by Brad Sullivan

It’s been an incredible NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament this season, and the Final Four should be no exception. When you look at this year’s remaining teams, there are two teams that very few had advancing to this stage.

VCU and Butler have punched their ticket to Houston by taking down some of the highest-ranked, talent-flush teams in college basketball. The strong play of these underdogs proves once again that a playoff system is the best way to determine a champion. It is the most equitable method to determine who should take home the trophy.

In college football, the opportunity to win a national championship is only available to those who run in the same circles. A school must belong to a BCS conference to even be considered. Meanwhile, NCAA basketball shares the same equitable method to determine a champion as Division II Football, Division III Football, women’s field hockey, squash, and every other NCAA sport. You can get hot at the right time, make a run, and win a title. It’s the American way!

Unfortunately college football is more of a mafia cartel. The teams without the name will never have a chance to get hot and make a run due to the BCS. You’d think John Gotti himself set it up.

With the NFL in a lockout, College Football has a great opportunity to make some headway increasing their fan base, and what better way to grab more fans then by creating a playoff system?

We all know this won’t happen without pressure from the fans, but it would be epic. You would see some smaller programs get hot at the right time and run the table.

The fans will continue to be forced to watch lopsided routes and terrible teams play each other in terrible tradition-less bowl games rather than experience all the excitement and fairness of a single elimination playoffs system.

Michael Bradley Sullivan serves as an SFC Sportswriter Fellow. He is a senior broadcast journalism major at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. He was born and Raised in Corpus Christi, Texas. He is a fan of the Texas Tech Red Raiders, the Dallas Cowboys, and the San Antonio Spurs. Follow him on twitter here.

by Scott Weiss

“BCS executive director Bill Hancock said college football is more likely to return to the old bowl system than having a playoff one beginning in the 2014 season.”  What this reminds me of is a totalitarian government saying, not only aren’t we granting increased freedom of speech, but any increased freedom that we previously granted is being revoked.  Hancock said that a playoff system is not even being considered.  The level of arrogance and disregard for public sentiment is startling.

Wouldn’t it be nice if college football fans exerted enough pressure on Mr. Hancock and his cronies to take the decision out of their hands completely?  Mr. Hancock, everyone including you knows that real champions are the ones who win their way through a playoff system.

Check out the entire AOL FanHouse story here.

Scott Weiss is the Local Chapter Chair for SFC-New York/New Jersey and an SFC Sportwriter Fellow. He has been involved in the sports fans advocacy movement since 2000. He is a life long fan of the Mets, Jets, Knicks, and Rangers.

The Big Ten will likely not make an appearance in any BCS title game in the near future, and columnist Michael Arace explains why in today’s edition of the Columbus Dispatch.

While our good friend, the author of ’Death to the BCS’, Dan Wetzel, was interviewed for this piece, two intriguing messages emerge from Jim Tressel’s recent appearance on The Dan Patrick Show and Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delaney’s appearance on a panel in New York.

Tressel:  ”Within five years, we will be positioned for a playoff of sorts.”

Delaney (paraphrased by Arace here): Non-BCS conferences have been asking for more and more, and they ought to stop trying to squeeze the big boys – or else.

This battle is far from over.  It is so crucial that we harness the power of the public outcry and continue to organize fans to change our future. SFC will not sleep until we have won a playoff system. That would be a true victory.

While we previewed this week’s story on the cover of Sports Illustrated, it’s important to note that the fine writing staff at Sports Illustrated is no longer living in the dream world creating fantasy-filled college football playoff brackets (which we love!) asking the question ‘What if…?’ In this week’s edition of SI, our friend Dan Wetzel (author of ‘Death to the BCS’) joins Austin Murphy to present hard facts supporting what Sports Fans Coalition has been clamoring about for more than a year now: the BCS is a cartel. Those University Presidents and beneficiaries of this unpopular and inequitable system support the status quo as cronyism rules and merit-based rewards are only granted if you know the right people.

Check out the cover here, but more importantly take a look at this snapshot of evidence explaining how and why this tax-funded non-profit institution, the NCAA, administers Division I-A football different than any other sport.

Austin Murphy and Dan Wetzel shed light on the money-making traditionalists—namely bowl executives and the highest-profile conference commissioners, ADs and coaches—that are eager to maintain the status quo. Here are several reasons why this group of power brokers wants to keep things the way they are:

• Bowl games enjoy tax-free, not-for-profit status despite generating money: “The Sugar Bowl finished 2007 with $37 million in assets and turned an $11.6 million profit. What’s more, the Sugar Bowl ¬accepted $3 million from the Louisiana state ¬government—this a year before it was announced that the state was running a $341 million shortfall in its budget.”

• Bowl executives are handsomely compensated: “Working for bowls is a great gig, if you can get it…. The money is excellent, even for such inconsequential games as the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl, whose executive director, Gary Cavalli, is unlikely to go hungry, having pocketed $377,475 in 2009. Cavalli, of course, is a bargain compared with Sugar Bowl CEO Paul Hoolahan, who made $607,500 in fiscal 2007.”

• The majority of a bowl’s revenue goes to the bowl, not the participating schools: “The 2007 Chick-fil-A Bowl generated $12.3 million in revenue but paid out just $5.9 million total to the participating schools, Auburn and Clemson.”

• Schools profit little from bowl games, even if they’re BCS bowls: “The $18.5 million [Ohio State received for making the Rose Bowl last January] went to the Big Ten, where it was added to a pool of bowl revenue that was then sliced into 12 shares—one for each team, one for the league office. That still left Ohio State with a tidy $2.2 million to spend, which the Buckeyes did. Ohio State’s team travel costs were $352,727. Unsold tickets ran the school a cool $144,710. The bill to transport, feed and lodge the band and cheerleaders came to $366,814. Throw in entertainment, gifts and sundry other expenses and the Buckeyes lost $79,597.”

• Bowls profit off of the teams that play in them: “Halftime entertainment at the Jan. 1, 2009, Outback Bowl was provided by the [Iowa] Hawkeye Marching Band. And how did the Tampa Bay Bowl Association, which runs the game, thank the band for that gratis performance? By charging the university $65 a head for each of the 346 band members. According to university records submitted to the NCAA, the school was forced to purchase face-value tickets totaling $22,490 for the band, even though the game wasn’t sold out.”

o This includes required ticket agreements: “For their appearance in the 2009 Orange Bowl, Virginia Tech and the ACC agreed to purchase 17,500 tickets at $125 per seat, but they could sell only 3,342, according to university documents. The result: a $1.77 million bath for the school, not the bowl.”

• Bonuses for certain coaches/ADs that make bowls: “Coaches land tidy bonuses for even -minor-bowl glory. ADs, too, reap a windfall for a bowl invite. The going rate: one month’s extra salary for an appearance in even the lowliest game. Oregon’s Rob Mullens ¬receives $50,000 if the Ducks go bowling. Kentucky’s Mitch Barnhart collects $30,000.”

It just goes to show that its not what you do, it’s who you know!

SFC is seeking to change that.

College football needs to play by NCAA rules of fairness like every other sport in collegiate athletics determining the champion on the field of play no matter how many fat cats gripe about losing million dollar checks because their team wasn’t good enough to get the ‘w’. It’s what the fans want and it’s time for the fans to take the power back since it is our tax dollars supporting this culture of greed and the inequitable administration of our games.

Jeremiah Tittle is the Managing Editor of SportsFansCoalition.org. Reach him at JeremiahTittle@gmail.com. Apply for a position with the SFC Sportswriter Fellowship here.

It’s over now. #1 played #2 and #1 was victorious.

It was a great game, with a little of everything in it for college football fans – interceptions, injuries, trick plays, and heartwarming stories of players who faced adversity and kept going.

However, there was something just not right about it.  This is not the game we should have had.

It has been over a month since the BCS, aided by computers (what would we do without them?), decided which two teams would face each other in its don’t-call-it-a-national-championship game. There were four more Saturdays of college football in which the fans could have had the playoff that included all of the best teams in football, not just those ordained by a group of insiders deadset on protecting their million dollar paychecks.

Joe Paterno said it best in a recent interview with ESPN. “We must have a championship game. We get forgotten after we finish the season. I don’t like the BCS. I think we need a playoff.”

The team with even one loss gets forgotten because their fate is decided immediately upon the regular season’s end. And what’s worse for teams that are not in an elite conference such as Penn State, even with a perfect season, a mid-major will be similarly exiled. Just ask Boise State how they felt after beating TCU in the anticlimactic Fiesta Bowl.

As responsible sports fans, we want the college football season to last with an eye toward keeping our school’s athletes healthy – but with meaningful games leading up to the crowning of a true champion.

Without a playoff in the month of December, we will never know. If that means Alabama doesn’t play Jack State in September, so be it. We’d rather see an Alabama-Florida playoff rematch then the Florida-Charleston Southern blowout in Week 1.

Picking the final two teams for NCAA Football’s top prize  shouldn’t include a debate of what clique they hang out in. In this new decade, let the champion be decided on the field.