Is this really something that you shoudl be concerned with right now Government?
Now I'm by no means a Govenrment basher. Heck I actually don't mind paying taxes, and think in some cases government should play a bigger role. This is not one of those cases.
The really weird part is Joe Barton is a Republican. When I first saw this article I thought it was a joke. Wow.
Politicians are always in search of new matters in which to meddle. They need to be seen doing something, preferably on camera, in order to impress constituents with their industriousness. What that something is is less important..
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Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, who has introduced legislation that would prevent the NCAA from calling a game a national championship unless it's the outcome of a playoff, bluntly warned Swofford: "If we don't see some action in the next two months, on a voluntary switch to a playoff system, then you will see this bill move."
First flaw in the argument: Barton does not state how congress has any standing on the matter.
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Originally Posted by Yahoo News
After the hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee commerce, trade and consumer protection subcommittee, Swofford told reporters: "Any time Congress speaks, you take it seriously."
Yet it is unclear whether lawmakers will try to legislate how college football picks its No. 1 before the first kickoff of the fall season. Congress is grappling with a crowded agenda of budgets, health care overhaul and climate change, and though President Barack Obama favors a playoff, he hasn't made it a legislative priority.
Apart from this not being a pressing matte rin the great scheme of things, I doubt that it is a vote-getter. Utah is mentioned in the end of the article, but I don´t see Obama getting those 3 electoral votes for anything short of personally stopping Armageddon. This can lose some votes among those who see it as meddlesome, so th net effect is in my guess negative. However, if Obama can string along the GOPs to deal with these kind of issues while he is seen as dealing with the big stuff, then it can work in his favor.
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Originally Posted by Yahoo News
College football's multimillion-dollar television contract also could be an obstacle.
Anothe potential problem - why would politicians want to antagonize big media and potential donors when the potential rewards for doing so are so low?
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Originally Posted by Yahoo News
The current system features a championship game between the two top teams in the BCS standings, based on two polls and six computer rankings.
Under the BCS, some conferences get automatic bids to participate while others do not. Conferences that get an automatic bid — the ACC, Big East, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-10 and SEC — get about $18 million each, far more than the non-conference schools. Swofford is also commissioner of the ACC.
And, here is where the politicians might actually have a case. Swofford has an obvious conflict of interest, and there are real monies involved. The rules as written now, are such that some designated parties have it inherently and explicitly better. This could be construed as a type of discrimination, and that is often regulated against even if it is the result of rules written in a non-governmental organization which the parties to are free to leave.
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Originally Posted by Yahoo News
"How is this fair?" asked the subcommittee chairman, Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois, who has co-sponsored Barton's bill. "How can we justify this system ... are the big guys getting together and shutting out the little guys?"
"I think it is fair, because it represents the marketplace," Swofford responded.
This has got to be one of the dumbest statements that I have read in a good long time. That something is inherently fair because it is the result of a market outcome? If that were true, all government is a waste and nothing but a waste - including national defense.
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Originally Posted by Yahoo News
Craig Thompson, commissioner of the Mountain West Conference, which does not get an automatic bid, called the money distribution system "grossly inequitable."
The MWC has proposed a playoff and hired a Washington firm to lobby Congress for changes to the BCS. The proposal calls for scrapping the BCS standings and creating a 12-member committee to pick which teams receive at-large bids, and to select and seed the eight teams chosen for the playoff. The BCS has previously discussed, and dismissed, the idea of using a selection committee.
Well, now if were are discussing how one should set up a competition system so that the most worthy competitor is most likely to be crowned national champion, then that is a whole other kettle of fish. Obviously, if one wants (and I can not see why not) to have a system in which it is impossible for a competitor to have a 100% winning season without being championship, then the quickest possible format is a straight DE. If the season schedule allows for 13 games, then the DE can accomodate 8192 teams, which should be enough to cover US. colleges and universities.
However, when one starts to add other desiderata - that game participants should be known in advance for the most part, that all teams should get at least some games even if they lose in the beginning, that rivalry games between geographically close teams are desirable, etc. then its gets awfully tricky fast. The only way to get anything resembling fairness out of that is to state and agree upon the must criteria and the desiderata beforehand, and to provide a sorting should the latter clash. Only after that is done, can an optimal format be devised. It probably can not be devised anyway, but one will come a great deal closer to that goal, and if the foundation is not laid in advance the resulting format will be bad.
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Originally Posted by Yahoo News
The four current BCS games — the Sugar, Orange, Rose and Fiesta bowls — would host the four first-round playoff games under the proposal.
Valero Alamo Bowl chief executive Derrick Fox, representing the 34 members of the Football Bowl Association, said that a playoff "is rife with dangers for a system that has served collegiate athletics pretty well for 100 years."
But Gene Bleymaier, athletic director at Boise State University, noted that his school's football team went undefeated several times, yet never got a chance to play for the national championship under the BCS.
Asked by Rush whether Congress should intervene, Bleymaier responded, "The only way this is going to change is with help from the outside."
In the Senate, Utah Republican Orrin Hatch has put the BCS on the agenda for the Judiciary's antitrust subcommittee this year, and Utah's attorney general, Mark Shurtleff, is investigating whether the BCS violates federal antitrust laws.
Fans were furious that Utah was bypassed for the national championship despite going undefeated in the regular season.
If the pols want to do something that is relatively easy, and increases fairness a lot, then they should do another thing. In US. team sports organizations, it is almost always so that a team can not be demoted to a lesser conference if they play badly. The flip side of that is that teams that win the lesser conferences can not advance. (Here I am disregarding the special cases where teams go broke, or when conferences choose to increase their ranks.) A good player can advance to a higher conference, but a team can not work its way up the ranks by winning. Outlaw the closed conferences on competition-stifling grounds, and that unfairness is fixed! Much simpler than coming up with a near-optimal championship format.
Oh, another thing. Any championship format which relies on votes, polls and the like is bogus. Politics are popularity will interfere, and mor worty teams will suffer for the unjust halping of those that have many of high-placed fans. Just no way around it.
First flaw in the argument: Barton does not state how congress has any standing on the matter.
Like the neighborhood busybody, Congress doesn't need "standing".
Seriously, since it makes the laws the "standing" requirement imposed by the courts seldom if ever applies. If it oversteps Constitutional bounds its meddling may be curtailed, but otherwise it has pretty free rein to stick its oar in anywhere it pleases, alas.
As to the "fair market solution" angle, I didn't read the statement as a universal assertion that all market solutions were always fair everywhere no matter what, which seems to be where you've gone with it. It was a specific statement about this one particular matter...
Frankly, though, the market isn't supposed to be about fairness. It's about efficiency. But after all, the guy WAS talking to politicians.
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The way we're supposed to run things is spelled out for us. But unfortunetly, when something really works well, there's a guy sitting at the top of the heap who wrecks it. It's not 'government' or 'public' is people. People allow themselves to become corrupt, they allow themselves to bring their own ideas into a system or subsystem that was hammered out by committees and groups of people who were trained to create these systems for people who can benefit from them. Now New York is charging their disabled people to live in sub-standard homeless shelters, that means they've convinced themselves that it's okay to rob the disabled. Which is why California is burning - to make the wealthy 'homeless' so they can have a taste of what it's like, but those people have so much loot, they just move into another house or condo, or rebuild on the same place. So, it's not doing anything but making a mess.
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Last edited by Inspector Gadget; 05-09-2009 at 07:33 PM..
That something is inherently fair because it is the result of a market outcome? If that were true, all government is a waste and nothing but a waste - including national defense.
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