Wednesday, July 8, 2009

BcS


Breaking News! 
Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is going after the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) with guns a-blazing. He serves on the Senate’s judiciary subcommittee on antitrust and is using his power to go after the BCS.

For those of you not in the know, the BCS is not a global china manufacturing conglomerate. They are not the sole makers of a revolving cylinder or drum in a machine. The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) is “a five-game arrangement for post-season college football that is designed to match the two top-rated teams in a national championship game and to create exciting and competitive matchups between eight other highly regarded teams in four other games.”

It seems that the honorable Senator from Utah is a bit peeved about his Utes placement in the final tally after they went undefeated and did not get a chance to play for the #1 ranking in the championship.

Let me explain something about what may seem like an inequity here. Going undefeated, while a commendable feat, does not necessarily mean that your are among the best. For example, if my son’s high school freshman team goes undefeated for the season, it does not mean that team is as good as or better than the high school Varsity team which has one or two losses. It is a measure of two different qualities.

The teams that the Utes played last year to achieve their undefeated record were from poor to fair in ability. To have them play for the national championship would have been more unfair to the teams that did play which had much more difficult opponents all year long. Fans will always think that their team deserves to be in contention for a championship. After all Fan is short for Fanatic or Fanatical (excessively enthusiastic [Latin fanaticus belonging to a temple, hence, inspired by a god, frenzied]).

But here is the more important point of this. Orrin Hatch would have us believe that this issue is of such import to the country that we should spend time and lots of money to “fix” the college bowl system. I guess since he serves on the Senate’s judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, this is the only venue he has to make right the injustice to the University of Utah’s football team.

So we will spend a few million dollars following up on this antitrust action which would have no possibility succeeding so that Orrin Hatch can look better to his home state. Meanwhile, when I last looked the country had some real issues that needed attending to which we have not handled.

Banking for example is still in a sorry state. Banks trying to make-up the money they’ve lost on bad loans they made by hiking up rates to 19 – 20% on the credit cards they sponsor. The economy in general being held down by various factions that are benefiting from the poor economy. After all, many a millionaire was made in a bad economy. States like California are over extended in their budgets and in fact have no budget at this time.

We have healthcare problems, swine flu and bird flu are national and international problems, major cyber attacks on government sites, Social Security numbers vulnerable to compromise, shipping (as in boats) looking at a loss of some $20 billion and Microsoft announcing of a new security issue with a couple of its operating systems.

We’re talking serious consequences here. The apparent inequity for the University of Utah’s football team requiring time and money on the part of the senate must be more important than I thought. Who knew!

I know that fragmentation is a problem. I know that Diskeeper is the solution.