That’s the tagline of a brand new political action committee, Playoff PAC. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) have long been bent on trading the BCS for a real playoff system and Monday, they together announced their backing of this PAC.

According to a Playoff PAC press release, the BCS is  ”inherently flawed. It crowns champions arbitrarily and stifles inter-conference competition.”

I totally agree, especially with that second part.

I covered Rutgers as a newspaper writer for several years and women’s basketball coach – and Hall of Famer – C. Vivian Stringer always said, “You have to play the best to be the best.” I thought it was true. Not in football though. If you play the best, you’re probably screwed. 

Coach Stringer also always said, “It’s not where you start, it’s where you end up.” (She even said it in her Hall of Fame induction speech.)  But again, not in football. It usually doesn’t matter if you’re hot late. If you lose early, the fork’s in you.

In football, there’s no incentive to schedule tough games. The BCS practically demands you play cupcakes. Seriously, look at this first week’s BCS rankings. No. 1 Florida hasn’t played a nonconference game outside of Florida since the inception of the BCS. The Gators have played Charleston Southern and Troy so far. No. 3 Texas’ nonconference slate is Louisiana-Monroe, Wyoming, UTEP and UCF. No. 2 Alabama did play VaTech, but its other nonconference games are FIU, North Texas and Chattanooga.

The BCS forces cowardly scheduling and bland games. But now, can we count on government to do anything about it? Is government our last hope here?

There’s a long history of pols trying to get into the politics of the BCS. In 2003, the Judiciary committees of both the House and Senate convened oversight hearings to examine the system. In 2005, Texas Rep. Joe Barton called a BCS official to Washington, to testify before an Energy and Commerce subcommittee. In April of 2008, the House passed a resolution condeming the BCS as “an illegal restraint of trade that violates the Sherman Anti-Trust Act” and then urged the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department to open an investigation.

Utah’s Orrin Hartch made all sorts of noise last winter and in December, Barton introduced the College Football Playoff Act, a bill that would “prohibit, as an unfair and deceptive act or practice, the promotion, marketing, and advertising of any post-season NCAA Division I football game as a national championship game unless such game is the culmination of a fair and equitable playoff system.”

Home state pandering certainly could have something to do with this. Two of Barton’s co-sponsors on that Playoff Act bill were Texas Reps Michael McCall and Lamar Smith, who hail from two of the four districts that represent Austin, home o the University of Texas’ main campus. A month before the bill was produced, it was Texas that was shafted by the BCS – the Longhorns and Oklahoma each had one loss, Oklahoma’s was to Texas, Oklahoma got to play in the BCS title game, not Texas. After an undefeated Utah was left out of the title game talk last year, it didn’t take a leap to expect Hatch would get all hot and bothered.

Still, you surely remember Pres. Obama, in his first post election sit-down with 60 Minutes, said this was a key issue on his agenda. His tone was light and he smiled, but his words were clear: “This is important. I’m going to throw my weight around a little bit. [If] you’ve got a bunch of teams who play throughout the season [and] there’s no clear decisive winner … we should be creating a playoff system.”

I’m going to pretend the politicians want to help the little guy and believe in a fair and equitable system. So I’m all for this PAC. As long as they don’t ask me for any money…