College hoops' lesson for football

Virginia Commonwealth University and Butler University are this year's surprise teams in the festival of sport known as March Madness. They come from unheralded conferences and have knocked off major basketball powers to reach the Final Four of the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

The college basketball world, indeed the whole sports nation, delights when teams like this get to play in the title game (and one of them will, because they face each other in Saturday's semifinals). They are called things such as Cinderella and underdog.

College football is another matter. Instead of a fair and honest tournament, it has a bowl system with the primary purpose of keeping television revenue concentrated in a handful of major conferences.

Outsider football teams are not called Cinderellas; they are called derogatory things — most notably, in the words of Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee, "the Little Sisters of the Poor." That phrase was part of Gee's explanation for why overachieving upstarts such as Boise State and Texas Christian University should not be allowed to play in college football's championship game. Their impressive records were made possible, he said, by playing in weak divisions against charity-case opponents.

Well, TCU did a pretty good job of shaming the establishment last year. After the polls and computer rankings determined that its 12-0 season was not good enough for the championship game, TCU defeated Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl. Wisconsin was the winner of the powerhouse Big Ten conference, a status it achieved by defeating Gee's Ohio State.

And yet the college football bowl system remains as entrenched as the Soviet Politburo during the Cold War. Next year, a so-called championship game will be played between two teams selected by polls and computer rankings. The best of the rest will be sent to bowl games based on the poll rankings, the conferences they play in, and how large a television audience they are likely to command.

That is college football fans' loss. March Madness is one of the few sporting events that consistently live up to the hype; this year's tourney has had more than its share of buzzer-beating bracket busters. Imagine how much more exciting college football would be if it culminated in a tournament of, say, 16 teams over four weekends in December and January.

Call it Winter Wackiness.