TopFrog
Lifelong Frog
The Oakland Press: True college bowl champion is greed
By DAN K. THOMASSON
Scripps Howard News Service
Amidst all the hurrah of the college bowl season, which finally ended this week, topped so far by Texas Christian University’s exhilarating victory over the behemoths from Wisconsin in the venerable old Rose Bowl nothing is more important to remember than the underlying reason behind these events that are supposed to highlight the nation’s best “student” athletes -- money.
The bottom line is really all that counts here in an improbable, dishonest exercise in anti-competitive commercialism called the Bowl Championship Series, foisted off on Americans as the true determiner of America’s number one football team. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Well, TCU -- not a part of the cabal that controls this infamous business — fought its way through to finally dispel that notion dragging with it the Boise States and Utahs that have been so absurdly denied the same opportunity over the years.
Whatever the BCS claims, it never will be the same again. That, of course, presumes that it ever was what it claimed. Perhaps the TCU fete will strike a blow for those who would set aside this monstrosity and install the only real way to decide who should sit atop the football mountain, a national playoff just like other sports. But one shouldn’t be too hopeful considering the millions upon millions of dollars members of these privileged conferences, the bowls, sponsors and television share. ...
By DAN K. THOMASSON
Scripps Howard News Service
Amidst all the hurrah of the college bowl season, which finally ended this week, topped so far by Texas Christian University’s exhilarating victory over the behemoths from Wisconsin in the venerable old Rose Bowl nothing is more important to remember than the underlying reason behind these events that are supposed to highlight the nation’s best “student” athletes -- money.
The bottom line is really all that counts here in an improbable, dishonest exercise in anti-competitive commercialism called the Bowl Championship Series, foisted off on Americans as the true determiner of America’s number one football team. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Well, TCU -- not a part of the cabal that controls this infamous business — fought its way through to finally dispel that notion dragging with it the Boise States and Utahs that have been so absurdly denied the same opportunity over the years.
Whatever the BCS claims, it never will be the same again. That, of course, presumes that it ever was what it claimed. Perhaps the TCU fete will strike a blow for those who would set aside this monstrosity and install the only real way to decide who should sit atop the football mountain, a national playoff just like other sports. But one shouldn’t be too hopeful considering the millions upon millions of dollars members of these privileged conferences, the bowls, sponsors and television share. ...
