Clarion Content

The best team in the country was???

The Clarion Content was just excoriating the Obama administration last week on our politics page for its failure to object to the merger between two existing harmful monopolies, Ticketmaster and Live Nation. There is better news out of Washington, D.C. today. While the President was courtside watching the Duke game yesterday afternoon, with Veep Joe Biden who looked like he couldn't tell the teams apart without a program, the Justice Department was indicating its preliminary willingness to look into a harmful sports monopoly, the college football Bowl Championship Series (BCS).

The BCS is, of course, prima facie an anti-competitive system. It is deliberately designed to exclude and minimize opportunities for schools not in the six "power" conferences. The BCS worked just as its designers intended this year when it denied undefeated Boise State and Texas Christian a chance to compete for the national title. In fact, it not only excluded these schools from a national title game or any opportunity to play in one, but in a fit of extreme protectionism, it refused to allow them to play any team from the so-called power conferences in a BCS sanctioned bowl.

This behavior is monopolistic and highly objectionable. It would be bad enough if it were perpetrated by a private entity, but coming from an organization that includes many public universities, it is genuinely perverse. We agree, of course, that there are far bigger problems facing the country. However, we are glad to see the Obama administration is at least on the right side of this anti-trust issue. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote in a letter to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, a leading rabblerouser on the topic, that, "This seemingly discriminatory action with regard to revenues and access have raised questions regarding whether the BCS potentially runs afoul of the nation's antitrust laws...The administration shares your belief that the current lack of a college football national championship playoff with respect to the highest division of college football ... raises important questions affecting millions of fans, colleges and universities, players and other interested parties."

Is it going anywhere? Probably not, much more likely it is strictly for public consumption, and the Obama folks showed their true colors in raising nary an objection of significance to the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation which will raise the already ridiculous prices for concert tickets even higher. The BCS signaled its inclination to continue to ignore any and all objections in a statement released by its chairman, "This letter is nothing new and if the Justice Department thought there was a case to be made, they likely would have made it already."

Labels: college football, Ethically questionable, sports, Sports Economics