Ask not what the BCS can do for you, ask what you can do to the BCS.

Senator Orrin Hatch, mad as hell and not willing to take it anymore, is firing with both barrels:  July 7th hearings on the BCS in front of the Senate Antitrust Committee on which he sits and a “Why I Fight” piece he wrote that appears in today’s Sports Illustrated.

He sounds pretty fired up.

Hatch notes the sentiment for a college football playoff and writes that “almost anything would be better” than what the BCS has in place now.

Hmmm… I wonder if that would include ditching the BCS in its entirety and going back to the old system.  Hey, that did get dear ‘ol BYU a national championship in 1984!

Nah, probably not.  Because as much as he keeps talking about playing for the title, he keeps looking at all that money.

“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.”

And that, my friends, ain’t right.  If those heartless commie bastards that run the BCS won’t voluntarily share the wealth, well, then, by God, good conservatives like Orrin Hatch will just have to do something about that.

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.”

All I can say is that it’s a damned shame the BCS doesn’t control Wall Street.   Or the health insurance companies.

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UPDATE: Judging from this, I’m sure the WAC would like to see Senator Hatch move things along.

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UPDATE #2: This is a fun read.  Especially this part:

That’s been the problem all along. The BCS system is the natural outgrowth of college athletics’ essential stance to the outside world — one hand outstretched to hold the cash, one hand held aloft with the middle finger prominent.

Even the fight against the BCS, feeble though it’s been, has been fought by Orrin Hatch, the senior senator from Rice-Eccles Stadium, solely because his state school, Utah, was the latest one to get jobbed by the system. Otherwise, he’d be a loyal Republican and defend the BCS’ right to strangle the competition as part of doing business in a capitalist system.

If Hatch were serious, he’d actually be trying to strip college athletics of its power to hide behind the tax laws, or force it to be run as a separate entity outside the protection of the university, or find other ways to slap the system out of its institutional and extra-ethical arrogance.

But no, he just wants his favorite school to be a greater beneficiary of the currently corrupt system, and so does Calhoun. In other words, the Mountain West folks are not reformers, they’re just failed candidates without the throw-weight or interest to help overthrow the system. They just want their place at the trough.