simple arithmetic, really. When I say they have no chance I mean that, regardless of their on-field performance, they will likely not be able to gain access to the playoff that crowns a champion. It’s worth saying out loud, for everyone’s benefit, that half the teams taking part in the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision have no chance of winning the competition in which they are competing. If any of this sounds familiar – a system set up to favor a tiny elite class, preternaturally upbeat crackpot leaders speaking in self-help cliches, exploitative labor practices … recruiting – you might be a college football fan. So, the structure itself dooms the vast majority.”
“If you look at a multi-level marketing scheme you will see that over half of all the money goes to the top 1%,” MLM expert Robert Fitzpatrick interjects, like most of those interviewed looking directly into the camera. They’re the ones propping up the system, the ones generating the riches enjoyed by those at the top. In any case, what we learn along the way is usually some variation on a theme: The wealth and prestige promised to everyone who signs on with a multi-level marketing company will only ever be enjoyed by a tiny cadre of elites, whose continued success is nonetheless reliant on an army of enthusiastic underlings continuing to chase the dream. Watching the con at the center of the entire enterprise slowly unravel is good television as it turns out. What makes LuLaRich, and other MLM-based content, so irresistible to viewers is that the ‘there’ Harwood references is too often an illusion, one typically peddled by a hypnotically charismatic founder whose rhetorical and aesthetic approach is a grim mix of the evangelist Billy Graham and 1970s consumer electronics maven Crazy Eddie.
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