Why does BCS have to act as a high school?

Kicking off the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, the billion-dollar television property known as “March Madness,” with its 68-team field that includes universities like Wofford and Belmont, is the perfect opportunity to bring out once plus the hypocrisy of the organization when it comes to deciding a soccer champion. While equality basketball tournaments—heck, we can also include the women’s side here—are open to a variety of teams, big and small, public and private, well-funded and on tight budgets. the dominance of college football is a study in elitism.

The so-called Bowl Championship Series conferences (SEC, Big 10, Pac 10, Big 12, Big East and ACC…along with a special exemption for Notre Dame) make all the decisions in college football and if they don’t like someone, they are more than happy to take their ball and go home. The conferences, all of which make millions of dollars for their member schools with television contracts, like to be an exclusive club. A college football country club, if you will. Working with the antiquated bowl system, fought for (just in many cases) by local officials who fear being left out of the tourist money bandwagon, the NCAA has become a hostage to the big football programs. that make up those six conferences and Notre Dame.

In football settings, rules are in place to minimize the number of teams from outside the power conferences that get a chance to play in a big money bowl game. It doesn’t matter the actual championship game. That’s decided by a Byzantine formula that seems to factor in TV ratings and booster funds just as much as it does anything sports-related. At most, there are two teams from outside of the major conferences that participate in bowls designated as BCS. (We’ll save what a complete waste of time the minor bowl series has become over the years for a December post, while I’m looking at the San Diego County Credit Union’s Poinsettia Bowl.)

The argument that the NCAA makes for doing things the way it does, and not replacing it with the kind of playoff system used for college basketball, is that it would be academically detrimental to football players. The governing body, of course, has never explained why it’s not detrimental to the studies of football players at all other levels of college football, who do make the playoffs, or why it’s okay for college teams to basketball miss large portions of classes during the month of March. So as you think back to last season, when a small school in Indianapolis named Butler nearly angered ACC powerhouse Duke, take a moment to remember that you’d never see that kind of story in college football.

You’ll never see anything quite like this year’s upset of traditional Louisville basketball power by Morehead State during the early rounds of the men’s basketball tournament, either. The college football powers that be want you to believe that such a thing would be bad for business. Faced with the fact that such upsets actually increase public interest in their men’s basketball tournament, college football shrugs and issues a collective, “Yeah, well, that’s basketball.” Yes, it’s basketball and I’ll sit back and enjoy the little ones breaking supports as they struggle to play for another two weeks. In the end, the schools with the big names and the big money still, if history is any indication, will come out victorious in the end.

But no one can ever say that everyone didn’t have a chance. Meanwhile, most of the 120 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision of college football’s Division I have already been eliminated from championship contention…and their season doesn’t start for another five months. It’s time for BCS to graduate from high school!