Separation of sports and state
Guess what! We’re not having a national championship game this year. Sorry Texas and Alabama fans. As the nation’s top two ranked teams, you will be playing a football game in January but it won’t be for a title. At least it won’t be recognized as such by Congress.
As if our elected officials didn’t have more important things to worry about like the economy, unemployment, terrorism and our troops overseas, Congress continues to impose its will on college football and the BCS.
This week, a House subcommittee approved legislation to ban promotion of a ‘national championship game’ unless it is the result of a playoff. Funny, I never saw Congress lobbying to rename the World Series even though we only had North American teams competing for it. Interestingly enough, one of the bill’s chief proponents, Joe Barton, is from Texas. Must be a TCU grad.
As most of us already know, TCU, Cincinnati and Boise State all went undefeated this season, but since it is widely perceived that they come from less competitive conferences, they were excluded from the BCS title game.
None of us can find a job or afford to buy Christmas presents for our loved one this season but at least we can rest assured our elected officials are concerned for the well-being of college football. So we have that going for us… which is nice.
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2009.