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With Ari Fleischer on the payroll of the College Football Playoff, the group never has to wait long for its next burst of negative feedback. They have a publicist consultant who specializes in generating negative publicity. Pretty much the opposite of what should be desired.
Fleischer’s appearance as the moderator at Saudi-backed LIV Golf’s press conference Tuesday was just the latest eye-rolling moment from a guy who has never failed to fail while working for the CFP. He’s also made regular appearances as a political commentator on Fox News, which has created some discomfort for a college athletics organization that tries to stay apolitical. And then there is just about everything he’s touched in his role as a college football propagandist.
Fleischer was part of the doomed PR effort to save the Bowl Championship Series and stave off a playoff—that should have been enough to cut him loose from any role in the next iteration of the sport, but no. Fleischer remained on board as a consultant for the CFP, proving magically malleable on the issue of the sport’s postseason.
(It seems really hard to get fired from the Old Boys Club that runs college football.)
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Whatever impact the former White House press secretary under George W. Bush made in the first seven years of the playoff seemed negligible. It wasn’t until the botched rollout of the plans to expand the playoff from four to 12 teams last year, when the June leak caught several conference commissioners unhappily off guard, that anyone remembered the CFP had a media consultant. The mess surrounding that expansion plan was sufficient to derail expansion for the foreseeable future.
The CFP is inherently controversial enough—four teams chosen subjectively by a selection committee out of 130 get a chance to win the national championship. The playoff makes matters worse for itself with a weekly television show releasing its rankings as the latter third of the season unfolds, with its work subject to lampooning every Tuesday night. The list of aggrieved parties is lengthy and vocal every season.
Why add to the accumulated criticism by creating an in-house problem for yourself with a consultant like Fleischer? Why have that guy in the room with the most powerful people in college football when they’re making the big decisions?
CFP executive director Bill Hancock confirmed to Sports Illustrated Tuesday that Fleischer is still a consultant to the group. Hancock noted that Fleischer consults with a number of other entities outside the CFP, and is not beholden to apprise it about every gig he takes on. Neither Hancock nor several other CFP leaders seemed to have any idea about this particular Fleischer job.
Taking Saudi Arabian government money has led to major blowback for a number of the world’s most prominent golfers, from major winners Phil Mickelson to Dustin Johnson to Graeme McDowell to Sergio Garcia to Martin Kaymer and beyond. They’re willing to take the criticism for linking arms with a brutally repressive regime in exchange for massive paydays, and Tuesday in the Fleischer-led press conference they did their level best to pretend no controversy existed.
When LIV golfer Talor Gooch was hit with a question about Saudi Arabia “sportswashing” its unseemly global image for human-rights abuses, he answered, “I don’t think that assertion is fair.” Then he sought to get out of that political sand trap by describing himself as, essentially, just a dumb golfer. “I'm not that smart,” Gooch said. “I try to hit a golf ball into a small hole. Golf is hard enough. I try to worry about golf, and I'm excited bout this week.”
Fleischer apparently did his part to provide cover for the poor multimillionaires being asked questions about something other than hitting a golf ball into a small hole. Rob Harris, an Associated Press reporter, was reportedly cut off and escorted out of the press conference after trying to ask a follow-up question about reconciling the Saudi sportswashing attempts to buy favorable impressions via buying golfers. He was later allowed back in.
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It’s all a feel-good enterprise. Just good people trying to “grow the game” of golf.
Like the golfers, Fleischer seems to have a price at which he can relinquish his convictions. Per ESPN’s Kevin Van Valkenberg, Fleischer was asked at the LIV press conference, “how he squared his current relationship with LIV Golf with his past tweets claiming Saudi Arabia was spending billions to ensure Mohammed bin Salman wasn’t overthrow(n), and wasn’t this an example of that. Fleisher said that tweet was ‘a long long time ago.’ “
And many dollars ago, one would assume.
The mix of Ari Fleischer and sports has seemed to yield very little other than embarrassments, missteps and forehead slaps. Why the College Football Playoff wants to continue paying that nincompoop to help it form strategy is as mystifying as the reluctance to expand the playoff.
More games are better. Less Ari is also better. No Ari is best.
