So Congress voted to sue the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries. My only question is whether, upon the hearing this, the Cartel's ministers openly burst out laughing or managed to keep it inside. Such a pathetic, puny, irrelevant little gesture. No wonder the Saudis hold us in contempt.
Meanwhile, the world of American college athletics continues to operate under the control of its own cartel. This cartel-- which is usually identified in the media as the "BCS" (for Bowl Championship Series)-- seeks to corner the market not on oil, but rather on the televised broadcast of college football games in general, and particularly of the elite bowl games played traditionally on New Year's Day, but now spread out through the first week of January. If you're not into sports, all this may sound like small potatoes. But in fact, college football is a multi-billion-dollar industry. The ability of "the BCS" to dominate this industry bestows very lucrative benefits on 66 colleges and universities, and imposes very severe limitations on all the others. These facts are well-known to most sports fans, and to all college sports fans. But I would like to take a moment to try and explain the situation to people who do not follow these subjects.
For over 100 years, the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) has acted (or, purported to act) as kind of umbrella-oversight committee over most American colleges and universities that compete in scholarship-based athletic competition. For decades, there was no outer-limit on the number of scholarships a school could give. But in the 1970s, certain limits were put in place, and currently the maximum number of football scholarships a school can provide at one time is 85. There are, across the country, 120 colleges and universities which do, in fact, provide that maximum. For purposes of competition, these schools are classified separately from those that provide fewer. That classification was officially known as I-A for nearly 30 years, until 2006. The "One-A" label is still widely used in the media and by the public.
Meanwhile, colleges and universities also affiliate with each other to form athletic conferences, usually in groups of eight to twelve. Just as individual schools have different levels of support and resources, so, too, do the various conferences. At present, six of those "One-A" conferences-- the Atlantic Coast, the Big East, the Big Ten, the Big XII, the PAC-10, and the Southeastern-- have essentially aligned with each other for the purpose of hoarding as much of the money generated by the college football industry as possible. Because these "Big Six" conferences claim (among them) most of the largest and most-prominent state-universities, their alignment-- their "cartel", if you will-- has been remarkably effective over the past 10-12 years since the cartel was formed.
For the 66 "One-A" schools that belong to this Cartel, the results have been the financial equivalent of winning the lottery every year. For the 54 "One-A" schools that are not in the Cartel, the results have been the financial equivalent of adding on another mortgage payment every year. These schools cope with the situation as best they can, but the "best they can" is increasingly not enough to get by. As a result, one non-Cartel member (East Carolina University of Greenville, NC) has publicly offered to hire itself as a kind of indentured servant to the Big East. Well, not "hire," exactly, since ECU would receive no money for its trouble. It would simply receive the opportunity to play the other Big East teams in football, and-- if they were to defeat them all on the field-- go on to claim the Big East's ticket in those BCS-bowl games. Otherwise, they'd be worse off than they are now. In one sense, it has to be more than a little bit humiliating.
But in another sense, it cuts to the heart of the matter: East Carolina wants a chance to defeat the Cartel members on the field, and to know that if it does so, it will be rewarded for it. Snuffing out that chance was not, I believe, the specific purpose of the Cartel when it was formed. Indeed, I do not think the men who created it in the 1990s were fully aware that a Cartel was what they were creating. But that is-- exactly-- what it has turned into. The NCAA, whose mandate is to uphold the interests of all its members, in fact has acted as the Cartel's handmaiden for the last decade or so. There is no serious sign of change coming over the horizon.
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