Good news, playoff fans! Our old friend Joe Barton is back just in time for the bowl season, and he's bringing along a few new friends from Congress to prop up an old idea:
WASHINGTON (AP)?Proponents of a college football playoff are launching a new national campaign aimed at taking down the BCS.
The "We Want a Playoff Now" campaign was introduced Thursday on Capitol Hill. It includes the lobbying firm The Moffett Group, headed up by former Rep. Toby Moffett, D-Conn., and the communications firm, New Partners.
Along with that effort, two congressmen are forming the Congressional Collegiate Sports Caucus. The congressmen, Texas Republican Joe Barton and Tennessee Democrat Steve Cohen, are reintroducing Barton's 2009 bill aimed at forcing college football to switch to a playoff system. The longshot bill would ban?as unfair and deceptive?the promotion of a postseason NCAA Division I football game as a national championship unless it's the outcome of a playoff.
How do you know they mean it? Look at their stripes: Cohen is a Tennessee politician who openly roots for Alabama, which has just been handsomely rewarded by the current system with a controversial ticket to the BCS Championship Game. If he doesn't have incentive to keep his mouth shut, nobody does.
So the "Congressional Collegiate Sports Caucus" is now a real thing, with (so far) only one mission: Reviving Barton's failed effort to kill the BCS via legislation, last seen lurching forward in December 2009 from a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where it eventually died of neglect. To recap, the bill proposes to "prohibit the marketing, promotion, and advertising of a postseason game as a 'national championship' football game, unless it is the result of a playoff system," under threat of being labeled "an unfair or deceptive act" by the Federal Trade Commission. The Moffett Group is on board to do whatever nefarious voodoo vaguely defined lobbying groups are usually hired to do to give the bill a fighting chance.
Regular readers may also remember Barton as the tough-talking Texas A&M fan who grilled ACC commissioner John Swofford during a Congressional hearing on the BCS back in May 2009. (Swofford was there as acting BCS coordinator, a title that used to rotate among conference commissioners before they hired Bill Hancock as "executive director" and unofficial punching bag to deflect the blows from hostile Congressmen and the like.) Two-and-a-half years later, well, they're back at the beginning of Level One. Yeah, at least it's a two-player game this time, along with the Justice Department, which is still sort of figuring out the controls. But by the time they get to the end, if they get to the end, the game may have already changed.
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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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