Boise State President rips the BCS and rightfully so...

Boise State Pres. Bob Kustra/Courtesy: idahoreporter.com

They should be ripped and ripped frequently, but yet they aren't. By now, many of you may have heard the CBSSports.com BCS analyst found an error in the final BCS poll of the year. How did he find it? He double checked the math of one of the five computer polls used to come up with it.

So, the question you are probably asking is what about the other 4 computers? We don't know, because the corrupt BCS doesn't release that information to the public. Smell anything yet? Obviously, there are a bunch of questions here. The biggest of them: "So, without checking the validity, we've believed everything the corrupt BCS people have told us".

Needless to say, there are some pretty upset people about this (though none of them have anything to do with the BCS). Chief among them, Boise State president Bob Kustra. Kustra was so frustrated that he sent a somewhat angry e-mail to many of his peers:

((from the idahostatesman.com))

Greetings:

I trust that you have heard about the news from CBS sports analyst Jerry Palm that the BCS rankings erroneously ranked the positions of four teams in the final BCS rankings of the season. 

The BCS has corrected for it and Bill Hancock has apologized, but it still leaves open the question of transparency. There are five other computer models used to determine the rankings each week that are hidden from public view, unlike the approach used by Wes Colley who allows the light of day to shine on his work.  Thankfully, in this case an astute third party caught the error and brought it to the attention of the BCS.  I’m sure that you can imagine numerous “what if” scenarios where this type of mistake could have had significant repercussions.

How many times have we heard calls for transparency on our campuses and how many times have we shared our governance and communicated with our faculties and other constituencies in a transparent fashion?  Yet, in intercollegiate athletics, with the NCAA standing silently on the sidelines, we allow the BCS to work its magic with no idea of how accurate its rankings are on a week to week basis.  

It's egregious enough to see teams with mediocre seasons climb into the BCS bowl games because they happen to be in privileged conferences, while others with better records are written off as second-class citizens.   When we cannot see how these decisions are made, it becomes an affront to the concepts of integrity and fair play that we claim to value. 

When C. Wright Mills wrote of the "power elite", I doubt he was speaking of universities and intercollegiate athletics.  If he were still around, there could be a great second edition, this time focused on where elitism really runs rampant and takes Division 1 football players from some conferences and restrains their ability to compete.  I hope you noticed my choice of the word, "restrain".  I trust we will all be hearing more about "restraint" unless presidents step up and do the right thing.

Bob Kustra, President
Boise State University

 

This, we think, reinforces most everything that we've complained about with the BCS. Kustra, in our mind is 100-percent correct. It is a rich system, set up by the rich, operated for the rich and for their own benefit. The whole "Weaker Schedule" or "Weaker Conference" thing is a load of crap. TCU would be good in any conference as would Boise State. Heck, Boise beat the ACC Champs--Virginia Tech. If the BCS chooses to ignore anyone outside of their own conferences: The ACC, The Big East, The Big 10, The Big 12, The Pac 10 and The SEC, then why bother to have any other conferences exist.

We fully realize that much like Kustra, we are being somewhat Don Quioxte like. But this is what we believe, and since we are writing this on our blog, we can say it.

((BEFORE YOU ASK: WE CLICKED ON A STRANGE SETTING HERE ON BLOGGER AND HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO FIX IT, SORRY FOR THE ODD COLOR BARS IN THIS POST)). (the BCS did it!)

In the vein of the Rich getting richer, we give you "Eat the Rich" by the '80's Metal band Krokus: