The Solution to the BCS Conundrum, Found at the Patent Office

by Mark Malek

If you follow college football at all, or alternatively, the circus act that we call Congress, you have probably heard the controversy about college football.  It happened just this past weekend.  Is it fair how the players of the championship game for the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) are selected?  Since I live in Florida, and I am surrounded by Florida Gator fans, the answer is a resounding NO!  Just take a look at this year – the University of Florida Gators have been the #1 team all year long, and University of Alabama has been #2 for most of the year.  Both teams were undefeated, and both are in the Southeastern Conference (SEC).  It’s hard not to say that the SEC was the toughest football conference this year – and this is coming from a guy who bleeds Wolfpack red (yes, it was a tough season) and generally roots for the ACC (except for Carolina).

UF was a victim, and Alabama was the victor, of the strength of the SEC.  The two were undefeated this season and, as such, were forced to meet in the SEC championship game.  Someone was coming out of that game with a loss and, unfortunately, it was Florida.  When a team has been as dominant over the past several years as Florida has been, a loss like that was a tough pill to swallow.

With the narrow win by Texas over Nebraska (and they just squeaked out a win in that game) the championship game will be between Alabama and Texas.  Things would have been really interesting had Nebraska been able to hold off Texas.  I was talking with a friend of mine today, and he described the scenario had Nebraska won as “BCS anarchy.”  I thought that was accurate.  We have heard all sorts of solutions.  I personally lean towards a three-to-four week playoff system that starts right about now, and goes through the first week in January.  It could start with 16 teams and work on down to a championship game between two deserving teams.  The craziest thing I have heard is Congress getting involved somehow.  Don’t we have enough problems?  Do I really need to hear about congressional hearings (translation – wasting our tax dollars) on whether or not the college football champs are selected?

Right about now, you are probably wondering what any of this has to do with intellectual property.  You thought you were reading an intellectual property blog, not the sports column right?  As you can probably guess, all answers lie within the intellectual property world.  You need to look no further than the United States Patent Office to figure out the solution to this problem.  I was perusing some patents (insert dork joke here) and came across U.S. Patent No. 6,053,823 to Marc Mathews of Arizona directed to a method for conducting a championship playoff.

Although I like Mr. Mathews’s plan, the patent attorney in me has kicked in and wonders how in the world this patent was ever allowed.  I understand that this was allowed way back in 2000, long before we had such strict criteria for patentability.  The claims of this patent fail the current Bilski standard of patentability, i.e., the invention is not tied to a machine or does not transform an article from one thing or state to another.  Even if this were not a Bilski-related issue, I still fail to see how the claims of this patent ever met the remaining thresholds for patentability.  The claims essentially cover ranking teams and conducting a tournament.  Is that not what has been going on for years in NCAA basketball?  Maybe the way that they rank the teams in the basketball tournament differs somehow.

Well, it really does not have much impact anyway as Mr. Mathews allowed the patent to expire by failing to pay the required maintenance fees.  I suppose if he was really onto something (which, for all you college football fans, he is) I suppose he would have paid the maintenance fees and entered into a lucrative licensing agreement with the BCS.  Maybe they would have just named the championship game the Mathews bowl, or better yet, named the trophy after him.  Either way, I will still be watching the bowl games this holiday season and beginning my period of mourning while I await college football (and hopefully a Wolfpack football team that does not cause me so much stress) to return next fall.