Big cash subsidy.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS - Column

The 2009 college football season is over, and a winner of the Bowl Championship Series has been crowned. Which means if you're a college football follower, there are two things gnawing at you. First, no matter which team won, you despise the BCS. Second, you or someone you know has a better idea for determining college football's best team.

The most commonly endorsed scenario--you've heard this at least three times this season, usually from a friend who's on his second beer and has a daughter at Boise State--is to construct a simple bracket-style playoff system that leads, over a span of three weeks, to a singular champion. Your friend sincerely believes that he, uniquely, has conceived this system, and that if only it could be advanced before college football's Powers that Be, it would be adopted unanimously and immediately out of recognition for the brilliant plan it is. And then they would name a Bowl after him. And he'd get really good seats each year for the championship game.

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Never mind that every Joe or Joan who has given the subject a shred of thought has come up with exactly the same idea, under exactly the same illusion that it would stand a chance of being adopted.

But here's to them for trying, at least: A playoff system does make perfectly good sense from a standpoint of good of American competition. Letting 'em line up and play is the credo of nearly every organized sports league. "Can they be right and every other sport be wrong?" asked U.S. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) at a December congressional hearing on college football.

Of course not. The BCS approach to determining a college football champion runs counter to every tradition of fair play, in that it substitutes guesswork, computer models and pre-determined participants in place of honest gamesmanship.

But let's be grown-ups here, sports fan. Your anger over the BCS has been misdirected from the start. You're coming at the issue of a college football championship formula from the wrong place. You presume it's about football, about competition.

You're so cute.

What happens on the field is peripheral to the BCS's mission. The BCS is about distributing income from a college bowl economy that generates roughly $250 million per year. It is a closed system for rewarding insiders--mainly the six collegiate conferences that receive automatic placement in...