A Dishonorable Flag Flies Over BCS Nation

Every time I mention that there should be a big-time college football playoff, belly-painted yahoos fire off e-mails beginning, “You’re an idiot!”

The deep thinkers want me to believe there already is a playoff, only it’s the regular season. They point out that when the student (ha ha) athletes get done with their 11 or 12 regular season games, it’s plain which team is the national champion.

To that, I usually say the same thing I say now, which is, “Oh, really?” In this extraordinary year, five teams finished the regular season undefeated. But only two could play in a game that decided The National Champion.

Stop. Before we go another paragraph, we need to say, “National champion? Of what nation?” Clearly it is not the national champion of the United States of America.

That’s because America’s college athletic champions are determined by tournaments open to all competitors in their category. It’s done that way in every varsity sport in every division with the exception of big-time college football. It has no tournament.

So if big-time football insists that, yes, it has decided The National Champion, it follows that big-time college football must be a nation unto itself.

Amazingly enough, it is.

It is BCS Nation.

The Bowl Championship Series Nation, to use the full name of the pigskin republic, was created in 1998. It is a confederation of six athletic conferences that decided they would not suffer another minute under the oppressive administration of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

BCS Nation has its own flag.

It is green.

The green is marked with white lines, much like a football field.

As is traditional for flags, it bears symbols defining the nation’s history, spirit, and values. In this case, those symbols are: $$$$$$.

Each dollar sign represents one of the six conferences that, in violation of moral, ethical and legal boundaries, are the major players in a cartel created for the purpose of placing their champions in multimillion dollar games while leaving crumbs for the rest of America’s teams.

The temptation, often unresisted here, is to say that the 63 universities in those six BCS conferences should be ashamed of themselves. I should not resist this time either, but what good does it do to say they should be ashamed when history and current practice show they cannot be shamed?

Maybe once upon a time they were embarrassed that proud flagship universities, research centers and leafy groves of academia could be seduced into condoning Professional Football on Our Campus Except the Players Work for Free. But if they once had a jot, iota, or even smidgen of shame, it has long since been shoved into a dark corner of their money-grubbin’ souls.

The presidents and faculties of those 63 universities are henchmen to the robber barons of the BCS. Such is the sorry state of big-time college athletics and academics in the 21st century.

Sorry, too, are those folks in Congress who made noises about investigating the BCS to see exactly how cartel-ish it is. In response to those noises, the politically adept BCS added a bowl game to its 2006 schedule to give more teams -- wow, two more! -- a chance at the big money. This is a legal maneuver known as, “So, throw ‘em a bone.”

And the folks in Congress shut up. After all, there’s no upside to getting involved in a fight where everyone -- yahoos and university presidents alike -- talks around the truth, some of them on purpose, others because they’ve heard the Big Lie of amateur athletics for so long that they believe it.

This year, each of the eight BCS teams representing amateur (ha ha) athletics will be paid at least $14.4 million. (The Rose Bowl payout, as yet undetermined, is usually greater than the BCS-guaranteed share). If the Rose share matches the BCS payouts, the total would be more than $115 million.

Here’s a thought. Navy gets $750,000 in the Emerald Bowl. Boise State gets $1.35 million in the Liberty Bowl. It is fair, then, to estimate that the $115.2 million paid to eight BCS Nation teams will be more than is paid to the other 48 bowl teams combined, maybe even twice as much.

Now, look. I could care who is the national football champion. Every Division I basketball program has a chance to get into the NCAA Tournament, and that tournament doesn’t always decide which team is really the best in the country. But at least it’s a fair deal in the way that Americans recognize fair deals. And everybody gets some of the money.

Meanwhile, the BCS bullhonkie stinks.