Does this really surprise anyone?
… As Cuban wrote today, however, he faces another hurdle — namely, that he’s not the first person to have this idea, and those before him aim to profit off a playoff plan one way or another. Here’s part of an e-mail Cuban received from someone reportedly represented by a major law firm:
My advise is, don’t waste your money. There are three perfected alternatives to the BCS. I own one, a guy with CBS owns another and a guy in Arizona owns the third. By that, I don’t mean the screw-ball ideas you see on the internet, but actual branded properties.
[…]
You should also consider that the playoffs are already owned by someone, as in, the patent for resolving the FBS championship by way of a playoff was issued long ago. It’s called a method patent, so be careful not to infringe it.
I was hoping it turned out that Jim Delany was the patent holder, but no such luck.
Get The Picture 
I wonder about the seriousness of a person who does not know the difference between “advise” and “advice.”
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“There are three perfected alternatives to the BCS.”
Color me skeptical.
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Seeing the idea of dumping more money into SEC programs, I sent Cuban an e-mail asking him to look into the SEC West’s disgusting oversigning practices and giving him a few links explaining the extreme injustices the practice requires. He hit me back with a short reply that made it sound as if the topic was new to him but that he was thankful to be made aware of it.
Cuban likes to throw out big ideas into the marketplace of ideas and see what comes back. It’s more a learning experience for him than anything. He ends up financially moving on only a small minority of these ideas (see, his sports wagering hedge fund idea that got some talk a few years back) because ultimately he is a smart and disciplined investor.
The last thing SEC football needs right now is more money. The continued oversigning practices (in 2010 no less) of the SEC West (+ SC and UK) are an embarrassing stain on the conference’s image and reputation and, by continued association with these ridiculous “universities”, those of the University of Georgia as well.
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Not only that, but the oversigning (or lack there of) is keeping us at a competitive disadvantage.
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I would rather UGA never win another football game than oversign.
The SEC West is a bunch of impoverished, economically stagnant, backwards, regressive states. And that is reflected in their universities’ complete lack of basic ethics on issues like this.
Sadly, the University of Georgia just gets lumped in with these utterly embarrassing institutions, despite the fact that Georgia does not engage in oversigning and is far more diverse, far larger in population, and far more economically vibrant than these sad SEC West states.
It is time for UGA (leaders, graduates, supporters, etc.) to quit pretending this is still the 1960s, when the state of Georgia was relatively the same size and make-up as these SEC West states. The differences are night and day now and all trends point towards those differences growing even larger over the years to come.
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