The start of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, the billion-dollar television property known as “March Madness,” with its 68-team field that includes universities like Wofford and Belmont, is the perfect opportunity to bring out once plus the hypocrisy of the organization when it comes to deciding a soccer champion. While egalitarian basketball tournaments, what the heck, we can also include the women’s side here, they are open to a variety of teams, big and small, public and private, well-funded and on shoestring budgets. the dominance of college football is a study in elitism.

The so-called Bowl Championship Series conferences (SEC, Big 10, Pac 10, Big 12, Big East and ACC…along with a special exemption for Notre Dame) make all the decisions in college football and if they don’t like someone, they are more than happy to grab their ball and go home. The conferences, all of which make millions of dollars for their member schools with television contracts, like to be an exclusive club. A college football country club, so to speak. Working with the antiquated bowl system, which is fought for (justly in many cases) by local officials who fear being left out of the tourism money train, the NCAA has become hostage to the big football programs. that make up those six conferences and Notre Dame.

In the football setting, there are rules to minimize the number of teams from outside of the power conferences that have a chance to play in a game of big money bowling. The actual championship game doesn’t matter. That’s decided by a Byzantine formula that seems to factor in TV ratings and booster funding as much as it does anything related to playing sports. At most, there are two teams from outside the major conferences that participate in the designated BCS bowls. (We’ll save the complete waste of time that the minor bowl series has become over the years for a December post, while I’m watching the San Diego County Credit Union’s Poinsettia Bowl.)

The argument the NCAA brings up for doing things the way they do, and not replacing it with the kind of playoff system used for college basketball, is that it would be academically detrimental to football players. The governing body, of course, has never explained why it’s not detrimental to the education of football players at all other levels of college football that they do make the playoffs, or why it’s okay for college teams to basketball miss large portions of classes during the month of March. So as you look back on last season, when a small school in Indianapolis called Butler nearly angered ACC powerhouse Duke, take a moment to remember that you’d never see that kind of story in college football.

You’ll also never see anything like this year’s upset of traditional Louisville basketball powerhouse Morehead State during the early rounds of the men’s basketball tournament. The powers that be in college football want you to believe that such a thing would be bad for business. Faced with the fact that such surprises actually increase the public’s interest in its men’s basketball tournament, college football shrugs it off and issues a collective, “Yeah, well, that’s basketball.” Yes, it’s basketball and I’m going to sit back and enjoy the little ones breaking supports as they struggle to play for another two weeks. In the end, the schools with the big names and the big money still, if history is any indication, will come out on top in the end.

But no one can ever say that everyone didn’t have a chance. Meanwhile, most of the 120 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision of Division I college football have already been eliminated from championship contention…and their season doesn’t start for another five months. It’s about time for the BCS to graduate from high school!