When Sen. Orrin Hatch held a hearing regarding the BCS this past June in the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which he is the ranking Republican member, the consensus was that another hearing on Capitol Hill regarding sports was inappropriate. Such was the perception that many member of the committee failed to even make a presence at the hearing.
Mind you, Hatch's position as a senator from the state of Utah, whose namesake university had six months earlier finished number two in the country in the final polls, did come off as a bit opportunistic. Yet, a point Hatch raised in a column he wrote in the following week's Sports Illustrated was especially relevant. It said in as many words that if a business in almost any other realm made as much money as major college football did, and operated like the BCS does, that people would go into conniption.
The common sense college football public may well have a similar reaction should BYU, out of the same Mountain West Conference and same Utah as Hatch, run the table and not get a crack at the national championship game. An undefeated BYU would have beaten ranked conference powers Utah, TCU as well as Florida State on top of Saturday's 14-13 win over No. 3-ranked Oklahoma in what essentially amounted to a road game at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, TX. The win for the Cougars served to back up the MWC's growing status as a league that steps up to the plate when given the opportunities
Let's forget about BYU having a shot for the national championship for a little while and focus on their, or any other Mountain West team's prospects at getting an automatic BCS bid. A team from a non-BCS league can get into a BCS bowl if it finishes in the top 12 in the BCS standings or finishes in the top 16, ahead of a BCS league's champion. Due to the paucity of elite teams in both the Big East and the ACC, it is not out of the realm of possibility that a one-loss Mountain West champion could finish ahead of a major conference winner not in the top 16 in the BCS.
However, the BCS conferences knew what they were doing to keep as much power as possible in their hands while still allowing the illusion of giving non-BCS teams a fighting chance when the rules on automatic qualifiers were changed before the 2006 season. The BCS only allows one team from the five non-BCS conferences to qualify per year, regardless of whether multiple teams could qualify under the rules, in what amounts to a poison pill in the BCS contract. In the context of this season, Boise State was the top-ranked non-BCS team coming into Week 1, and already has already won its toughest-on-paper game for the season, defeating Oregon. This is not good enough, and should be changed if college football wants to get away from being so blatantly, and perhaps criminally, oligarchic.
As a student of political science and more specifically, international politics, I am fascinated by the electoral concept of proportional representation, mainly because this country does not have it. To make a long story short, proportional representation is when a political party gets a number of legislative seats proportional to the share of the vote it received in an election, and in most countries where it or some modified form of it is employed, a threshold must be met to insure that a party will get any seats.
A system of proportional representation allows more parties to get seats, and allows voters to have an incentive greater than intrinsic pride to vote for a party that may not be one of the dominant parties in the country, because their voice may be represented at a national scale. If the Mountain West had an automatic bid into the BCS, as the last few years have shown they deserve, the incentive would be great for the conference's schools to attract recruits who are after what only the BCS' six conferences plus Notre Dame can promise.
Unfortunately, the unchecked metaphorical parliament of the BCS believes that the Mountain West Conference has not reached its electoral threshold, despite evidence to the contrary, and has the current system locked in until 2013. Until at least then, the BCS remains a one-party state with no new entrants needing apply.
September 20, 2009
Kyle Jahner:
“The BCS only allows one team from the five non-BCS conferences to qualify per year”
Fiction. The BCS only GUARUNTEES one team an automatic bid if they meet automatic qualifications. They can still qualify as at-large teams.
Granted, those other qualifying teams will then be subjugated to the same biased, money-based decision making that the bowls use to pick everyone else, so you may effectively be right, but you still were factually inaccurate with your statement, which was a pretty crucial element to your argument.
As long as the bowls get to choose their teams, though, money will always be the big factor that at times trumps competitive considerations.