NCAA Football Bcs

Every Monday during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

There's an unnerving, repetitive theme to the first four items in this week's FanHouse Walk -- lawyers. Maybe its just the offseason or an odd week, but they seem to be everywhere related to college football right now. Today's headliner finds Florida's Attorney General Bill McCollum threatening the NCAA and its president Myles Brand with a $1,000 fine or even jail time if it doesn't make public documents related to its confidential investigation into Florida State athletics.

Every Monday during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

Rap, Rap, Rapping At The Door -- Bad news is best delivered on Friday, so no surprise when it was discovered that in the new BCS contract the Rose Bowl must fill one of its slots to a non-BCS team (think Boise State or Utah) if it loses either the Big 10 or Pac-10 champion to the BCS championship game.

There are the Rose Bowl haters out there snarking away on this, but I think its another sad day for college football. Everyone bemoans the USC/Illinois type matchups in Pasadena, but I still find it fresh and what the Rose Bowl is all about. The various Miami/Nebraka, Texas/Michigan, USC/Texas type matchups were all enjoyable, but something has never felt right about them.

Texas coach Mack Brown understandably fumed last season after Big 12 tiebreaker guidelines eliminated his team from the BCS championship mix.

He even threatened to vote his team No.1 in the final USA Today Coaches' poll, which counts for one-third of the voting to determine the BCS national championship. That's a AFCA no-no, as coaches are obligated to vote for the BCS championship game winner , so Brown backed off his threats and voted Florida No. 1.

For a while it looked like Brown was prepared to get real ugly with his peers.

But now the veteran UT coach is all smiles after word leaked out Wednesday that the AFCA has decided to no longer make the coaches' final poll votes public beginning in 2010. So the era of transparency the coaches had been so proud of and confined by is over.

Every sport needs a bad guy to keep the fans interested. Just ask Vince McMahon. Wait, don't. He can't hear you, he's on top of a 238-foot-high pile of $100 bills. So take my word for it. Sports are as much about who to root against as who to root for.

College football used to have a plethora of villains. When Steve Spurrier was at the height of his powers he had the two qualities most valued in a villain. He was arrogant and he was right. You never knew what he was going to say next, but you knew it was going to be a slam of one of his rivals. We won't even discuss some of his final scores.

Nowadays, however, everybody's just so doggone nice. (Okay, everybody outside the SEC.) There's one man, though, who might make a good hate sink for football fans. That's him in the picture.

The hypocrisy of the NCAA's celebration of "amateur" athletics is hardest to stomach when we're reminded just how much money is paid to everyone other than the players. The latest example? Former Congressman (and Oklahoma quarterback) J.C. Watts was paid $620,000 to work as a lobbyist in Washington on behalf of the BCS.

The federal government's opposition to the Bowl Championship Series is well established: President Obama favors a college football playoff, and last week a member of Congress compared the BCS to Communism. And now the attorney general of Utah is saying that if the feds don't go after the BCS, he will.

Every Monday during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

Mr. BCS Goes To Washington -- Except I have a feeling Jimmy Stewart would find some way to rail against the BCS, however wrongheadedly. You see, the big word in the halls of Congress on Friday was "fair" but don't let that confuse you. While the Mountain West and certain members of Congress are using the fairness term to stoke public support, their real concern is about money.

Every Monday during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

Zed's Dead, But Not The Spread -- Great find from Smart Football of UCLA coach Rick Neuheisel discussing in great detail the spread offense and UCLA's decision not to run it. Smart Football has his response as well, synthesizing Neuheisel's main arguments and where he gets confused before making the conclusion that the term has "quickly lost all use as a meaningful and descriptive term".

In several decades of public service, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch has been reliably conservative. However, when it comes to discussing matters of college football the Senator walks and talks like a member of the other party. Since 2003 Hatch has been complaining about the BCS and its unfairness, accusing the major conference commissioners of being 'elitists' and threatening to haul the entire show before Congress.

In an interview with CBS Sports' Dennis Dodd, Orrin Hatch Senate Republican appears to be playing a hand from the Democratic playbook railing against unfairness, threatening congressional intervention into a private entity and a radical change in how wealth is earned and distributed among the involved parties.

Every Monday during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

Rejoice! Er, potentially rejoice -- Last week the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported speculation that FOX might extricate itself a year early from its BCS coverage commitments. Besides the rarely disputed notion that FOX's BCS coverage is woeful -- thank you, Thom Brennaman and endless band shots -- the network seems to realize they've been dealt a weak hand for their 2010 games.