Tournament of poses: why congress wants to pick college bowl winners.

• Author: Kendall, Brent
• Position: 10 Miles Square

For years, college football fans around the country had complained that, unlike every other major American sport, theirs ended without a decisive championship, and,in some seasons, without a clear-cut champion. The crowning of champions was left to a pair of polls; college football coaches voted in one, journalists who covered the sport in the other. Not infrequently, these two camps disagreed. This vagueness was seen in some quarters as deeply anti-American: At the end of the season, it wasn't always clear who had won the damn thing. So the presidents of the major college football conferences (such as the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference) and the executives who run the New Year's Day bowl games (the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, etc.) got together and devised a new system, which went into effect in 1998, and is designed to end the season with an undisputed champion. The system is extremely convoluted (like the sport itself), but its basic feature is to mandate that the two teams which end the year in the highest ranked positions play each other in one of the New Year's Day bowls.

But some fans have a big gripe with this system, too. They complain that the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) system, which gives priority to the champions of the "major" conferences in the race for the national championship, unfairly discriminates against the smaller schools--the so called "mid-majors" in Division I-A. So this obscure power struggle between parochial interests got kicked up to the American institution that remains, even with a GOP leadership which had promised to get rid of pork-barrel projects, the undisputed national champion of power struggles between parochial interests: Congress. As it happens, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is an alumnus of Brigham Young University, one of the mid-majors with the biggest gripe; his Judiciary Committee speedily set about scheduling hearings.

"Many sports fans in Utah and all across the nation have strong feelings about the BCS," said Hatch, in the fine, grandiloquent rhetorical tradition senators usually employ when speaking about weighty matters of state, like Social Security reform or campaign finance. "First, [they feel that] the current system is unfair. Second, they care deeply that it isn't."

Hatch, a once-promising high-school halfback, argued that the current system disadvantages universities like BYU because the power schools retain most of the $90 million generated by the BCS bowls and...