04/23/24
December 10, 2009
House Panel Approves Bill Seeking Demise of BCS Championship: A U.S. House subcommittee approved legislation Wednesday that would ban the description of any Football Bowl Subdivision game as a national championship unless it resulted from a playoff. "The Bowl Championship Series ... is not about choosing the champion or competition on the gridiron," said the bill's author, Rep. Joe Barton (R.-Texas). "It is about revenue sharing for the schools that are in the BCS conferences." Barton expects the bill to get a House vote.
[insert general agreement with grum@work]
posted by Joey Michaels at 12:26 PM on December 10, 2009
This is an inventive way to take a shot at the BCS cartel. Barton pointed out an interesting fact: TCU has made less money winning four bowl games in a row than Baylor has made while never going to one.
As the fan of a non-BCS program, I'd like to see the non-BCS schools give up on the bowl system and get into the playoff with whatever they now call Division I-AA. I don't think the bowl system will ever end.
posted by rcade at 12:36 PM on December 10, 2009
I do believe, during the decline of the Roman empire, people would've said, 'hey Nero! that's some mighty nice fiddling you're doing there.'
posted by kokaku at 01:01 PM on December 10, 2009
The approach of the proposed bill seems odd to me as it might run afoul of the First Amendment (even when the lower scrutiny applicable to restrictions on "commercial" speech is applied).
Plus what grum said.
posted by holden at 01:25 PM on December 10, 2009
"The bill passed on a voice vote, with the only dissent from Rep. John Barrow, D-Ga., who said Congress has better things to do." Can we fix the auto-comment insertion feature? It's redundant.
Joe Barton's salary is a clear example of government waste.
posted by joaquim at 01:32 PM on December 10, 2009
I think Joe Barton ought to do more thinking and Joe Bartoning.
posted by NoMich at 02:31 PM on December 10, 2009
I think Joe Barton ought to do more thinking and Joe Bartoning.
Sideshow Bob, is that you ?
posted by tommybiden at 03:07 PM on December 10, 2009
BCS, can we say collusion, monopoly, afoul of anti-trust legislation?
posted by kerrycindy at 05:29 PM on December 10, 2009
I had a committee of my buddies together last night and we approved our own legislation calling for all troops to be pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan so the billions upon billions spent over there can be used to rescue the country's dismal economy.
I expect our legislation to have as much as an impact as the House Subcommittee's.
On second thought, how would it look for the Nobel Peace Prize winner to pull troops out of war?
posted by dyams at 05:39 PM on December 10, 2009
Good god, thank you Tommy for getting that reference.
posted by NoMich at 06:04 PM on December 10, 2009
Good god, thank you Tommy for getting that reference.
I believe just about everything in life can be referenced by either The Simpsons, or Seinfeld.
Personally, I'd say Les Whinen should do more thinking, and less whining.
posted by tommybiden at 06:22 PM on December 10, 2009
Oily Joe Barton is an Aggie, in case you were wondering.
Sally Jenkins has a fairly strident anti-BCS piece in the WaPo, which is a bit lavish in its praise of the Mountain West, though she makes the important point that your chances of getting to the "championship" game are determined not just by your schedule, something that's set years in advance, but by the preseason polling, since ballot-fillers adjust their rankings in predictable ways, e.g. Florida remained #1 until it got pasted by Alabama, then got dumped to #5.
The BCS might have dampened things down, but they got greedy and chose to pair off TCU and Boise State in the Fiasco Bowl sponsored by Sucks To Be You, which smells like the imposed championship game of an implicit division between 1-A and 1-AA.
posted by etagloh at 11:51 PM on December 11, 2009
Preseason polling in college football is a major source of unfairness. If they didn't allow a poll until four weeks into the season, there might be less of a credibility problem for the BCS at the end.
posted by rcade at 10:54 AM on December 12, 2009
If they didn't allow a poll until four weeks into the season
But old habits die hard, and there'd doubtless be "unofficial" preseason and early-season polling, perhaps encouraged by ESPN and the networks.
I'm sure that there's a decent stats paper to be written on the unwritten rules of the writers' and coaches' polls, based upon that big dataset of rankings and results. You can usually test sample sets for the herd mentality effect, or undercorrection.
posted by etagloh at 12:27 PM on December 12, 2009
[insert auto-comment #44, titled "Don't they have anything better to do with their time?"]