Considering the economic issues and other important needs facing the nation weren’t enough to keep congressional leaders busy, last Friday lawmakers threatened college football officials with federal legislation to eliminate the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) and develop a playoff format to crown a champion.
During the hearings, U.S. Representative Joe Barton (R-Texas) likened the BCS to communism and joked it should be labeled “BS,” not “BCS.”
Barton, the top Republican on the committee, said at the hearing “It’s (the BCS) like communism.” “You can’t fix it.”
He quipped that the BCS should drop the “C” from its name because it doesn’t represent a true championship.
John Swofford, the coordinator of the BCS and commissioner of the ACC, rejected the notion of changing the current format to a playoff, telling the House panel that it would threaten the existence of bowl games.
Sponsorships and TV revenue that now go to bowl games would instead be spent on playoff games, “meaning that it will be very difficult for any bowl, including the current BCS bowls, which are among the oldest and most established in the game’s history, to survive,” Swofford said.
Subcommittee chairman Bobby Rush (D-Illinois), co-sponsor of Barton’s bill, queried Swofford on the fairness of the current format. “How can we justify this system … are the big guys getting together and shutting out the little guys?,” said Rush.
“I think it is fair, because it represents the marketplace,” Swofford responded.
At present, six major conferences constitute the BCS, with the champions of those conferences earning automatic bids to BCS bowl games. Conferences receiving automatic bids are the ACC, Big East, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-10 and SEC.
There are five bowl games that make up the BCS – the Fiesta, Sugar, Orange, Rose and the BCS national championship game. The payout for each of the BCS bowls for the coming year is expected to be $18 million.
Also at issue is the BCS’s television contract with Fox and ESPN.
The BCS’s new four-year deal with ESPN, worth $125 million per year, begins with the 2011 bowl games. That deal was negotiated using the current BCS format.
Craig Thompson, commissioner of the Mountain West Conference, called the money distribution system “grossly inequitable.”
The MWC has proposed a playoff and hired a Washington firm to lobby Congress for changes to the BCS.
The proposal calls for scrapping the BCS standings and creating a 12-member committee to pick which teams receive at-large bids, and to select and seed the eight teams chosen for the playoff. The BCS has previously discussed, and dismissed, the idea of using a selection committee.
Derrick Fox, representing the 34 members of the Football Bowl Association, said that a playoff “is rife with dangers for a system that has served collegiate athletics pretty well for 100 years.”
But Gene Bleymaier, athletic director at Boise State University, noted that his school’s football team went undefeated several times, yet never got a chance to play for the national championship under the BCS.
Asked by Rush whether Congress should intervene, Bleymaier responded, “The only way this is going to change is with help from the outside.”
Barton, who earlier this year introduced legislation that would prevent the NCAA from calling a game a national championship unless it’s the outcome of a playoff, warned Swofford saying, “If we don’t see some action in the next two months, on a voluntary switch to a playoff system, then you will see this bill move.”
It remains unclear whether lawmakers will try to to push through legislation that forces college football to revise the way it crowns a champion before the 2009 season gets underway.
Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University, said the legislation could result in a court challenge.
“This is a rare effort by Congress to prevent people from using what is a common description of sporting events,” he said in a telephone interview. The legislation, he said, “may run afoul of the contractual agreements between parties, wiping out benefits that have already been paid for by companies.”
[...] at Moon Dog it’s a story of a senator on capitol hill calling the BCS comunist. Way to go I say, finally someone who has decided to pick on sports besides [...]