Commentary on Conference Realignment from Dr. Weber

College football seems to be about two games this year: the great contests taking place every Saturday and the sad game of musical chairs that dominates the headlines the other six days of the week. One of the founding members of the Big East will soon be headed to the ACC. A cornerstone of the Big 12 is off to the SEC, following previous fellow members who departed to the Big 10 and Pac-12.  Another institution left the Mountain West for the Big East – only to then accept an invitation to the Big 12. And, the list doesn’t end there.
 
But this is no game; it is a serious matter.  We are witnessing a systemic problem within college football.  The Big East, which has been artificially propped up by the Bowl Championship Series, is now about to be hoisted by that same petard.  One might argue that this is just the free market working its will.  But, of course, the market is not free; it is controlled and manipulated by the cartel that is the BCS. Consequently, once proud universities scramble to find high stable ground on an inherently uneven playing field.
 
We know how unpopular the BCS is and we have known that the BCS is unfair for the 53 teams of the five non-BCS conferences. What has not been so apparent until the present leap frogging is that the BCS is ultimately not in the best interest of its own members.  Doubt that? Ask the Big East or the Big 12.
 
This unseemly madness will stop only when the Department of Justice steps in to enforce our nation’s antitrust laws. In a nutshell, the BCS falsely proclaims a “national champion” while eliminating 44% of Division I football programs, ignoring five states (Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming) and distorting football revenues to the point of absurdity. Under this flawed system, 13-0 TCU, ranked #2 nationally after winning the Rose Bowl, earns $12 million for its conference while 8-5 Connecticut, unranked after losing the Fiesta Bowl, earns $22 million for its conference -- not for playing well, not because their athletes put forth superior effort, but because they happen to be members of an automatic-qualifying conference.
 
So long as the rewards of intercollegiate football are based on entitlement - what conference a university belongs to - rather than performance, we will continue to see this sorry spectacle of conferences abandoned, traditional rivalries severed, and inadequate accolades for play on the field.
 
Universities are jumping conferences not because their fans want it, not because it is in the best interest of the sport, but simply because if the sport is going to be rigged they would rather find themselves among the “haves” rather than the “have-nots”.
 
This is a sorry case of, “stop me before I sellout again.” That is the nature of cartels; they are hard to abandon. And, in spite of their best efforts, fans have not been able to bring reason to the game. We need the Department of Justice to fix this mess. No one within the system has the power to stop the BCS, and most refuse to try either because they are part of the self-defeating conspiracy or because they hope to be.
 
The time for reform is now, and only Justice, (both the Department of and the value itself), can put an end to all of this and restore the integrity of a once great game.
 
With the ongoing drama of the conference realignment and as someone who has seen this play out before, Dr. Weber felt the need to weigh-in and call attention to the BCS' role in these developments.  Dr. Weber was President of San Diego State University from 1996 - 2011 and has served on the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee, as a member of the NCAA board of directors and on the NCAA executive committee.