BCS and Antitrust

USA Today's Steve Wieberg reports this morning that the Mountain West Conference yesterday "unveiled a plan that would recast the BCS' four current bowls — FedEx Orange, Allstate Sugar, Tostitos Fiesta and Rose — as quarterfinals in an eight-team playoff, quadrupling the number of teams that get a shot at the national title." [The complete proposal (pdf) is linked in the article.] Wieberg notes that the proposal would alter the way teams are placed for the BCS bowls, setting up a 12-member selection committee that would rank the top 25 at the end of the regular season and slot eight teams into a playoff format, and those slots would still take into account automatically qualifying conference champions.

I raised the question whether the BCS system constitutes an illegal restraint on trade under Section 1 in a post back in 2005 (which, ironically, was one year after Utah's 2004 undefeated season). Here is what I wrote four years ago: "So in other words ladies and gentlemen of the jury: The six largest athletic conferences got together and agreed that the teams in their conferences have the toughest schedules and should, therefore, have a greater opportunity to compete for a national title to the exclusion of an undefeated team that simply does not compete at their level according to them (such as a Tulane in 1998 or a Utah in 2004), and they devised a system to accomplish those ends." And now you can add, "a Utah in 2008".

In antitrust speak, Mountain West's proposal could be viewed under a rule of reason analysis as "a less restrictive alternative" that serves the same procompetitive justifications as the current BCS system in crowning a legitimate college football champion, but which does so in a manner that does not produce the same anticompetitive effects.

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