Bowled Over: why is Congress getting involved in the BCS?

Okay, Pink Slip generally avoids things political, but I need a little help here.

We've got wars going in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden is still OUT THERE. We are grappling with the blowback from an economy that was sustained for far too long by an over-mortgaged house of cards. Ice shelves half the size of Pluto are calving in Antarctica. Whether swine flu is a bona fide or media-hyped pandemic, we're all reaching for the surgical face mask every time someone in ear shot blows their nose. The noisome and ill-prepared boomers are reaching retirement age.

And the United States Congress has nothing better to worry about than whether the college football champeen should be decided by the current Bowl Championship Series or a revised playoff system?

Am I missing something here?

Anyway, I caught an AP report on Boston.com the other day that says that Texas Representative Joe Barton has "introduced legislation that would prevent the NCAA from labeling a game a national championship unless it's the outcome of a playoff system." Illinois Representative Bobby Rush - yes that Bobby Rush, the Bobby Rush of 1960's Black Panther Party renown - is co-sponsoring the bill.

The way it works (or doesn't work) now is that the BCS folks use some combination of polls and computer rankings (who beat whom pair-offs) to decide who gets the bid to play in a national championship game.

The bias is, apparently, towards that big, national, semi-pro schools - Florida and Oklahoma squared off this year - and against the lesser-known, who-cares Old Siwash teams (like Boise State, which is riled up because, despite having had undefeated seasons, it never gets asked to The Dance. Sniff, sniff.).

Relying on an evergreen Republican boogey-man, the analogy that Rep. Barton uses is that the BCS is "like communism [in that] you can't fix it."

Rep. Rush uses the old bleeding-heart bleat:

""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?"

Apparently, this pops up as a Congressional issue fairly regularly, often after a member feels that their team has been snubbed because they're not members of one of the major conferences that dominate/control the bowl picture. Which is how Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah has gotten involved. Hatch "has put the BCS on the agenda for the Judiciary's antitrust subcommittee this year."

Hatch's home state U is a member of the wound-licking Mountain West Conference. The MWC is not a member of the elite golden circle of conferences that are automatically included in an important bowl, or apparently likely to get tapped for the big kahuna playoff game. So it's hired a Washington lobbyist to plump for changes to the way the Bowl Championship Series currently works.

Even the President has weighed in on this. Last fall, as president-elect, he indicated a preference for an eight-team playoff system. (No word lately on his feelings. Perhaps he is more focused on somewhat more pressing agenda items.)

Maybe there should be a playoff system. The other major inter-collegiate sports have them - March Madness, the Frozen Four, the College Baseball World Series. But it seems to me that this is for the NCAA to take up with its members, no doubt in consultation with their deep-pocketed friends in the networks that televise college games.

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why this is a matter that Congress should be spending time on.

When I was a kid, when something was getting blown out of proportion, we used the expression, "let's not make a Federal case out of it."

Pink Slip to Joe Barton, Bobby Rush, and Orrin Hatch. Let's not make a Federal case of who's the ranking college football team. Why don't you get back to your real work of partisan grandstanding, pork-barreling, and campaigning for your re-election.