If college football is controlled by business decisions, why does the NCAA keep its tax exemption?

Anyone who managed to watch and even pay close attention to the telecast of the Texas Longhorns’ 51-20 blowout of the Kansas Jayhawks on Saturday night would have heard a telling admission about the true nature of college football and the cockamamie system it uses to determine postseason bowl games.

At one point in the second half as Texas was clearly pulling away from the feckless Jayhawks, bored ABC announcers invited a fellow named Brad Edwards into the booth. Edwards was described as a BCS analyst for ESPN. His job apparently is to try and figure out the insane and monopolistic computer algorithms that the Bowl Championship Series uses to divide up which teams play each other in the biggest, most expensive bowl games each year.

For example, Edwards was telling the play-by-play announcer, Ron Franklin, that in order for an undefeated Boise State team to play for one of the biggest bowl games, it would probably require that Oklahoma State, which already has lost twice this season, lose once more. Mind you, Edwards said all of this with a straight face.

Throughout his labyrinthine explanations of possible postseason scenarios, Edwards kept admitting that the BCS is driven by “business decisions.” Franklin clarified this point by remarking that the BCS, which is under contract with the NCAA, has a vested interest in figuring out which schools would have a better chance of having fans filling stadiums and drawing a larger television audience to these early-January BCS bowl games.

While we’ve been over the mindless, anti-competitive machinations of the BCS system before, what was really interesting in Saturday night’s broadcast was Edwards’ continual acknowledgment that the BCS is driven by “business decisions.”

Business decisions? Isn’t the NCAA a tax-exempt entity, a distinction it receives on the premise that it is an organization charged with enhancing higher education?

If you have no problem with the half-baked logic that computers and politics should decide the outcomes to sporting events, the fact that a tax-exempt organization like the NCAA institutes a system for supposedly-amateur athletics that gets controlled by “business decisions” should be particularly vexing.

The late Myles Brand, who was the NCAA’s president from 2002 until he died earlier this year, was summoned to defend his organization’s tax exemption to Congress in 2006. Myles had to respond to several questions from Bill Thomas, a Republican from California who chaired the House Ways and Means Committee. Through his questions, Thomas clearly was skeptical about whether the NCAA was truly supporting amateur athletics and promoting higher education, the two aspects upon which the NCAA’s tax exemptions rest.

Throughout his written responses to Thomas’ questions, Brand continually dodged the essence of the questions with wispy platitudes and misleading data. He took up the cudgel that the NCAA exists to serve educational opportunities for student-athletes. While each of his responses deserves critical analysis, perhaps one of the most laughable answers in this context was to Thomas’ question about what the NCAA was doing about all these soft majors and classes that athletes, who on average get into schools with lower SAT scores than other students, usually take to walk an easy path to eligibility. This is what Brand said:

It is important, however, to understand that the faculty of each college or university, rather than the NCAA, determines the courses that will be taught, the standards for instruction and the requirements for degrees. They are also responsible for monitoring against academic abuse or fraud, and they take these responsibilities seriously. It is unlikely that any intrusion by the NCAA into this realm would be either practical, successful or welcomed.

So in other words, “At the NCAA, we’re all about education, except when we’re not.”

This kind of flippancy, coupled with the common-knowledge that it bases major football contest match-ups upon business decisions, shows that the NCAA is a money-driven organization interested in education to the narrowest extent that it can keep its tax exemption.