Don't look for the Barton Bowl anytime soonLet's cut to the chase with Rep. Joe Barton, the Texas Republican who grandstanded at last week's BCS hearings.

He wants the Barton Bowl, a national championship game at Cowboys Stadium, smack dab in his district.

Oh, he didn't say that, but he came out swinging at the BCS. His weakest effort was the crack about dropping the "C," and calling it the "BS system." Had 'em rolling in both aisles with that slice of originality.

Then he came with the heavy stuff, calling the system that's been in place since 1998 "like communism."

The anti-BCS crowd needs a better front man than Barton, who still thinks the NCAA — not the conferences — controls postseason college football. It has one in Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson.

Thompson coolly reviewed a reform measure authored by his conference to fix what he thinks are five fundamental flaws in the BCS. It can be boiled down to two inequities: money and opportunity.

Six power conferences — the Big 12, SEC, ACC, Big Ten, Pac-10 and Big East — received 87.4 percent of BCS revenue over the past four years, with the five other Division I-A conferences getting the rest.

And the system is so stacked against teams outside of the power conferences they can't play for the BCS National Championship . Undefeated Utah didn't last season, nor did Boise State in 2006.

"It's impossible to justify," Thompson said.

Thompson played it with two-minute drill precision, not only identifying the system's imbalance but countering such power-conference concerns as preservation of the minor bowl games and maintaining the importance of the regular season.

College football can have it all, Thompson said, with a four-team playoff in the end.

His plan: Ten teams for five BCS bowls. A committee ranks them one to 10, so out with the Harris Poll. The two lowest-ranked teams play in the fifth BCS bowl game. The top eight move on, keeping their traditional tie-ins (such as SEC to Sugar) when possible.

The four winners move on to a national semifinal, then championship game.

It's not a new plan and it doesn't address other issues. OK, Utah fans, head to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl and upset the SEC champion. Then off to Miami for the national semifinal. You had $3,000 budgeted for this, right?

The playoff suggestion needs work, but Thompson came out better on Friday than John Swofford. He is the commish of the ACC and, of all the luck, it's his turn in the rotation to chair the BCS.

Swofford played defense Friday, but he was like the non-conference cakewalk that the big-budget programs play in September for the easy victories. The best he could play for was a tie.

The current system is in place, Swofford said, "because it represents the marketplace."

He's dead on about that. There's a reason the power conferences have lucrative contracts with major networks and the other conferences don't. It's capitalism at work — the opposite of communism, congressman.

Barton and his kind — and that includes playoff advocate President Barack Obama — can keep playing political football, but they remain heavy underdogs in this game. The big boys have the product and usually get their way.

They did in 1984, when the Supreme Court ruled schools could negotiate their own television contracts. That started this whole power conference thing.

At the Final Four, Dennis Dodd of cbssports.com and I got an audience with Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany. Nobody in college football sees more value in the status quo than Delany. His is the conference of the game's greatest traditions, and he's not an agent of change.

"I don't think there's any evidence that a four-team playoff would stop at four teams. ... I don't like the way it feels or looks or anything else," Delany said. "We feel strongly about our legal position."

Barton and Congress feel strongly about theirs.

This could get good.