There Simply is no Basis for Believing Orrin Hatch Will Succeed
by AuditDawg on Jul 5, 2009 5:54 AM EDT
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When Kyle asked me a couple weeks ago if I'd be interested in posting while he was on vacation with the family, I honestly didn't know what I could bring the table. Thankfully Orrin Hatch and his crusade against America have provided me with the perfect conversation fodder. I post every now and then over at my site, but nothing as insightful like the fine folks here at Dawg Sports. As such, I realized I needed to step up my game. In doing so, I decided to talk about something that everyone that cares about college football has an opinion about while making my title a nice play on words from some recent articles here. I apologize in advance for the lengthy post, but once I started typing the words just started flowing and this is something that I feel strongly about. I hope you enjoy reading it and dissecting as much it as I did writing it.
Let me preface this piece by saying this is not a "pro-BCS/anti-playoff post", but rather my insight into why I think Orrin Hatch is misguided in his attempts to label the BCS as anti-trust. The playoff or no playoff debate is a topic for another day. Senator Blutarsky has covered this very well, but things are starting to heat up based on Hatch's article in the recently released Sports Illustrated as well as the fact that his anti-trust committee is having hearings on the BCS this week. I will break down Senator Hatch's points and point out what is right and what is wrong about each.
Hatch's first argument about why the anti-trust hearings are necessary is because of the unfairness that the smaller conferences (i.e. WAC/MWC) face when being considered for the national championship. Teams like Utah, Boise State, and Hawaii have gone undefeated in recent years, yet they were never considered national title contenders because of the perceived weakness of their respective conferences. Hatch summarizes his point with the following quote:
"It seems every year an obviously deserving team is left out of the BCS due to its arcane and, to put it bluntly, biased nature," Hatch wrote.
This is one point that I agree with Mr. Hatch. I even went on record last season and outright stated that there were four teams that deserve a slice of the proverbial national championship pie. I don't care that Florida held the trophy at the end of the day; Utah certainly deserved some sort of recognition for what they were, a championship football team.
Mr. Hatch's second point about the inequities of the BCS and how it may impact competition in the marketplace is due to the way revenue is handed out. He makes the point that poor teams (i.e. Baylor/Vanderbilt/Stanford) from the BCS conferences still get to share in the BCS money no matter what they do summed up by this quote from his SI piece:
"Every team from a preferred conference automatically receives a share from an enormous pot of revenue generated by the BCS, even if they fail to win a single game," Hatch wrote. "On the other hand, teams from the less favored conferences are guaranteed to receive a much smaller share, no matter how many games they win."
This too is another point of the Senator's with which I agree. Teams like Vanderbilt and Kentucky have for years reaped the benefits of a system that they will likely never participate.
Hatch follows that previous quote with this doozy:
If "those with the power to reform the system" don't do so voluntarily, Hatch writes, then "legislation may be required to ensure that all colleges and universities receive an equal opportunity."
What I gather from this is that if the BCS conferences won't share all that ill-gotten BCS money with the poor little Mountain West and Western Athletic Conferences, then by golly Congress is gonna show them.
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.
Let me know what you guys think. I've added a poll to see where you think this fight is headed. Comments, as always, are very welcomed.
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I'll tell you what's ridiculous...
is this thinking that somehow protecting competition is the same as socialism. You are familiar with monopolies, I assume; you must also understand, then, that Hatch’s whole premise is that the BCS is a monopolistic aggregation that intentionally unlevels the playing field.
Duh.
The rhetoric in this country has gotten so screwed up that any attempt to do anything regulatory is automatically anti-free market. Well, this country has been regulating the free market to protect competition, not destroy it, for about 100 years; having rules is not automatically socialist! Look at what the NFL does to protect competition, versus, say, Major League Baseball, which is rife with drug problems and has several teams that literally cannot possibly compete for a championship because they don’t even have the resources to keep their farm system stocked (Pittsburgh). Is the NFL a socialist league, or have they gone to great lengths to protect the integrity of competition?
If you want to make a more apt comparison, you’d be better off examining how universities interpret Title IX and how it affects college baseball.
To retort if I may
I don’t particularly like the tone at which you question my argument by basically belittling me in your first paragraph by essentially calling me an idiot just short of actually saying “you’re an idiot” but I could just be reading too much into your words as I certainly have had my words taken the wrong way on the ole’ blogosphere.
Now I am certainly guilty of hyperbole in this article with my “loss for America” and “socialism” comments, but that was done on purpose for a more tongue in cheek feel. After all, it is the weekend of Independence Day. I don’t actually believe that if the BCS were deemed anti-trust that is socialism. You are right that protecting competition is a vital role of the regulators in this country. I am on record with my support of regulators as I believe humans are innately greedy or just too stupid to protect themselves and that’s the role regulators serve. Dude, have you looked at my tag that I post under? In real life, I’m an external auditor who basically serves as the intermediary between publicly traded companies and the SEC (not the conference). If I didn’t believe in regulation then my whole career is basically a sham.
My problem with Hatch is that it always devolves to the argument about sharing the money. That’s why I say earlier that I think he will ultimately fail if he makes that lynchpin of his argument. That’s also why I included the McDonalds/hamburger shack analogy because that’s essentially what Hatch is arguing. If the strong point of his arguments revolved around things such as barriers to entry or monopolistic obstacles (which some pretty clearly exist within the BCS), then I think he’d have a more solid argument. But as long as he continues to nitpick on the money issue and why schools from the MWC don’t get the same chance at revenue as schools from the SEC, then he’s fooling himself. He’s not facing the economic reality that the SEC is the most profitable, most watched, most turnstile turning conference in the country and the MWC is not.
If you’re going to use the NFL as an argument for protecting competition, I guess I buy it but that’s kind of funny since we’re debating anti-trust issues. If you remember correctly, the NFL lost an anti-trust lawsuit to the USFL in the 1980’s and was declared “a duly adjudicated illegal monopoly”, which had achieved monopoly status due to predatory actions.
Thanks for coming by and sharing some thoughts, although like I said earlier I may be misinterpreting your words but they basically come across as belittling me the person rather than criticizing the points of my argument. I’m not trying to change anybody’s mind about what is or isn’t a monopoly. I just want to provide a thought that provokes debate and perhaps I stooped to a hyperbolic level in some of my comments, but that was purely for effect.
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My problem with Hatch is that it always devolves to the argument about sharing the money. . . . If the strong point of his arguments revolved around things such as barriers to entry or monopolistic obstacles (which some pretty clearly exist within the BCS), then I think he’d have a more solid argument.
Here’s the thing: it’s not two different arguments, it’s all the same.
It is undeniable that schools in the anointed conferences can receive money disproportionate to their winning, and it’s all but fact that winningest schools in the “lesser” conferences can never reach a level of revenue that even approaches that of the bottom-feeders in the major conferences.
That inequity of revenue is caused by the monopolistic nature of the NCAA. It’s not two different problems or even two different arguments — it’s two different approaches to the same thing: that in the NCAA the rich get richer.
When you’re a politician talking to TV cameras and you start blathering on about barriers to entry, illegality per se vs. the rule of reason, and so on and so forth, eyes start to glaze over. Nobody cares about the mechanics of the Sherman Antitrust Act. What they care about is the RESULT of the monopolistic behavior: that teams like Boise State and Utah can win all of their games, not win a national title, and bring home less money than an SEC bottom-dweller.
Some of the causes of that are competitive in nature (advertising and TV contacts) and some of the causes are not. Trying to draw those distinctions in front of our sound-bite media is a fool’s errand.
Instead of taking a stand against Hatch’s argument, why not take a stand as to the legality of the NCAA in general?
“That inequity of revenue is caused by the monopolistic nature of the NCAA. It’s not two different problems or even two different arguments — it’s two different approaches to the same thing: that in the NCAA the rich get richer.”
Wrong. The inequity of the system is caused by the BCS. The NCAA has no role in D-1 Football’s post season. There in lies the problem. If the NCAA were running a championship in D-1 things would have to be different. Unfortunately, the BCS is a private club that has elected to allow but a few tokens into their post season pay-off party.
by MikeInValdosta on Jul 5, 2009 8:51 PM EDT up reply actions
Exactly
The point that gets glossed over when debating pro-BCS/anti-BCS versus pro-playoff/anti-playoff is the fact that the NCAA doesn’t award a national championship in the highest level of collegiate football. Many sportswriters don’t seem to get this fact about why it is so difficult to just go to a playoff system when the NCAA has no vested interest in naming a national champion since it doesn’t. The BCS is a contract entered into by private parties essentially to make a lot of money and pretend to name a national champion through it.
http://hobnailboot.wordpress.com/
After re-reading my comments,
I don’t think there’s anything personal there. Calling the argument dumb, yes, but not the writer. Perhaps my tone was aggressive, but I have often read BS like that when it was seriously intended, and I’m sick of it.
As for tongue-in-cheek or hyperbole, well, that isn’t clearly intended in your essay. But I would suggest that using hyperbole in an article attempting to prove a point tends to lessen the impact of your own argument anyway.
I did see you are an auditor and did think it incongruous that you would make such speeches.
On topic,
I had forgotten about the NFL and the USFL, but it’s really an apples and oranges comparison. The point is that the BCS is an inter-league conglomeration while the NFL anti-trust suit was in relation to an extra-league organization; the comparison would be more apt if, say, the suit were brought by the Arizona Cardinals or another team.
Within league, the NFL goes farther to protect competition than any other pro sports league, anyway. The case can be made that the BCS teams generate revenue but that they have set up a closed system where they won’t play non-BCS teams on the road (certainly causing revenue losses) and their bowl contracts create a legal obstacle for non-BCS teams to earn big bowl revenue—as well as compete against the best teams (for a second time now).
So the money is relevant. Whether Hatch is right or not I don’t know, but the BCS is a stinking fish and always has been. I am surprised that the NCAA puts up with it, because the NCAA is the true governing body and is most analogous to a league office like the NFL. How odd would it be if the NFC West set up a revenue-sharing plan and exerted influence on the scheduling?
And finally,
(and I mostly mean that), the product the NCAA and other sports leagues peddle is semi-level competition. Factors that diminish that or otherwise damage its integrity should be limited if not abolished; conversely, there should be strategies to enhance competition in place and in consideration. The whole point of revenue sharing with the Vanderbilts and Kentuckies is exactly that, to enhance and maintain competition; if we know that we will beat them 70-3 every year because they slipped to mid-FCS level, well, the other teams who play them lose too, because semi-level competition is the product. So, if we revenue-share with Vandy, Duke, and UK, on what grounds do we exclude the Mountain West? What plausible rationale could be arrived at that isn’t “because we don’t want them to beat us”?
In short, your hamburger stand does not depend on McDonald’s, nor they on yours, in order to exist. That’s why McDonald’s and Burger King don’t revenue-share.
I get your points and they definitely are valid
While I feel your argument is rational and well-thought, I do think that some of your judgment may be clouded by what appears to be a pure disdain for the BCS. As mentioned by MikeinValdosta above, the NCAA doesn’t award a national championship in FBS football. Until they do, the BCS is just a private contract to earn lots of cash and pretending to name a national champion.
I’m solidly anti-playoff so maybe that’s where my bias comes in. I just personally don’t believe a playoff automatically rights all the wrongs (see the 2007 NY Giants and the 2009 Arizona Cardinals for proof that the two best teams don’t always end up in the final game). However, that’s another debate for another time. I think there are some real good qualities to the BCS that can’t be overlooked (i.e. if the BCS existed in 1984, no way in hell BYU would be national champions, or GA Tech in 1990 for that matter).
I honestly don’t know what the alternative is, but I don’t understand how something can restrict competition when the participants are competing for something that doesn’t really exist. Hence why people call it the Mythical National Championship.
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"National Championship"
I think referring to the prize as a national championship is what gets people in an uproar.
UGA, UF, and the City of Jacksonville conspire, through contracts, to make huge amounts of cash every year by having a football game. Utah is not permitted to get a piece of that action.
The bowl games, generally, and the BCS, specifically, are similar, just on a much grander scale and with the self-serving and self-appointed stamp of “National Championship” stuck on the top game. Private entities got together (conferences, bowls) and decided to select game participants according to certain formulae. The Sugar Bowl is not some kind of public commodity whose prize money must be regulated in the interest of fairness, is it? I mean, if the kind folks in New Orleans wanted to back out of the BCS and pay huge sums of money every year to Div IAA teams, would Boise State or UGA or anybody else have standing to object? Would Congress have the right to intervene on behalf of all of the schools not allowed to play?
by NCT on Jul 6, 2009 4:25 PM EDT up reply actions
Yeah, this is it.
The problem is an abdication of administration by the NCAA. All the private interests get to host their semi-private dinner parties and if you are cool enough or have enough cash you might get invited. And we call it a National Championship because there is nothing else.
NCAA: slaves to the moolah.
BCS: Augusta National.
If Hatch can somehow get the NCAA’s attention, I’m all for his effort.
Thanks for making that point clearer
I’ve been trying to get around to that in quite a circular manner. Your analogy to the Sugar Bowl and public commodities is the exact point I was trying to make about the BCS and why I don’t think that anti-trust provisions can really apply.
This isn’t as cut and dry like Microsoft’s case where they were essentially forcing retailers to pre-load Windows on every computer and using predatory actions to prevent OS’s like Linux from making it.
The non-BCS conferences are well within their rights to negotiate their own cash cow and call the winner a national champion if they like. It would be just as legitimate as what the BCS does. I compare the national championship awarded by the BCS to getting a degree from an unaccredited institution. Sure, you got a degree, but it doesn’t really count for anything in the eyes of most people.
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The Wall Street Journal takes up the good fight
That’s quite a clever title for an article.
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