December 6, 2005
Congress and the BCS
It seems Doug over at Below the Beltway is on the same page these days as I am. But before I get into that, go check out the Carnival of Liberty XXIII up at his place.
But we’re both blogging quite a bit about college football in the wake of the BCS matchups. I first stated that I want to see Ohio State destroy Notre Dame, primarily because I hate Notre Dame, and also because I’m a fan of the Big Ten, and will root on the Big Ten when all other things are equal. Doug is an outright OSU fan, and of course wants to see Ohio State victorious for that reason.
Now it has come out that Congress wants to hold hearings on the BCS.
Calling the Bowl Championship Series “deeply flawed,” the chairman of a congressional committee has called a hearing on the controversial system used to determine college football’s national champion.
A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee, charged with regulating America’s sports industry, announced Friday it will conduct a hearing on the BCS next week, after this season’s bowl matchups are determined.
“College football is not just an exhilarating sport, but a billion-dollar business that Congress cannot ignore,” said committee Chairman Joe Barton, a Texas Republican. Barton’s panel is separate from the House Government Reform panel that tackled steroids in baseball.
The committee announcement called the hearing, scheduled for next Wednesday, a “comprehensive review” of the BCS and postseason college football.
“Too often college football ends in sniping and controversy, rather than winners and losers,” Barton said. “The current system of determining who’s No. 1 appears deeply flawed.”
Well, I agree with Doug that this is stupid and pointless, and that Congress has absolutely no business doing this in the first place.
Let me expand on this a little bit, however. It’s quite stupid, and it is an overreaching of their authority. It’s also quite obvious that this is just home-state vote-buying by a Texas politician, since many pundits (and the computer rankings) feel that Texas is a better team than USC, but the human pollsters tend to reward the team with a higher preseason ranking.
But even more questionable is whether our Congress could fix the BCS anyway? The entire BCS structure is flawed. When it started, they seemed to find that strength-of-schedule and the computer polls were weighted too highly, because they tended to contradict what the human pollsters ended up with. So they took some of that weight out, leaving it much more heavily biased to the human polls. Then suddenly, the human pollsters didn’t seem to solve the problem, and people started advocating bringing back some more strength of schedule and computer poll weight. Finally, in 2003 and 2004 the fit hit the shan, and we had situations where three teams entered the end of the season with identical records, and one team was left out of the Championship game, winning their BCS bowl and not getting crowned the “official” #1 team. It was USC in 2003, and Auburn in 2004.
The BCS works great, as long as there are only two teams at the top of the heap. This worked out in 2005, because Texas and USC are the only major undefeated teams in NCAA football, and they are playing for the championship. But in 2003 and 2004, there was no way to have a “clear” winner.
The only possible way to have a clear winner is a playoff. Any time you leave it up to subjective analysis, you’re only asking for “sniping and controversy”. But the teams don’t want a playoff, the coaches don’t want a playoff, and the NCAA doesn’t want a playoff. In fact, many of the lesser bowls (and TV networks and sponsors) don’t want a playoff, because it lessens the worth (i.e. ticket sales and TV ad revenue) of those other bowls. If you want a clear champion, you need a playoff. Without a playoff, you won’t have a clear champion.
Is a playoff worth it? Who knows? That depends on whether you value keeping the system we have now, where every game during the season is of absolutely crucial importance if you want to even compete for the Championship, or whether you feel that having a playoff and a clearly defined champion is worth it. A playoff adds extra games to the season, puts the players at a greater risk of being injured, increasingly disrupts academic life, and will drastically change the travel plans of bowl attendees, because it is likely that unlike the pros, there won’t be a “home team” in any of these playoffs, they will be played in a bowl structure. I’m ambivalent about a playoff, because I don’t necessarily mind a little bit of controversy. I love college football, so a few extra games to watch might be fun, but I’m not that unhappy with what we have now. But I understand that this controversy, no matter how many times you tweak the BCS system, will arise every few years. It’s fundamentally necessary, because when three great teams are vying for two spots in the championship game, someone will walk away unhappy.
So Congress wants to step in. But I guarantee Congress doesn’t want to mandate a playoff system. The biggest worry for any elected official is pissing off too many constituents, and there are a lot of fans in this world who are against a playoff in college football. So if they actually mandated a change, they’re risking a lot of political capital on something that has a very small payoff for them. Congress has absolutely no intention of doing anything, because any actual legislation risks political capital. But they want the appearance of doing something, which has no risk but considerable payoff. This is a big charade, and anyone with a pulse and an IQ above 70 can see it for one.
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