We repeat: President-Elect Obama cannot fix your playoff system, college football fans. He can do many things, yes: hit a mid-range jumper, outfox political ninjas like Hillary Clinton, and name a specific Conan the Barbarian comic he found interesting. (All true, including the Conan factoid: he's a fan. Crom approves.)
He has no real power other than the august seal of the President of the United States to back his suggestion of a playoff. Representative Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii has even less power, but he thinks it's a splendid idea to get the government involved in forcing college football into some kind of playoff system. Abercrombie is joined in this by prior supporters of a non-binding piece of legislation suggesting Congress investigate the BCS, a group including Georgia's Lynn Westmoreland, a representative you may remember from this Colbert interview.
On principle, the government has zero power or responsibility to get involved in the BCS, and no powers should be invented or conjured from thin air to do so. There's much better things for politicians to be doing, like "nothing," for example. Anecdotally, if you think Lynn Westmoreland should be let near anything as precious as college football, much less any other sport, you're probably also in favor of letting people with seizure disorders land the space shuttle. As Molly Ivins once said of a Texas politician, "If he were any dumber, we'd have to water him." If this is the vanguard of the push for a playoff, I'm leaping off the wagon before it gets so much as an iota of momentum.
Government Meddles With Sport ... Again
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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.
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