Thursday’s Congressional hearings on the Bowl Championship Series discussed the discrimination smaller schools who aren’t in the BCS conferences face in trying to earn a berth in one of the four most well-known championship bowl games, accusing BCS rules of favoring the six most powerful college athletic conferences — and they do.

The BCS bowl system was established in 1998 by the Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big 12, Big Ten, Pacific-10 and Southeastern conferences as a way to determine the national champion for college football each year while maintaining and enhancing the bowl system that was nearly 100 years old.

But instead of giving every school a chance at playing in the four most lucrative championship bowl games — the Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl and Fiesta Bowl — the system seems to have been rigged in favor of making bigger schools more money.

Under the BCS system, the top team in each of these six conferences gets an automatic bid to one of the four big bowl games, leaving only two at-large berths open to smaller schools, and these are usually taken by schools from the six large conferences as well. In the five-year history of BCS, Notre Dame, a powerful independent, has been the only school to earn one.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner said of this blatant partiality at Thursday’s hearing, “Fundamental fairness trumps the fundamental of good marketing.”

And what good marketing it is — for BCS schools. In the last five years, $450 million in bowl revenue has gone to the 64 BCS universities and colleges, but only $17 million went to the 53 non-BCS schools, according to a Sept. 4 article from the Scripps Howard News Service.

A Sept. 4 article by The Associated Press said the projected revenue for the four 2004 BCS bowls is $118 million, but only about $6 million will go to non-BCS schools, unless one happens to qualify for a major bowl game.

Sensenbrenner was right when he told college executives they need to change the bowl system to assure the “noble aspirations of amateur athletics do not yield to the cold reality of corporate profits.”

But how should they accomplish that? The best idea for all involved would be to institute playoffs for the national championship that would give all Division I-A schools an equal opportunity to compete. It would not interfere horribly with athletes’ academics, as some proponents would suggest, because it would only potentially add two or three more games to their schedule — Division I-AA schools like Northern Iowa already do it.

Preserving the bowl system is only holding back smaller schools, not benefiting football’s traditions.

Editorial Board:Nicole Paseka, Megan Hinds, Amy Schierbrock, Alicia Ebaugh