Why No One Is Listening To Orrin Hatch And The MWC: The Legal Argument

Senator Orrin Hatch has been keeping up his holy crusade against the BCS in the name of the Utah Utes, ahem I mean uh, college football fans, in the last few days with his latest senate hearing.

However, considering no other senators bothered to come (the chair started the meeting, then left) don't expect anything to drastically change soon.

Some might say the other senators probably had better things to do, like try and fix the economy, or our schools, or our debt or... you get the picture.

The reality is they stayed away for a much better reason; there is no legal argument to change the BCS. If there was, the MWC and WAC would have already teamed up and sued the crap out of the BCS. There's a little problem though. OK, a big problem.

In 1984 the NCAA tried to gain control of major college football's TV contracts and mandate which teams got to be on television and the number of times a given team would be on TV in an attempt to:

A: force people to actually go to the games

B: even out the playing field for smaller teams by giving them an equal shot at being on TV

C: gain control of the giant money making venture that college football was starting to become

Meanwhile, many major football schools also belonged to a group known as the College Football Association. Those schools wanted no part of the NCAA's limited contract and signed their own TV deal instead.

The NCAA threatened all the CFA members who did not comply with their demands with sanctions.

The result? They were promptly sued by the Oklahoma board of regents and slammed by the Supreme Court of the United States as trying to create a monopoly over the control of college football. In its decision in NCAA vs. Board of Regents, 468 US 85, the SCOTUS (yes an actual abbreviation, look it up) said that:

The interest in maintaining a competitive balance among amateur athletic teams that the NCAA asserts as a further justification for its television plan is not related to any neutral standard or to any readily identifiable group of competitors. The television plan is not even arguably tailored to serve such an interest. It does not regulate the amount of money that any college may spend on its football program or the way the colleges may use their football program revenues, but simply imposes a restriction on one source of revenue that is more important to some colleges than to others. There is no evidence that such restriction produces any greater measure of equality throughout the NCAA than would a restriction on alumni donations, tuition rates, or any other revenue-producing activity.

Why is this so important? To this day major college, D1, FBS, whatever you want to call it, is the least controlled sport by the NCAA of all the sports under its umbrella. After the ruling, the Big Ten and the Pac Ten signed their own independent TV deals, while the CFA signed its own deal. 

Penn State and Notre Dame left the CFA in 1990 and 1991 because they weren't getting a big enough cut as independents. The CFA died for good when in 1995 the SEC struck out on its own and signed with CBS. The CFA ended officially in 1997, THE NEXT YEAR THE BCS BEGAN!!!

Basically, the NCAA tried to gain control over the biggest revenue source in college athletics, the major college football TV deals, and had the smack down laid to them by the Supreme Court. Really, it’s a surprise the major football schools didn't break away entirely.

Schools that fought this NCAA attempt are almost exclusively teams currently in BCS conferences. The conferences and the university presidents of the BCS have basically been told in the highest federal court in the land what they are doing, far from being a monopoly, is actually the opposite of a monopoly.

Since the court system in America has a long standing precedent of upholding previous court rulings, requiring a minor court to overturn a decision of the Supreme Court IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

This is why Nebraska’s president can say whatever he wants and make jokes while he’s in a senate hearing. He has nothing to fear. Nada, nunca, nothing. This is the reason the Justice Department keeps giving Hatch the runaround. 

They all know it would require a change in federal law strong enough to overturn a SCOTUS decision. If not, the BCS, which has everything to lose, will just sue and put it right back at the court's feet with the caveat that they already decided this 25 years ago.

Basically, the BCS is here to stay until the people in charge say it isn't. After all, the federal government is on their side.

Oh yeah, in 1984 BYU won the national championship