Obama Wants Playoffs

A political group founded last year to oppose the existing college football playoff system struggled to raise funds in first year of operation.

According to Federal Elections Commission (FEC) reports filed by Playoff PAC, the committee only raised $5,974 in cash and in-kind contributions last year and had only three contributions of $200 or more.

The group was founded in September amid much fanfare on Capitol Hill because it was backed by former Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), who oppose the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) system that critics say make it almost impossible for small schools to win a national championship.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/80725-anti-bcs-group-struggles-to-raise-funds-in-first-year

Now we’re getting somewhere.

For nearly two decades, railing against the Bowl Championship Series was like tilting at windmills. The guys who hijacked college football’s postseason in 1992 had no reason to budge. They had TV contracts, sponsors aplenty, college presidents, conference commissioners and chambers of commerce in a handful of cities in their pockets. They even had a quasi-secret formula to justify their decisions, backed by computers powerful enough to run NORAD.

All we had was public opinion.

“It’s like communism,” Texas congressman Joe Barton said about BCS not long ago. “It can’t be fixed.”

Just about everyone, though, from President Barack Obama to the 90 percent of fans who cast votes against the BCS in a recent Sports Illustrated poll, knows what’s required to fix it: a playoff. What they haven’t figured out is the best way to get one.

Thanks to Boise State’s habit of crashing the BCS party, they’re going to get several more chances. Broncos coach Chris Petersen hasn’t lobbied to be No. 1, but there’s no shortage of people willing to take up the cause.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=9491110

A House subcommittee this morning passed legislation that would force college football to switch from the current Bowl Championship Series to a traditional playoff system.

“There are quite a few steps to go still in this process, but today’s subcommittee vote is important because it will help the BCS finally start to respond to overwhelming public sentiment in favor of a playoff,” Matt Sanderson, spokesman for the anti-BCS Playoff PAC, told CBSNews.com.

Bowl Championship Series Executive Director Bill Hancock emailed a statement countering that claim, arguing that “the consensus among the presidents, athletics directors, coaches and faculty from the 120 major universities is that the current system is the best.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/12/09/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5951874.shtml

No good deed goes unpunished! I was minding my own congressional business when a Star-Telegram reporter called and asked about a bill I introduced back in January concerning the college football Bowl Championship Series. I was pleasantly surprised with the reporter’s interest and answered her questions. So imagine my disappointment when an editorial in the very same newspaper referred to me as one of the “showboats in Congress.” (see: “Congress is in the wrong field,” Dec. 2)

The Editorial Board didn’t point out that I wasn’t looking for coverage; the reporter came to me — presumably because of reader interest in the unfair way Texas Christian University is being treated by the BCS cartel.

It is ironic that when I do things that directly help the people of Tarrant County, it goes unnoticed by the Star-Telegram. Readers will never know about my efforts to save hundreds of jobs at Lockheed Martin, or that I recently obtained funding for groundbreaking energy production research at the University of Texas at Arlington.

That is because the Star-Telegram chose not to write about it and instead zeroed in on a one-page bill I introduced 11 months ago. That’s the free press, and I accept that, but it doesn’t make me a “showboat” congressman.

http://www.star-telegram.com/1021/story/1815798.html

Rep. Joe Barton, the Texas Republican who is an outspoken sponsor of a bill to force a college-football playoff, responded to critics of his idea in Tuesday’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram, denouncing the Bowl Championship Series, the association of powerhouse football conferences that now runs the process of picking a champion.

The bill gets its first vote on Wednesday at a 10 a.m. meeting of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee.

In the opinion piece, Barton called the BCS “a cartel in the truest sense of the word,” and went on to say that “If Exxon Mobil and Chevron did in the oil industry what the BCS has done in college football, they would be prosecuted for violating antitrust laws…

“Since the BCS began in 1998, guess how many teams have played in the `championship’ game. Only 11. This means that each year, more than 6,000 student-athletes are left out and learn firsthand how a cartel really works.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/12/08/rep-barton-bcs-is-out-of-bounds/

The biggest winner in this year’s BCS debate?

Could it be Baylor?

The Bears haven’t been to a single bowl game of any kind in the 11-year history of the Bowl Championship Series, yet the money keeps flowing in.

They’ll receive somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.4 million this year, thanks to a revenue-sharing deal the Big 12 and the other five conferences with automatic BCS bids have that guarantees bowl money to all their teams, even if they don’t play in a bowl game.

So, while college football fans debate Alabama and Texas, TCU, Boise State and Cincinnati — five undefeated teams who came into Sunday vying for two spots in the Jan. 7 championship game — Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, uses Baylor as Exhibit A when he talks about why the BCS needs to change its business model.

http://www.latimes.com/sports/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-fbc-the-bcs-cartel,0,3202513.story

A congressional committee called in some of the keepers of the Bowl Championship Series for explanations this past spring. A Democratic congressman, Bobby Rush of Illinois, chaired the hearing. A Texas Republican, Joe Barton of Ennis, characterized the BCS as “like Communism: You can’t fix it.” A Texas Democrat, Gene Green of Houston, brought a Houston Cougars helmet to the proceedings.

“This,” Green said, “goes across party lines.”

The good news for those who would like the BCS to suffer an excruciating death is that members of Capitol Hill are asking hard questions about why the highest level of college football does not have a playoff system. The bad news for BCS detractors is that Rush, Barton and Green were the only ones who saw fit to attend that particular hearing.

To BCS administrator Bill Hancock, it sounded like echoes of seasons past.

“Politicians have discussed this many times,” Hancock said. “I guess in the real world, we wish everybody loved it. They don’t. Some people don’t like apple pie and motherhood.”

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/college/6712367.html

WASHINGTON — Rep. Joe Barton had a plane to catch, but he wanted to give college football officials a warning before leaving the highly publicized hearing.

Peering down from the podium, the Republican said in his Texas twang that unless the officials took action toward a playoff system in two months, Congress would likely move on his legislation aimed at forcing their hand.

More than three months have passed, and Barton’s bill hasn’t moved. Such is the way with college football and Congress.

For years, lawmakers have railed against the Bowl Championship Series, calling it an unfair way to select a national champion. A lot of righteous thundering, however, has not yielded anything on the legislative front.

http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/story/12057629

The BCS in Congress: If you can’t beat ‘em, accuse ‘em of perjury

a pair of my muckraking Yahoo! Sports colleagues, Dan Wetzel and Josh Peter, recalled Fox’s comments well enough to undermine them completely:

In fact, 10 bowl games are privately owned and one is run by a branch of a local government. The remaining 23 games enjoy tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service, but combined to give just $3.2 million to local charities on $186.3 million in revenue according to their most recent federal tax records and interviews with individual bowl executives.

One would-be reformer who might be interested in that information is Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking “nonprofit cop,” who just learned the results of the Congressional Budget Office review of college athletic programs’ tax-exempt status that he ordered back in 2007. But the first Congressman Wetzel and Peter went to with their investigation was, of course, Texas Rep. Joe Barton, the ranking “BCS cop,” who didn’t take the news in a very forgiving tone:

“That doesn’t seem like something that’s really geared toward giving to charity, does it?” said Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) after being presented with Yahoo! Sports’ findings.

“It’s perjury if it’s knowingly said,” Barton said of the sworn testimony, which he called “misleading.” “It’s also contempt of Congress. You’ve got to give [him] some sort of due process, but ultimately the remedy is to hold [him] in contempt of Congress on the House floor or send it to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution of perjury under oath.”

According to Wetzel’s and Peter’s (lengthy and detailed) report, Fox submitted a written statement that his testimony was “a good faith estimate based on information initially supplied by the FBA [Football Bowl Association],” but another member of the FBA, Bruce Binkowski, said “the organization doesn’t compile such figures and in literature doesn’t assign a dollar amount to the bowls’ charitable donations because ‘we just don’t know.’” Fox reportedly said last week he “needed a day” to confirm the figures to the reporters, but didn’t respond

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/The-BCS-in-Congress-If-you-can-t-beat-em-accu?urn=ncaaf,165911

The bloodbath Friday at the Rayburn House Office Building offered a faint glimmer of hope for everyone who wants to see a college football playoff. Maybe nothing will come out of the public evisceration of BCS coordinator John Swofford and Alamo Bowl president Derrick Fox by Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) in a House subcommittee meeting. Maybe the BCS will continue to frustrate college football fans for decades. Or maybe, just maybe, the wheels have begun to turn toward a more satisfying postseason.

Either way, it sure was fun to watch the BCS supporters squirm Friday.

Friday’s hearing put the fat back in pork barrel politics. Barton represents a ton of Texas fans in his district, and most of them are royally peeved the Longhorns got left out of the BCS title mix last year. Orrin Hatch, who leads the anti-BCS crusade in the Senate, represents Utah, where the flagship state university enjoyed a 12-0 regular season but had a zero-percent chance of playing for the national title in 2008. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama can spout off about a playoff because he knows it’s the lone issue most Republicans will join him to support.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/andy_staples/05/01/bcs-hearing/?eref=T1