Utah Attorney General thinks that BCS is a monopoly

Mark Shurtleff, the attorney general for the state of Utah is looking into whether or not the BCS breaks anti-trust laws.

"We've established that from the very first day, from the very first kickoff in the college season, more than half of the schools are put on an unlevel playing field," Shurtleff said Tuesday. "They will never be allowed to play for a national championship."


"It's not about bragging rights. It's a multimillion dollar -- hundreds of millions -- business where the BCS schools get richer and non-BCS get poorer," Shurtleff said.

I think that this whole thing, along with the Utah for National Championship movement, is silly. Shurtleff's solution is to create a playoff. For all of the failings of the BCS, a playoff is not the solution to these problems.

First lets assume that an 8-team playoff is created. For an 8-team playoff to be truly workable and to assure that the top 8 teams are in the playoff there cannot be any automatic bids. The conferences that currently have automatic BCS bids won't agree voluntarily to possibly give up their seat to the party. And there would be years where the champion of the Pac-10, Big 12, Big 10, ACC, SEC, or the Big East is not included in the playoff. In the 10 years of the BCS the following champions of the BCS conferences (as determined by who got the autobid in the BCS) were ranked outside of the top 8:

• Big 10 - Wisconsin (1998, #9), Purdue (2000, outside of the top 15), Michigan (2004, #13)
• Big XII - Kansas State (2003, #10), Oklahoma (2006, #10)
• ACC - Florida State (2002, #14 & 2005, #22), Wake Forest (2006, #14), Virginia Tech (2008, #19)
• SEC - LSU (2001, #13)
• Pac-10 - Stanford (1999, outside of the top 15)
• Big East - Syracuse (1998, #15), Miami (FL) (2003, #9), Pittsburgh (2004, #21), West Virginia (2005, #11 & 2007, #9), Cincinnati (2008, #12)

So in 10 years of the BCS every major conference would have been affected (although some more than others, if this doesn't show how the Big XII, Pac-10 and SEC are better than all of the other football conferences, I don't know what will). In other words with the champions of the ACC and Big East consistently being left out of the playoff system those conferences will become increasingly marginalized. Thus the fear of the Utah AG of the BCS enriching the rich will happen even in a playoff system.

Second, the BCS wasn't set-up to anoint a national champion. Here is a sampling of recent NCAA champions in various sports with their championship trophy:


And here is what the BCS trophy looks like:

A crystal football. Not only that, but instead of having the NCAA logo prominently displayed you see the logo of a major BCS sponsor. The BCS was set-up to create better bowl matchups than there otherwise would have been and to make money due to the increase exposure of those games. And the BCS has done a good job of that.

Third, having an 8 team playoff would also likely kill off all interest in the bowl games like the Cotton Bowl, Holiday bowl, etc. much like how the NIT is largely forgotten about in relation to the NCAA mens basketball tournament. Thus even fewer teams get to celebrate a successful year with the reward of a bowl game and the rich continue to get richer.