Blame the BCS alliance for ACC's raid on Big East

By Sally Jenkins ~ The Washington Post

A civil war is taking shape in college athletics.

On one side is Big Football, and on the other side is what might be called Little Football. A major collision between the factions is coming, with a couple of possible outcomes: Either a genuine reform effort will finally take shape, or the NCAA as we know it will end.

The potential doomsday scenario became all too realistic this week with the Atlantic Coast Conference's hostile corporate raid on the Big East. But that unsavory affair was just a symptom, not the cause. The real cause is the Bowl Championship Series alliance, a cartel so ruinous and corrupt that it ought to be promptly dismantled by the NCAA -- a move toward which is underway, led by Little Football schools.

Little Football is a loose confederation of universities such as Tulane, colleges that choose to behave like colleges rather than conglomerates. According to Tulane President Scott Cowen, the leader of the rebellion, the BCS is not just wrong and destructive; it's probably illegal.

Concentration of power

Since its inception in 1998, the BCS has effectively concentrated all of the money and power in college athletics in the hands of just 63 schools in six major conferences (the ACC, Pacific-10, Big Ten, Southeastern, Big 12 and Big East). It's effectively locked out the other five conferences and 53 schools that play Division I-A football from any chance of getting into the major postseason bowl games, with their massive financial pots.

Not one college from those conferences (the Western Athletic, Mountain West, Conference USA, Mid-American, Sunbelt) has gone to a BCS bowl. As The New York Times has noted, BCS revenue from the 2002-03 season was $114 million, and more than $109 million of that went solely to the BCS colleges.

The others got backwash.

The BCS has effectively sentenced schools such as Tulane to second-tier status and huge financial deficits. And Cowen for one is sick of it.

A couple of weeks ago, Cowen sent a letter to his fellow NCAA Division I-A presidents protesting the BCS system and asking them to join him in a conference call to discuss ways to attack it. He figures the time is ripe because the BCS contract expires after the football season in 2005. Cowen says, "We have about 12 months to make the compelling case that a system that has divided Division I-A football into two camps -- haves and have-nots -- and essentially prevents 53 universities from competing for a national championship, should be dismantled." Cowen figured if he heard back from 10 other presidents, that would be a good start.

Thirty-three of them responded. More replies are coming in every day.

Why is Cowen such an implacable enemy of the BCS? Tulane ought to be a poster child of everything that's right in the NCAA. It has one of the highest graduation rates for athletes in the country, one of whom is Washington Redskins quarterback Patrick Ramsey. And yet it's running a $7 million annual deficit.

Rewarding terrible rates

Meanwhile, colleges with disgraceful graduation rates hoard the money from postseason play. Tennessee's football graduation rate in 2001 was 8 percent, and Oklahoma's football graduation rate for the same year was just 6 percent, according to the 2002 NCAA Graduation-Rates Report. Tulane's was 82 percent.

The cost of NCAA Division I-A membership has become exorbitant -- the latest rules require a college to support 16 sports in order to participate -- and yet Tulane is locked out of any shot at getting into the Rose, Fiesta, Orange and Sugar bowls, with their massive TV rights fees and payouts.

"It's not a matter of if programs will begin to disappear; it's a matter of when," Cowen says.

But Big Football has become so financially predatory that it's even turning on itself. Anyone who watched the ACC's raid on the Big East had the sensation of watching a python devour its own tail.

The raid, resulting in the defection of Miami and Virginia Tech, instantly ruined the Big East financially and stripped it to six Division I football colleges, jeopardizing its membership in the BCS.

Ironically, the demise of the Big East would mean fewer BCS schools -- instead of 63 it would be down to 55 or so -- concentrating even more money in fewer hands. The NCAA then would be divided exactly in half between the BCS schools and nonmembers. Without a majority, how many favorable rulings will the BCS get, seeing as how it's hurt half of the voters?

Even more ironically, Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese is a BCS official. During the football season, when critics pointed out the system was financially unfair, Tranghese replied flippantly, "This isn't communism." No, it's education. And the tactics of hostile takeovers and insider trading don't belong in this forum.

"I think what's happened is, you live by the sword, you die by the sword," Cowen says. "Nobody should really be surprised by the ACC-Big East conflict because the system is based on power and money and therefore inevitably leads to predatory behavior. And quite frankly it's an anathema to the goals of education. If this doesn't get rectified, the NCAA Division I as we know it simply won't sustain itself. Something will happen. Something will break."

The BCS has been corrosive to all collegiate games, across the board, not just football: Non-BCS schools now have smaller athletic budgets, fewer recruiting resources, poorer facilities, lower staff salaries and ever-rising deficits. It's no coincidence that in three of the last four years, 14 of the 16 teams in the round of 16 in the NCAA men's basketball tournament were from BCS schools.

How can BCS colleges, in the name of higher education, bring about the wholesale destruction of college football? They can't and still call themselves institutions of learning under the law.

Profit-sharing has long been a central tenet of the NCAA: The organization is no stronger than its weakest member, and its central mission is supposed to be not for profit. Its not-for-profit status, in fact, is all that protects it from antitrust challenges, taxation and labor law. Define the NCAA as a business and suddenly the players are entitled to salaries and labor protections, and those bowl payouts are unrelated business income in the eyes of the IRS.

Instead, under the BCS rule, the NCAA has degenerated into a system of Big Football intentionally trying to kill off Little Football in order to keep all of the profits. "If you were a conspiracy theorist, one would say that's exactly what's happening," Cowen says. "In essence you end up squeezing out a number of people in Division I-A." Why the NCAA allowed the BCS to be created is a good question. The fact is the NCAA has been in an awkward position because "it feared that if it asserted its authority the big football schools would break off from the NCAA," Cowen says. But maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing.

"If that's the ultimate outcome, I personally have no problem with it," Cowen says. "They would be what they're becoming, major semi-pro leagues. They would define themselves as that." In the meantime, the BCS will continue to threaten the financial well being of smaller football programs struggling to retain Division I-A status. Cowen has scheduled the conference call of 33 college presidents for July 22. NCAA President Myles Brand has said he may monitor it.

He needs to.