You can always tell when there are elections coming up because someone in Congress starts talking about how unfair or unbalanced the current college football landscape is. A few years ago, it was Senator Orrin Hatch trying to get Congress to investigate the BCS for breaking anti-trust laws when his home-state Utah Utes went undefeated but didn’t get any votes for a National Championship. Obviously nothing came of it but Hatch got his name out there to his constituents as a man who stands up for their favorite college football team. Now it’s a new champion of the people calling for Congress to act on the greedy conferences’ insatiable lust for realignment.
From ESPN.com:
The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee is urging the panel to hold hearings on antitrust and other issues in college sports, including the recent series of conference realignments.
“It has become increasingly clear to me that the combination of issues and challenges facing intercollegiate sports have reached a tipping point calling for congressional attention,” Michigan Rep. John Conyers (pictured above) wrote to the committee chairman, Texas Republican Lamar Smith, in a letter released Thursday. The committee said in a statement that it is reviewing Conyers’ request.
Conyers said in his letter that he was concerned about the impact that conference realignment would have on lower-profile sports teams and smaller and independent universities — especially historically black colleges and universities.
Conyers also wants to look into due process for athletes, the NCAA’s use of athletes’ images in video games without compensation, limitations of athletic scholarships, and the costs to players from injuries sustained during games among other issues.
Not to get too political on you, but John Conyers was the victim of a new redristicting law in Michigan which took away 80% of his constituents who voted for him. That means he is in serious danger of losing his re-election campaign. I’m not saying he doesn’t care about student athletes, but I think this publicity push may have some ulterior motives.
Now to address Senator Conyers and any future political candidate who would like to spend time convening Congress to talk about sports: Stop it. Maybe after you’ve fixed the budget, the economy, unemployment, the environment and foreign relations you can come back around and tackle issues in sports, but until then, TCU jumping from conference to conference doesn’t need to be your concern.
More than likely, nothing will come of his request and he’ll go back to Michigan saying “hey, I tried,” and that will get him a few more votes come election season. The conferences will continue their slow conglomeration towards a handful of super-conferences and the government shouldn’t really have much to say about it. It’s the NCAA’s jurisdiction to police the realm of college athletics even if they don’t/won’t actually discipline any of the schools or police their own product effectively. One ineffective governing body is more than enough for college sports.
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