They generate and distribute hundreds of millions of dollars to non-profit educational institutions. Hancock can talk about how they’re just “widdle old football games” but when that kind of scratch is being tossed around, the government has a right to ensure nothing hinky is going on.
It seems like an unpopular opinion, but I actually agree with this. Most football fans that I’ve heard from want the government to just stay out of sports. But you have to realize that sports, including NCAA sports, are businesses. We don’t let other forms of business operate however they want.
Congress waded into Major League Baseball in 1903. The MLB antitrust exemption was an act of Congress. Therefore, Congress has in implicit seat at every table where decisions about competitiveness within the League is under consideration.
Also, Congress waded into the issue of anabolic steroids with the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990, where these synthetic hormones were put into Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act.
So, the fact that an organization which has a Congressionally-mandated antitrust exemption, unique in all of U.S. professional and amateur sports, appeared to be systematically and organizationally violating a controlled substances law in an organized and deliberate fashion, definitely makes it a topic Congress had to wade into. Not doing so would have been a particularly egregious lack of care and diligence.
No. Did you read your own cite? Baseball’s antitrust exemption was judicially created, in an opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes that employs some…questionable…reasoning.
I’m not one to want the govt involved, but your comment sounds like you think the BCS is a good system.
I’ve always thought an 8 team playoff would be a great compromise. The goal is to make sure that the top two teams are somewhere in that top 8, the further you get from #1 the less likely you deserve to be in the playoffs. If your team is ranked #9 I don’t have a problem excluding you (including if it’s my team).
I’d prefer a playoff system, but I object to federal intervention in this area. Really think this is happening because Orrin Hatch is butt hurt about Utah not getting a shot at the title.
You’re probably right, but if Utah misses out on an extremely lucrative title shot because they’re not in the “right” conference, even when they played well, one could argue that there is not real competition to get in the title game. Millions of dollars are riding on this opportunity, it can’t be restricted to the good ol boys in the conferences you like.
Not lately, so obviously I misremembered. However, leaving aside trivial issues of misattribution, the exemption persists by Congressional sufferance:
–Toolson v. New York Yankees, 1953
So… your point is completely accurate, but utterly irrelevant. Congress has, according to the Supreme Court, every legal right to hover concernedly over every major aspect of Major League baseball that affects its environment of business competition.
Yeah. Disagree with the Holmes if you want. But it’s still the law of the land.
And back on-topic? The BCS sucks bad. But I’m not crazy about Congress changing this kind of stuff, even if it’s the only way it would ever happen. Intervention (as seen in MLB) may be the law of the land in some ways, and have ample precedent, but I’m not saying that’s a good thing. (I think Holmes was wrong, too. Not that it matters. It is what it is.)
the NCAA is corrupt but the BCS is a small part of the problem.
If the DOJ wants to investigate anything, why not the skyrocketing cost of college tuition, books and housing? People scream and the DOJ investigates every time the price of oil goes up. But the cost of college is always going up by more than inflation, it’s importance in getting a good job increases, and they continually get a free pass???
Did anyone else take a close look at the last attempt to legislate a college football playoff (the “Barton bill”)? Going by a strict reading of the bill (a “single-elimination playoff” for which all FBS teams are “equally eligible”), the BCS Championship Game is a “valid” playoff (unless somebody can show that any of the computer ranking systems gives extra weight to being in a conference, and since five of the six systems are proprietary, and the one public one does not use conferences at all, that’s not very likely).
The main problem isn’t the lack of a playoff; it’s the fact that the “automatic qualifying” conferences get most of the money, and the claim that since they generate most of the money in the first place, they’re entitled to it, even if, say, a Big East champion team gets a BCS bowl berth (and the millions of dollars that go with it) at the expense of a much higher ranked Mountain West or WAC team. (My guess as to why they don’t just leave the NCAA and form their own association is, they don’t want to give up the men’s basketball money.)
Seriously? Cable companies, Microsoft, Google, oil companies, and cell phone companies are all perfect little competitors in completely open markets and don’t use any kind of quasi-monopoly power to get money from consumers, but the frikkin NCAA post-season for one sport is a financial scandal that impacts every citizen’s pocketbook enough to be worth investigating?
Seriously?