On Sunday the Bowl Championship Series announced the addition of a fifth game to college football's postseason.
Based on the statements of those involved, you'd have thought an athletic scholarship had been guaranteed to every American youth.
Today is a very good day for college athletics
Scott Cowen, leader of the Coalition for Athletics Reform, told The Associated Press.
This agreement is a significant victory for college sports and higher education chimed in NCAA president Myles Brand.
So two additional teams, neither one of which has to be a mid-major by any stretch, eventually will enter the money-driven establishment that is known as the BCS.
An improvement over the existing disaster? Yes. A very good day for college athletics? Hardly. A significant victory? That's absurd.
Nothing short of its extinction will ever be a significant victory for the BCS. Nothing short of the day a Mid-American Conference team, with a fraction of the resources of Ohio State, is in competition for the National Championship will be a very good day for college football.
But fortunately, significant victories do happen in college athletics, sometimes in our own backyard. Case in point: The Ohio hockey team.
Victories happen when a team lacks varsity status, though you wouldn't know it judging by the fan base, hype and home-ice advantage it garners.
They happen when every player on a scholarship-less team is essentially a walk-on athlete, yet a team's performance is a recruitment tool in and of itself.
They happen when a team has found the ideal balance between youth and experience and has not lost in 20 games, dating back to November.
They happen as Ohio, already Central States Collegiate Hockey League champions, prepares for the 2004 American Collegiate Hockey Association National Tournament and a shot at the one tournament victory that eluded it last season.
The Bobcats represent all that is good about college sports at any level of play. At a time when money has seeped between the cracks of professional sports and oozed into the NCAA, Ohio hockey still embodies a blue-collar, underdog image.
In fact, the only money issue for the hockey team involves not having enough - having to ask for donations in order to guarantee its road trip to the ACHA National Tournament this week in Ames, Iowa.
Outsiders will never truly understand the aura of hockey in Bird Arena, just as I will never understand the BCS.
A very good day for college athletics at Ohio University? That will be Sunday if the Bobcats can call themselves ACHA National Champions.
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Matt Bixenstine
