Pondering The Legality Of The Big, Bad Bowl Championship Series

[WSJ_law_blog]

Remember last year, when the University of Utah, the 2008 college football version of The Little Engine That Could, was the only team to finish with a perfect season? Then remember how they had to remain on the sidelines, while two one-loss teams played for the national championship? (If you don’t, click here for a previous LB post on the issue.)

The incident, like many before it, prompted lawyers and notables to start pointing fingers at the Bowl Championship Series, college football’s system for crowning a national champion. The BCS offers six premier conferences automatic bids to the bowl games that determine the national champion, but the system leaves many conferences out in the cold.

After the Utah team was shunned, the state’s attorney general argued that college football’s system for crowning a national champ might run afoul of antitrust laws by excluding smaller schools and conferences. Utah’s senior U.S. senator, Orrin Hatch, sounded the same note Wednesday at a subcommittee hearing, which is investigating whether a college football playoff system would be better than the current system.

The BCS allows the six major conferences to earn much larger revenues than other conferences. That, Hatch said, is the stuff of antitrust concerns. “If the government were to ignore a similar business arrangement of this magnitude in any other industry, it would be condemned for shirking its responsibility,” Hatch wrote in a recent Op-Ed in Sports Illustrated.

Of course, Hatch might not feel so strongly about it if he, by chance, represented the great state of Alabama, or Texas, or Tennessee, right? As if to make Hatch’s point, the Mountain West, the conference to which Utah belongs, signed a deal late Wednesday that will largely keep its schools on the fringes of the BCS power structure. Here’s a story from the Salt Lake Tribune about the deal, which explains that Mountain West schools will not receive an automatic bid to a BCS bowl game this coming year but could, if they have a bang up season like Utah did last year, still be eligible to receive an invitation to a major bowl.

The Mountain West conference seemed to strike this deal with a gun at its head, which only seems to underscore the influence wielded by the BCS. “The Mountain West believes it has no choice at this time but to sign the agreements,” it said in a statement. “If a conference wishes to compete at the highest levels of college football, and the only postseason system in place for that is the BCS, no one conference can afford to drop out and penalize its football programs and student-athletes.”

We ask you, oh LB faithful, is the Bowl Championship Series exercising monopoly power?