http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-zirin1-2010jan01,0,5969683.storyLos Angeles Times
January 1, 2010
Congress should bench the BCS
Legislators ought to do the people's work and make the Bowl Championship Series a memory.
By Dave Zirin
'With all the serious matters facing our country, surely Congress has more important issues than spending taxpayer money to dictate how college football is played." So said Bill Hancock, executive director of the Bowl Championship Series, and for years this is a sentiment I have wholeheartedly supported. No longer. When it comes to college football's utterly criminal Bowl Championship Series, Congress should do the people's work and make the BCS a memory. The House is debating the College Football Playoff Act of 2009, which would "prohibit, as an unfair and deceptive act or practice, the promotion, marketing and advertising of any postseason NCAA Division I football game as a national championship game unless such game is the culmination of a fair and equitable playoff system."
Currently, the teams chosen for the "championship" game are divined by convoluted statistical methods that often make little sense without an advanced computer science degree and leave fans, coaches and players enraged. The legislation has bipartisan sponsorship, which includes Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton and former Black Panther turned Chicago Democrat Bobby Rush. Nothing brings the nation together like hatred of the BCS. I hope the bill passes with a rider that allows for some sort of public funeral so we can dance on its grave and achieve closure...
I say this because the Bowl Championship Series fronts for a mammoth fraud that threatens the very foundation of public higher education. College football is a billion-dollar business, but one in which the benefits go to the few while most of the schools are awash in debt. These were the sobering conclusions of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics... The commission also noted that head football coaches at state colleges are often the highest-paid public employees. This year's BCS national championship coaches are Nick Saban of Alabama, who has a $32-million, eight-year contract, and Mack Brown of Texas, who just received a $2-million-a-year raise, for an annual salary of $5 million, until the end of his contract in 2016. That works as long as the teams are doing well, but if Texas tanks and attendance and alumni giving droop, then it joins the grand majority of schools for whom football is a budgetary black hole.
The BCS facilitates this process by making sure that the top conferences -- the Southeastern, the Pac 10, the Big 10, the Big 12, the Atlantic Coast and the Big East (otherwise known as the BCS conferences) -- get the biggest pieces of college football's bowl season pie. Winners of these conferences get automatic bids to the biggest bowls. A small-conference team such as unbeaten Boise State will see less money this bowl season than the 1-11 Pac-10 doormat Washington State... In addition, such a system creates incentives for small schools to bet the farm on their football programs. Athletic departments become unregulated hedge funds to which schools plow tons of money into pigskin futures with the hope of playing against the big boys from the power conferences. And in the power conferences, it costs so much to "play ball" that exploding budgets are now threatening to swallow the entire academic institution. At UC Berkeley, $430 million is going toward football stadium renovations while student fees have tripled in the last decade and academic programs are cut...
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