9/2/03 - For the record, I have long been in favor of an NCAA Football Playoff Tournament to determine a national champion. I devised several plans/schemes by which this end could be achieved and wrote two of them up in detail and mailed them off to the powers that be in the NCAA in the past. Naturally, I never got a response from the NCAA gurus; they probably had difficulty with some of the polysyllabic words in my communiqué.

I tell you that as a backdrop to my next statement. I am not a fan of the BCS. I appreciate what the BCS tries to do in terms of setting up a championship game and providing competitive match-ups in the other major bowl games at the end of the college season. That is a worthy objective, but once again the devil is in the details. Selection of the teams by some cockamamie computer analysis of ratings and strengths of schedule and biorhythms of the back-up left tackles is less than satisfactory. So I don't like the BCS about as much as I did not like the old system whereby bowl games had contracts with conferences to have a conference champion play some other handpicked opponent. Neither system is any good.

Now comes a potential event that stands to make it a lot worse. On Thursday of this week, the Congress of the United States will insert itself into this matter. On that fateful day, the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives will hold a hearing regarding the BCS. The Congresspeople will try to ascertain if the BCS is a violation of the antitrust laws or if it excludes the mid-major schools by some process that will be erroneously called “natural selection”.

I don't care what your political leanings may be; but no matter where you are on the political spectrum of the US, there have to be at least a dozen problems that could use some Congressional impetus toward resolution that are 100 times more important than the BCS and the “legitimate access” that it may or may not provide to colleges that play football. In the grand scheme of things, this issue has all the gravitas of the next words to be uttered by any one of the Easter Island statues.

The Judiciary Committee will hear testimony on this matter. I really wonder if any of those folks cannot anticipate what the witnesses will say once they put the microphone in front of them. Representatives of schools and/or conferences that have teams regularly involved in BCS games will say that this is an attempt to give fans what they want – top flight match-ups. Representatives of schools and/or conferences that do not get teams into BCS games will say that it is exclusionary and a way to keep all that money flowing to the big schools to keep them on top of the heap. Trust me; you will not have to watch this on C-SPAN with your full attention to get these messages. This is what will be presented to the Committee and everyone with an IQ higher than a kumquat should know it before the words are uttered.

So, why does the Congress have to waste its time and energy on this? They keep saying that they are there only “to do the people's business”. OK, let me try to believe that for a moment without giggling too much. If you want to do the people's business, then go and do it. Start with the important issues and after you have resolved them – not passed some bill that will be a stop-gap measure that will require further legislation in a couple of years – then move down to the less important issues. When those are resolved, go on to the really trivial issues and solve them. After all of that, hold your hearings on the BCS.

Memo to the House Judiciary Committee:

You will have more time and be able to do more of “the people's business” if you do not waste time in hearings where you already know what will be said.

If you do not already know the positions of the people on your witness list, then you are so out of touch with the world that you will only be able to come up with a solution to the problem by dumb luck. And if you are in that state of ignorance, then you would be eminently qualified to have “dumb” luck.

The Washington Post has already taken sides in this matter. In its September 1 editions, it points out how the poor and oppressed mid-majors have already beaten two ACC schools this year (Maryland lost to Northern Illinois and Georgia Tech lost to BYU) and how Colorado State almost beat Colorado. What they fail to point out is that no one – not a single person – ever thought that Maryland or Georgia Tech or Colorado would be in the championship game. It is wonderful to have small schools rise up and win a few of these early season mismatches – scheduled by the larger schools only to beef up their records. But if you match Northern Illinois or BYU in a championship game against a Miami or an Oklahoma or a school of that caliber, all you will get is a David vs. Goliath story line. Yes, I know how that bout came out in the Bible; I also know that there was some Divine intervention in that confrontation. Would there be an equal measure of Divine intervention in a collegiate football game? I'm not so sure…

The First Amendment of the US Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law…” and then goes on to list various freedoms that may not be abridged by those well-meaning folks who want only to do the people's business. It would have been prescient indeed – and convincing evidence of Divine intervention in the formation of the US – if the Founding Fathers had added the phrase, “intercollegiate athletics” to that First Amendment. Too bad they did not; it would have saved all of us a lot of hot air and posturing and preening by our Congresspeople.

But don't get me wrong, I love sports...

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