This is actually really interesting….there have been a few Supreme Court Decisions regarding baseball and the Sherman Antitrust Act….at first it was decided that MLB was not interstate commerce and thus exempt but the most recent Flood v. Kuhn decided that it was indeed interstate commerce under the Sherman Antitrust Act but MLB is exempted, but not other sports.

Soooo if it can be said that College Football is interstate commerce (it can IMO) and that those conference with automatic bids to the BCS form a cartel (which they do IMO) that restricts interstate commerce and competition then yeh we might have something here.  We just need Utah, Idaho, Hawaii, Nevada, and New Mexico to lead the way because the rest of us are stuck in states that won't do a thing (imagine the angry phone calls and political backstabbing our Attorney General would have to contend with from Gators, Seminoles, Hurricanes, and even Bulls).

SPOT ON seminowl

see, it gets tricky… the MWC, WAC, Sun Belt, CUSA, MAC are actually a part of the BCS charter, they just don't have "automatic" bids… so any AG who decides to take this up would have to argue (and argue very good at it) that the BCS conferences form a cartel because of their automatic bids…

"membership is not good enough…. the BCS conferences have a monopoly on their national championship because of their automatic bids"

and here's where it gets beyond tricky…. this is where it gets to be a headache (and consequentially why it never gets challenged)… if the Utah AG was to take this legal route, he would, in turn, end up suing his own state of Utah, because the universities in the state of Utah (Utah, Utah State and BYU) are all a part of the MWC and WAC, which, in turn, are part of the BCS

Luckily though I think those states without teams in auto-bid conferences would be willing to be on the wrong side of a lawsuit, especially if the injunctive relief was a break up of the cartel rather than anything financial.  The BCS charter reads exactly like a cartel agreement, its ridiculous, they distribute their money amongst the auto-bid conferences….give chump change to the non-auto bid conferences to keep them quiet.  And unfortunately it worked.  Non auto-bid conferences take their money with a grin, play their guarantee games with a grin, all the while knowing that they have signed a pact with the devil.  Know your role, dont get out of line, you dont deserve a national championship now and never will.

A playoff system is unnecessary if we can simply say that each conference with 12 teams or a team in the top 25 gets an autobid to a BCS game.  Add the Cotton Bowl and the Peach (chic-fil-a) Bowls as BCS bowls and voila.  The Sun Belt wouldn't have got one this year under those rules but it gives a whole new dimension to recruiting and conference expansion.  And yes, the Big 10 and PAC 10 can keep their precious Rose Bowl   In the future a plus-one could help a lot as well.  Oh yeh and any independent that is in the top 10 goes to a BCS game, that way its not a special rule for Notre Dame.  That could create a new golden age of independent teams (think Louisville and Miami under HS, Penn State prior to Big 10).

What will probably happen first is the BCS will try to throw another bone at the non-BCS schools.  Don't know what – maybe another bowl, maybe revenue sharing, who knows.  Hopefully the non-BCS won't be dumb enough to settle for it this time and demand equal treatment instead.  This is so obviously illegal – you can't make some member schools more equal than others.

Didnt' a team try to sue the BCS with the antitrust deal last year?  I though I remember hearing about that.