You're aware congress spends a lot more time on things less important than this on a pretty regular basis, right?
Throw on C-SPAN now and again. You might be appalled to see that they don't all sit around trying to fix the biggest of the problems, or you might not if you realized congress was a massive beast designed to handle many, many problems at once.
It represents the marketplace? What does that even mean? That because a majority of the fans are fans of big schools that it's okay to prohibit teams from conferences that aren't composed of big-name schools because people don't want to see them? That's prohibiting competition, pretty straight forward to me. Swofford and his conference get a bigger slice of the pie by guaranteeing a team from their conference is always, ALWAYS in the BCS series. They attain that slice of pie by shutting out other conferences from the championship itself and the series as well. Who's to say those conferences and their teams couldn't compete nationally in this supposed marketplace if they weren't raking in a potential 18 million a year?
Agreed. I think people maintain the image of the government that made a mess out of the MLB during the steroid debacle but it's hard to see how this isn't a slam dunk case of an organization prohibiting competition. I think it's in plain sight, too. The mere fact that a president of one of the conferences involved (who also holds a prominent position in the committee that limits the conferences that are non-BCS) can only make the case that tradition would have to be sacrificed if the system were to be changed to a playoff format says it all to me. I just can't believe it's taken this long to change.
I don't understand the complaint here. You should hope your government breaks up organizations that break antitrust laws, especially ones that involve the sanctity of our educational system. The fact that it involves this much money AND universities is a pretty big deal, I think.
Also:
"banning abusive behaviour by a firm dominating a market, or anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position. Practices controlled in this way may include predatory pricing, tying, price gouging, refusal to deal, and many others."
Hard to see how the BCS doesn't do that.
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