Even though the whistle blew on the U’s drubbing of Alabama in the Allstate Sugar Bowl more than six months ago, for the Senate, the game still isn’t over.
Besides being one of the greatest football victories in the U’s history, the game dealt a withering blow to the credibility of the controversial Bowl Championship Series. The system, in place since 1998, determines national rankings, including the champion, through polling data and complex computer models. It's long been criticized for favoring six privileged conferences by granting them automatic bids in the most prestigious bowl games.
U President Michael Young appeared before a Senate antitrust subcommittee Tuesday to sound off against the system, blaming its flawed design for the U’s exclusion from national title consideration, despite finishing the season as the only team in the league without a loss.
“I don’t know what more we could do,” Young testified. “We have worked hard, we have hired gifted coaches, we have invested heavily in our program. We have worked diligently by dint of tremendous sweat and labor and after a year like that could not rise.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, was the one who called the hearing and aired his own scathing critique of the BCS. He asserted that, more than merely unfair, the system violates antitrust laws that prohibit the forming of monopolies.
Five conferences, constituting nearly half of all NCAA football programs, are excluded from automatic BCS contention. Worse still, according to Hatch and Young, the path that allegedly provides these excluded conferences a shot at the national title is fundamentally flawed and exists only to lend the system a veneer of fairness.
“It’s hard to know what we do in a system that inherently stacks it against us,” Young said. “That, I think, becomes the most fundamental concern.”
Harvey Perlman, chancellor of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, was on hand to testify on behalf of the BCS. He asserted that the system, though imperfect, represents one of the very few viable approaches to organizing post-season football.
“The system allows every team an equal right to be number one or number two if they are successful on the field,” Perlman testified. “I’m not so naïve as to think that, as a practical matter, some schools don’t have, because of tradition, because of reputation, a better chance at it.”
For Hatch and Young, the question at the heart of the matter is whether the BCS merely makes it highly improbable for a team from a non-BCS conference to reach a national championship game, or whether the system makes it outright impossible.
“It makes it very difficult for any team in a process that is based in some degree on popularity polling and on historic patterns rather than actual onfield performance to be ranked one and two—it is simply not realistic,” Young argued.
Sen. Hatch pointedly asked what the U would have had to do to be in a position to reach a national championship game. Chancellor Perlman responded that it boils down to scheduling: If the U had chosen to play higher-ranked teams during the regular season, the picture might look different, he said.
“If they’d have beaten Alabama before that bowl game instead of at that bowl game, they might have had a better shot at (a national championship),” Perlman said.
Young, unmoved by Perlman’s arguments, pressed the idea that the deleterious effects of the BCU's inherent unfairness extend beyond the football field. He said that the system is at odds with the academic ideal that hard work and diligence should afford anyone the opportunity to achieve the highest rewards.
“We want our students to strive to make all playing fields in life level, and to give everyone the same opportunities to succeed,” he said. “It’s tough, however, to make these values stick when we teach a different message on the playing field.”
c.mumford@chronicle.utah.edu
