United Liberty

For those of you who may not know, I’m a college football fan. I spend my Saturdays in the fall on my couch watching the Georgia Bulldogs. There are probably more productive things to do that are much less annoying to my wife than my yelling at Mark Richt through my television, but I’ve yet to discover them.

It’s not too often that politics and college football intersect, but I came across a post at Dawg Sports, a blog run by a friend and fellow UGA fan, that caught my eye.

Sen. Orrin Hatch is on crusade against the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), no doubt because he feels the University of Utah was snubbed by the system this past year (Utah finished the season undefeated, but didn’t play the BCS title game). Unfortunately, Hatch isn’t the first Utah politician to make an issue out of this.

Hatch essentially wants to setup a welfare program for smaller conferences in the guise of “fairness,” while at the same time saying that if the BCS doesn’t do it “voluntarily” then the United States Congress will do it for them. It’s not exactly like they have a choice, right? The author brings Hatch down by using the free-market as a guide:

It’s at this point where Hatch loses me and why I think he will ultimately fail at his anti-trust pursuits. If Hatch is successful at his anti-trust pursuits against the BCS, we’ve lost a lot more than just a system for determining a national champion for the highest level of college football. This would be a loss for America. We are essentially throwing out 200+ years of free-market capitalism for socialism when there’s an unfair system in place.

Let me qualify what I mean when I say “a loss for America”. What Hatch either doesn’t realize or fails to acknowledge publicly is the economic reality that is the current BCS setup. The reason teams from the SEC, Pac-10, ACC, Big 12, Big East, Big Televen, and Notre Dame deserve the money and the teams from the MWC and WAC don’t is very self-evident. Once the MWC and WAC teams can consistently sell out 80,000+ seats at every member school every Saturday, sell millions of dollars worth of merchandise, and have TV execs foaming at the mouth to offer ridiculous sums of money just to broadcast their games, then maybe the MWC and WAC do deserve a share of that money.

I had this conversation with a friend the other day and I think I came up with a great analogy for why the notion that the MWC/WAC deserve an equal share of revenue as do the BCS teams and Notre Dame is just asinine. Let’s assume that I open a hamburger shack (MWC/WAC) with a couple of my friends. We make what is essentially a great hamburger that our customers love and swear that it’s better than McDonald’s (BCS Conferences & Notre Dame). One day I and my other co-owners get fed up when after months of trying we can’t get the same licensing deal with Coca-Cola (BCS) that McDonald’s does even though we only have one location, only about 20 regular customers, and our annual sales are less than a fraction of one percent of McDonald’s annual sales. Luckily one of our regular customers is the chairman of the Senate Anti-Trust Committee. So we appeal to our customer in the hopes that we will get the same deal as McDonald’s.

Sounds absolutely ridiculous, doesn’t it? When you think about it, this scenario is essentially the deal that Hatch is trying to arrange for the smaller guys. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal if you’re the MWC. You can have one decent team and put out an overall sub-par product, yet still reap the same benefits that conferences with multiple great teams and an overall great product do. This is why I think that Hatch will ultimately fail because sharing the wealth equally with those that have not earned it violates every principle of free-market capitalism that I can think of. I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I believe in America and I think America will win this fight over the likes of Orrin Hatch and Joe Barton.

Well said.

I’m of the opinion that Congress has many other issues to contend with, but if they want to do something about college football they should start by eliminating taxpayer subsidies to rent-seeking bowl games, including some that already turn a profit.