Dec. 9, 2009

Fix the BCS? Bill's benefit will hopefully be debated

By Ray Ratto | CBSSports.com Columnist

The much-vaunted and mostly laughed-at BCS Bill is entering Washington's legislative pipeline, which means that it can enter a world of shadows and cold, either to die of proper neglect or to stand in line behind the National Gravel Preservation Act of 2010 and about a hundred other bills, some of which actually have a chance of having an impact on regular citizens.

There is, however, something about Texas Rep. Joe Barton's preposterous I-have-nothing-better-to-do-with-my-time-in-office grandstand-o-rama that actually warms the heart, namely the idea that someone can finally get the BCS folks to show us the math that proves that more money can be generated with a bowl system than with an eight-team playoff.

Texas congressman Joe Barton is leading the government's charge for a college playoff system. (Getty Images)

There has never truly been an honest debate about the BCS, even though there has been metric tons of copy and miles of bandwidth devoted to the issue. That's because the issue breaks down to money, and the assumption has been that a playoff would make lots more money than the current system. There is no data to support this whatsoever, just a lot of nitwit conjecture, because nobody has ever seen the full books of the bowl committees, the schools and conferences impacted, and the television and sponsorship deals.

The bowl system is an extraordinarily tangled knot of exchanged cash, and if debate about the bill will force the BCS people to untangle that knot so we can all see how the system actually works, we can get a handle on why it is so stridently defended by those who constructed it. We can find out where the assumptions of the pro-playoff people work or don't, and we can come to the "Aha!" moment when it all comes clear to everyone.

Will this happen? Of course not. It never does. That's why Congress ranks right above meth dealers for trustworthiness.

But if the debate has a value, if one of the by-products of this otherwise nonsensical exercise is that Bill Hancock and the people who pay him actually have to show us why, in black and white and with actual facts and fully opened books, the BCS is preferable to a playoff system, then we can say it was worth the bloviation.

What we want, essentially, is to know how much money has been generated from all sources, and how and to whom it has been distributed. We want to know how much money the TV smart folks project a playoff system would generate, and how many schools would benefit from that system.

What we suspect is that the bowl system makes more money, but it is distributed to more schools, which means that the shares for the largest schools and conferences are smaller. What we suspect is that the playoff system would hasten the reduction of the FCS (big-time) football conferences to six -- the ACC, Big 12, Big 10, Big East, Pacific 10 and SEC. What we suspect is that the conferences would then re-align to cherry-pick the few strong schools from outside the circle and perhaps eject some of the weaker operations inside it.

But "we suspect" is a pretty thin reed to swing from. What we need out of the BCS Bill is not necessarily a bill, because the laws of unintended consequences come into play when we don't know what's being voted on. What we need is the hard and real information, as opposed to the "I want a playoff because my school got screwed" crowd or the "I want the BCS because my school didn't get screwed" crowd.

The bill would still be stupid because it eats up finite time and resources on something that is essentially trivial, and it would be stupid because it would further convince people who don't love college football that our politicians really are the intellectual lightweights and dilettantes we suspect them to be.

It could, though, provide the actual working data upon which we can all draw and make actual learned judgments on that trivial issue. We could see why people perceive a value in the BCS that its opponents do not. We could actually learn something.

In the meantime, we're stuck with the National Gravel Preservation Act of 2010, and Joe Barton waving his arms like an electronically gigged squid, and Bill Hancock of the BCS waving the Bill of Corporate Rights at us. And then we all walk off, shaking our heads and craving a drink.

It is, after all, what the holidays are all about.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.