http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/11/AR2009121101891.htmlThe administrators of college football's Bowl Championship Series use math as a cover-up. They complicate their rankings and revenue formulas until they distract us from the fact that the system is fundamentally illegal. Let's set aside the numbers for a moment, and concentrate on letters: The BCS is such a blatant robbery that its initials should stand for Bonnie and Clyde Stickup.
In any other business, if six major manufacturers got together and acted in concert with their distributors to ensure that, even if their product is lousy and market demand is low, they are guaranteed a vast majority of profits, what would you call that? Unlawful, that's what. Yet that's exactly how the BCS operates.
How long can the BCS stay ahead of the law? The call by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) for a Department of Justice investigation of the BCS no longer seems soreheaded, but right. Criticism is reaching a crescendo. Nike founder Phil Knight gave a speech at the National Football Foundation's annual College Hall of Fame banquet this week in which he said the BCS "debases" the game. A House commerce subcommittee wants to forbid the BCS from calling itself a "national championship." The Mountain West Conference and Boise State, tired of inequities, have retained the Washington law firm Arent Fox to study their legal recourse.
It's unclear what action they will take, but their attorney, Alan Fishel, has arrived at his own opinion. "It's well settled that a group of competitors can't agree with major distributors that, no matter what, they get the vast majority of revenue every year," Fishel says. The phrase for such behavior is antitrust violation. And antitrust violations are the business of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and the Department of Justice.
It's hard to believe that Justice Department officials could study the BCS and not see a revenue-allocation scheme, given how much major bowl money flows into so few hands, namely the 65 teams in the six founding BCS conferences (plus Notre Dame). What's more, the BCS blatantly restricts market access. None of the other 55 teams (from the five other conferences, plus Army and Navy) has ever been permitted to play for the championship, thanks to the mystery-shrouded BCS ratings, by which an outsider can win every game by a margin of 100 points and still not be rated highly enough to get into the title game. Try finding a mathematician, a master of ciphers, vector bundles or covariant derivatives, who can explain why TCU and Boise State never had a chance of overtaking Texas in those enigmatic BCS computers despite going unbeaten against comparable schedules. That's because it's a scam. The non-BCS schools simply did not start the season with the same mathematical opportunity of winning a championship as Texas.
Interesting read.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
