Permanently Busting the BCS: Utah's Schurtleff Brings Case Closer to Trial

Imagine the first college football playoff game. Snow in Columbus, 100,000 fans clad in Buckeye gear, and the overwhelming anticipation of an event that is long overdue. The perennially overrated Buckeyes would lose, of course, but that's the beauty of playoffs. Utah's attorney general, Mark Shurtleff, is bringing us closer to that possibility than we ever have been before.

On April 21, Shurtleff began eliciting the help of anti-trust law firms seeking the most viable avenue for bringing it down. But what chance does his case have? Pundits are a little more optimistic than you might think. An article published by Harvard Journal of Sports & Entertainment Law concludes that,"Although the outcome of any case...is difficult to predict...the BCS would struggle to defend itself."  

I am not a lawyer and have often wondered how in the world litigation could disrupt the BCS. The explanation is a lot less dense than one might expect. The most accessible argument to laymen like myself, lies in the "illegal collective boycott" tenet of past anti-trust law rulings. 

Every year the Big Six conferences receive bigger payouts, despite their actual performance, thus spending millions on state of the art facilities and marquee coaches. Who wouldn't be enticed by the prospect of superior equipment and palatial stadiums? This perpetual competitive edge excludes schools from non-AQ conferences constituting the aforementioned "boycott." (As a side note I've included the BCS payouts for 2010-11 from bcsfootball.org at the end of this article.) 

Detractors have already begun to say, "There's got to be other things the Attorney General can spend his time on besides college football." Many state institutions are missing out on scores of cash because the current system is set up to make the rich richer, so decrying these efforts on grounds that it lacks national relevancy are misinformed.

The BCS has drawn the ire of fans for the last decade and shrugged it off callously, but the American courts are poised to take it down. It's still a ways off but I'm already dreaming about Boise State routing their first-round opponent.  

The payoffs for the 2010-2010 were allocated as follows.

-Mountain West, WAC, Sun Belt, MAC, Conference USA   24.72 million TOTAL 

-Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big 12 -- $21.2 million EACH

-Big Ten, Southeastern, Pac-10 -- $27.2 million EACH 

The revenue distribution is much more complicated than simply dividing by the number of teams but the disproportion is blatantly skewed. And these payment allocations happen every year with the only change occurring if a conference sends more than one team to a BCS bowl.