Bolshevik Communist System? Calhoun's tune could be different

Troy Calhoun is an earnest young man, relatively free of pretense and a plain-spoken fellow by any available measure. Then again, when you're the head football coach at Air Force, there isn't a lot of room for creative dissembling.

Thus, his fevered comparison last week of the people who run the Bowl Championship Series as "a Soviet Presidium" and "a seven-member politburo that's decided if you aren't one of those party members, then you're unable to participate" had a nice display of historical awareness and coachly hyperbole.

Air Force's Troy Calhoun called the BCS 'a Soviet Presidium.' (US Presswire)

I mean, who knows Soviet-style leadership methods quite like football coaches?

Calhoun's trenchant analysis of the way that the Mountain West Conference's alternative to the BCS was rejected by a BCS-affiliated committee was faithfully reported by Jake Schaller of the Colorado Springs Gazette without irony or snark. Calhoun said it, Schaller wrote it, the way H.L. Mencken meant for it to be.

But one could have forgiven Schaller if he'd asked Calhoun, "And you expected what, really?" And then followed it up with, "Say, don't you have some of those my-way-then-the-highway types in your profession too?"

Because that's the real rub here. Calhoun and his fellow MWC coaches thought they'd made a compelling case for being included in a club that clearly doesn't want them, and then they were stunned to find out that the BCS folks could be as contemptuously dismissive of them as they are of everyone else.

And by extension, how contemptuously dismissive college coaches and administrators tend to be of everyone outside their industry as a general rule of behavior.

Or maybe you didn't catch the Columbus Dispatch series on the systematic and deliberate misuse of the Buckley Amendment, which was designed to shield student report cards and transcripts but has now been extended by many schools to include gambling, accepted payoffs, cheating, cashing on an athlete's notoriety, recruiting violations, academic fraud, rule-breaking boosters and even sexual abuse.

Or maybe you missed the news from so many schools where athletes promised scholarships have them taken away just because the coach recruited someone better.

Or Nick Saban getting a contract extension at Alabama that has no buyout clause, meaning that he can leave whenever he wants without any penalty whatsoever. Or San Diego State trying to figure out how to stiff the fired Chuck Long out of money they contractually owe him.

Ahh, the inspiration value of commitment ... just makes you swell up with pride, doesn't it?

This is all part and parcel of the wonderful world of college football, where emperors, dictators and, yes, even the Russian Presidium marvel at the powers granted to any even moderately successful program. The influence the industry wields without any mind to sensible oversight, or even any oversight at all, is breath-taking.

But now a few of them feel the hale and hearty backhand of people they thought were their contemporaries, and suddenly shock registers across the land. Frankly, in this instance and only this instance, I'm kind of with the BCS here, and for this limited reason only:

Maybe having discovered face first the height of the industry's arrogance, the Mountain West folks might finally understand more completely how big-time football programs are viewed by the outside world. They are funded so well (Florida's athletic department just got a 9 percent budget bump) yet regulated so little and bound by so few scruples that Calhoun's remarks are actually remarkable for their timidity.

And yet we also loudly suspect that if the MWC had been allowed full BCS privileges as though it were the Big 12, SEC, Big Ten or Pac-10, Calhoun would have been defending the system with full throat and fervor and comparing those who want to reform/reduce/reshape it as "Russian revolutionaries," or, since the "Soviet Presidium" reference is about 20 years out of date, "hippies."

That's the thing here. The Mountain West proposal might have opened up the BCS process, but had the BCS compromised and just let the MWC into its own restricted club, one suspects that Calhoun's take would have been dramatically different. Football coaches and college administrators operate under the basic premise, "How does this affect me?" and adjusts their Machiavellian instincts and public outrage accordingly.

That's been the problem all along. The BCS system is the natural outgrowth of college athletics' essential stance to the outside world -- one hand outstretched to hold the cash, one hand held aloft with the middle finger prominent.

Even the fight against the BCS, feeble though it's been, has been fought by Orrin Hatch, the senior senator from Rice-Eccles Stadium, solely because his state school, Utah, was the latest one to get jobbed by the system. Otherwise, he'd be a loyal Republican and defend the BCS' right to strangle the competition as part of doing business in a capitalist system.

If Hatch were serious, he'd actually be trying to strip college athletics of its power to hide behind the tax laws, or force it to be run as a separate entity outside the protection of the university, or find other ways to slap the system out of its institutional and extra-ethical arrogance.

But no, he just wants his favorite school to be a greater beneficiary of the currently corrupt system, and so does Calhoun. In other words, the Mountain West folks are not reformers, they're just failed candidates without the throw-weight or interest to help overthrow the system. They just want their place at the trough.

But points to Troy Calhoun for trying to frame the argument more creatively. It might have worked better had he exchanged "Russian" for "North Korean," though. The North Korean leadership structure does have a presidium, and as we have seen, they're way nuttier than the Russians.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.