Competing interests harm BCS product.

Byline: Ron Bellamy / The Register-Guard

Comedians make jokes about the Bowl Championship Series. Sports columnists lampoon it. Talk show hosts can talk themselves hoarse.

It's among the easiest targets in sports. Is this good business?

"In theory, it is the national championship format for college football, and should have the strength of that brand equity," said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon.

"And yet it just doesn't happen."

Doesn't happen because the format is caught between a rock and a hard place - between football fans who would like some sort of playoff system to determine the national champion and college presidents who, even as the NCAA is adding a 12th game in Division I football in 2006, are clearly not about to extend the postseason, even by a week, as they try to push the other way, toward academic reform.

And it doesn't happen, too, because the BCS has had so many product revisions since it was first introduced, revisions that have been reactive - see Oregon football, 2001 season - rather than proactive.

The latest effort separates the championship game from the four marquee bowl games - Orange, Rose, Sugar, Fiesta - without adding a playoff step, and proposes another voting poll because The Associated Press has dropped out.

Wrote Ray Ratto in The San Francisco Chronicle:

"Instead of the playoff system the university presidents won't let them have, or the additional game the university presidents won't let them have, they decided the problem can be solved by finding former coaches, college players, administrators and sportswriters to create a new poll, called (one supposes) the Latest Lame Compromise Poll, to join the coaches poll and the computers to make a new BCS."

In a sense, the BCS is like a new car that is introduced to the public and then recalled for repairs, time after time, because the engine doesn't work right.

Would people still buy such a lemon?

Maybe not, but then they have other choices in cars, and the BCS is the only football championship format available, however flawed.

But how much will all the snickering erode the credibility of the product?

Swangard believes the BCS needs to be concerned about that, at some point.

"It's your role to be the brand champion," he said. "You own the property, and you have sponsors who are paying millions of dollars to be associated with your brand.

"It's so critical that you put together an attack plan to win over the hearts and minds of these college football fans that this is the March Madness of football. ... '

However, Swangard said, "I don't think they feel the hurt yet. I think they see the revenue streams still being good."

Of course, March Madness, the Division I men's basketball tournament, is the best brand that the NCAA has going for it, better than even the NCAA name itself, which offers noble efforts, such as academic reform, and boneheaded moves, such as the bungling of the Rick Neuheisel case.

"March Madness owns a three-week period of the sports calendar that's so unique for almost any property," Swangard said. "There's such little competition against them on those successive weekend of games. That's the best brand out there."

And for all the reasons that March Madness is popular - once the tournament starts the format is seen as utterly fair, and the best team in that given tournament is the national champion - the BCS is found wanting.

The near-annual episode of faults-and-fixes doesn't help.

"They almost seem to live on the idea that any publicity is good publicity," Swangard said, adding: "I think we've passed that era. I don't think there's anything to suggest that (for the BCS) any publicity is good publicity."

Nor anything to suggest that the fundamental product is going to change, soon or ever, even if they tinker with the packaging.