Sports-Industrial Complex

After reading this Jason Whitlock article someone posted on HoyaTalk about ESPN's role in propagating the BCS-Centrism of college football, I turned on SportsCenter, where the 11 am show's anchors Stan Varrett and Josh Elliott "argued" for about 10 minutes about a playoff.  And by "argued," I mean that Elliott came up with a hypothetical playoff system, and Varrett offered stale, falsely equivalent rejoinders supporting the BCS.  The two anchors functioned as metaphors for what I imagine will be the coming debate in college football, particularly if Texas-- 11-1 and victorious over Oklahoma-- gets leapfrogged for the national championship game by Oklahoma.  

On one side, there will be President Barack Obama and, well, most sports fans who understand that playoffs are both a fair and exciting way to determine the best team in a league.  On the other side, there will be ESPN, the Sports-Industrial Complex, who recently purchased the rights to broadcast BCS games.  They need a return on that $500M investment, and if there's no BCS, well, that's just not going to cut it.  Having largely erased the pretense of journalism, I imagine they will use their new and opinion programming to wage a battle against implementing a playoff.  I'll be interested to see if Gregg Easterbrook writes about this in next week's TMQ (as he hinted this past week), but I imagine that he'd come to a similar conclusion.

As always, follow the money.