The NCAA's Bowl Championship Series, or BCS, decides which college football teams get to play for the national championship each year and which ones play in lesser bowl games. It's a complex system, so it's understandable if most Americans do not grasp how it all works - and if some object when their favorite teams don't get into desired bowls.
But those are matters for the NCAA to hash out, and it is absurd that those issues have literally become a federal case.
Believe it or not, the U.S. Justice Department has demanded that the NCAA explain why it does not have a college football playoff system. The Justice Department says, in effect, that other sports have playoffs, so NCAA football should, too.
The NCAA's response to the federal inquiry will "be relevant in helping us to determine the best course of action with regard" to the bowl games, an official with the Justice Department wrote in a letter to the NCAA.
We think the "best course of action" for the federal government is to step out of this issue entirely. Determining the No. 1 college football team each year is to some degree always going to be a subjective effort. But subjective or not, it does not call for Washington meddling.
As the executive director of the BCS, Bill Hancock, told The Associated Press, "Goodness gracious, with all that's going on in the world right now and with national and state budgets being what they are, it seems like a waste of taxpayers' money to have the government looking into how college football games are played."
We agree. Neither the Justice Department nor Congress has any special skill to set up the "right" system of picking college football's best team each year. In fact, a federally dictated system may only replace one set of complaints with another.
There is no sense in that.