We’ve been looking for a bipartisan issue for our country to rally around, and maybe Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, has finally found it. Shortly after he was elected president last year, Barack Obama let it be known that he wasn’t too thrilled with the way college football crowns its national champion:

“If you’ve got a bunch of teams who play throughout the season, and many of them have one loss or two losses, there’s no clear decisive winner. We should be creating a playoff system. …

“I don’t know any serious fan of college football who has disagreed with me on this. So, I’m going to throw my weight around a little bit. I think it’s the right thing to do.”

In a letter, Sen. Hatch reminded the president of his promise and called for a Justice Department investigation into possible antitrust violations. The senator from Utah does have a rooting interest in such action: The University of Utah football team finished last season undefeated but didn’t rank high enough in the BCS standings to contend for the national championship.

Hatch wrote that the system “artificially limits the number of nationally relevant bowl games to five. The result is reduced access to revenues and visibility which creates disadvantages to schools in the non-privileged conferences.” Utah plays in the Mountain West Conference, which does not receive an automatic BCS bid.

Former Notre Dame head football coach Lou Holtz is thinking about making a run for Congress in the state of Florida as a Republican. The 72-year-old Holtz, who currently works as a college football analyst for ESPN for the past five years, has never held public office. An anonymous GOP strategist says Holtz, if he decides to run, would challenge Democrat Suzanne Kosmas for her seat in central Florida’s 24th district.

A native of West Virginia, Holtz, who led the Fighting Irish to their last national championship in 1988 and ended his coaching career at South Carolina (had to include that for Chas), also walked the sidelines at William & Mary, North Carolina State, the NFL’s New York Jets, Arkansas, and Minnesota.

UPDATE: According to the Orlando Sentinel, Holtz currently lives in Florida’s 24th district, near Lake Nona.

Ask any red-blooded American, liberal or conservative, and he or she will tell you that the most pressing matters our nation faces are the economy, national security, and … straightening out the BCS mess. OK, I’m being facetious with that last one. But our president-elect did weigh in on the lack of a playoff system in college football’s top division on “60 Minutes” last night, calling for an eight-team tournament to crown a national champion:

“If you’ve got a bunch of teams who play throughout the season, and many of them have one loss or two losses, there’s no clear decisive winner. We should be creating a playoff system. …

“It would add three extra weeks to the season. You could trim back on the regular season. I don’t know any serious fan of college football who has disagreed with me on this. So, I’m going to throw my weight around a little bit. I think it’s the right thing to do.”

BCS coordinator John Swofford responded:

“For now, our constituencies—and I know he understands constituencies—have settled on the current BCS system, which the majority believe is the best system yet to determine a national champion while also maintaining the college football regular season as the best and most meaningful in sports. … We certainly respect the opinions of President-elect Obama and welcome dialogue on what’s best for college football.”

I agree with Obama on the need for a playoff, but should the president of the United States involve himself in matters of sports? Kind of reminds me of when President Nixon allegedly sent in plays to Washington Redskins coach George Allen, or when President Clinton tried to intervene in the 1994-95 baseball strike.

Tommy Bowden stepped down this week as head coach of the Clemson University football team. This rare mid-season resignation comes after Bowden’s team did not live up to expectations of a pre-season No. 9 national ranking. For several years Bowden—an outspoken Christian like his father, Florida State head coach Bobby Bowden—has been praised because of his character but ridiculed because he appeared soft, weak, and unable to rouse his players.

Comments like “he’s too nice,” “he doesn’t know how to motivate players,” “he too soft,” etc., were uttered as possible explanations for why team members lost confidence in their coach. Nice guys do not make good coaches some argue. On average, are any Christian coaches considered “tough?”

Bowden’s 10-year tenure ended after he was offered a conditional contract extension last year to keep him from leaving to coach at Arkansas. He had to win the Atlantic Coast Conference title in 2008. After a demoralizing loss to Alabama on national television, and a 3-3 start overall, winning the conference title was unlikely. It was time to for him to go.

Under Bowden, Clemson’s football team was known for having a large percentage of players attending church and Bible studies. That’s great but, at the end of the day, what fans want from a NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision program are wins. I have recently found myself asking, “Can Christian coaches cut it in college football?”

And what do schools want: Christian coaches or winning coaches? When the University of Alabama offered Nick Saban a $4 million annual salary, was it because he would put players in church pews? No. Saban was hired because he wants to win football games. Interestingly, none of my Christian friends who are Alabama fans seem concerned about neither Saban’s faith nor any moral influence he might have on his players. I wonder why?

Phillip Fulmer’s a Christian. The Tennessee Volunteers football team is struggling. Mark Richt’s Georgia Bulldogs was absolutely manhandled and humiliated by Saban’s Alabama team. Are these coaches next on the chopping block?

As a nearly idolatrous college football fan, I have to confess that I was happy to see Bowden go. Even worse, several pastor friends and I have joked we could care less about the faith of the next Clemson head coach. We just want someone who will win games. What’s wrong with us?

The college football season is now in full swing, and the pageantry of season openers excited fans on campuses across the country this weekend. In Chapel Hill, N.C., Saturday night, the Tar Heel faithful were treated to an unexpected and dangerous light show when a severe thunderstorm interrupted the first half of Carolina’s game against McNeese State for nearly two hours. Prior to that, the pre-game festivities were supposed to include a dramatic delivery of the game ball by skydivers. The ball and the jumpers, however, never made it to the Kenan Stadium turf, but they did land safely … eight miles away at Duke’s Wallace Wade Stadium, where the Blue Devils were getting ready to take on James Madison. According to The News & Observer of Raleigh, the jump was aborted over Chapel Hill because of the weather, but when the clouds suddenly parted and the pilot saw a stadium, the jumpers decided to go for it.

By the way, both Carolina and Duke won their games.

The preseason USA Today college football Coaches’ Poll is out, with the Mark Richt–coached Georgia Bulldogs ranked No. 1.

After the 2000 season, Vince Dooley, the former Georgia head coach who was then the school’s athletics director, was shopping for a new football coach and approached Florida State coach Bobby Bowden about hiring Richt, the Seminoles’ offensive coordinator. Bowden warned Dooley, “The one thing that worries me about him is he’s too nice.” Since then, this “nice” guy has disproven the old adage “nice guys finish last” by winning 80 percent of his games and two Southeastern Conference championships. “We have found out he has an inner toughness that makes him able to handle it,” Bowden told USA Today.

So where does Richt find that “inner toughness” he couples with his nice guy image? In its article on the Bulldogs yesterday, USA Today shared some of the things that drive the 48-year-old coach:

The fact that life now is exceedingly normal is a blessing given [his wife] Katharyn was diagnosed with cervical cancer in the spring of 2006. Complications after a radical hysterectomy made the situation more frightening. “I didn’t handle it all well. I got numb,” Mark Richt says. Only until the water girl was back on the sidelines and cancer-free did everyone exhale.

The Richts have four children: Jonathan, 18, a freshman quarterback at Clemson; David, 13; Zach, 12; and Anya, 11. The Richts adopted the youngest two from an orphanage in Ukraine in 1999, a decision guided by their religious faith.

The Richts also have taken their children on mission trips, most recently to Honduras last year. That experience prompted Richt to organize an NCAA-approved, five-day trip with two dozen of his players in May. The players delivered water to residents of poverty-stricken Guaimaca in Honduras, repaired fences, dug ditches and footers for houses, shared their Christian faith if so inclined and learned a little about the world.

“It helped us realize how privileged we are and sometimes don’t appreciate the blessings we do have,” [Georgia defensive end Roderick] Battle says.

Two days after Richt returned from Honduras, he joined four other college coaches visiting U.S. military bases during a week-long trip to the Middle East. “We tried to encourage everyone, but we left encouraged,” Richt says.

Too often, Christian coaches and athletes are labeled “too nice” or “too soft” to do the job. But now that a “nice guy” like Mark Richt has found success, maybe more ADs will make “niceness” a priority in their next coaching hires.

(Click here to read Mark Richt’s testimony.)

It’s happened only once in the NFL, when the 1972 Miami Dolphins, coached by Don Shula and led by the running of Larry Csonka and Mercury Morris along with the always tough “No-Name Defense,” defeated the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl VII.

In NCAA men’s basketball, it’s been accomplished by seven teams, the last time back in 1976, when the Indiana Hoosiers, led by coach Bobby Knight and the trio of Scott May, Kent Benson, and Quinn Buckner, took care of Big Ten rival Michigan in the NCAA tournament championship game. (The other six were San Francisco in 1956, North Carolina in ’57, and John Wooden’s UCLA teams in ’64, ’67, ’72, and ’73.)

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Well, we have a national champion in college football.  And the winner is: the Louisiana State University.  As ESPN’s Pat Forde writes about Florida’s victory last year over Ohio State and LSU’s victory last night over the same, “If you’ve ever seen lions maul a water buffalo, you’ve seen the last two title games.”  The long and short of this is that the real winner of the BCS this year is the SEC.  We invented the athletic scholarship, which is to say, we destroyed higher education, but we invented modern college football.  Granted, Slate’s LSU fan-slash-writer Josh Levin does admit that

Kansas and Missouri and USC and Georgia and West Virginia can make sensible claims that they’re the Tigers’ equal. By my count, eight different teams could’ve won the title if one or two plays had gone differently. After Monday night, at least we know the Buckeyes aren’t one of them.

Perhaps this is as close as the South will ever get to rising again.  And we love watching it.

The Bowl Championship Series was designed to create excitement for college football fans, culminating with the (supposedly) top two teams fighting it out for the national championship. And I’m sure a lot of you will tune in Monday night to see Ohio State battle LSU, but how many of you felt compelled to watch the other BCS bowls — the Rose, Sugar, Fiesta, and Orange — this week?

In the pre-BCS era, these games generated a lot more excitement and carried a lot more significance than they do now, especially back when the combination of results would have national championship ramifications. Plus, it was much more dramatic when they all were played on New Year’s Day. Because of the way the BCS is now set up, these so-called “major” bowls leading up to the championship game are nothing more than consolation games (remember the old third-place game in the NCAA basketball tournament?) and carry about as much significance as the Meineke Car Care and Emerald Nuts bowls.

I think it’s time to either institute a true playoff format incorporating the major bowls or scrap the BCS and go back to the way it used to be. What’s your opinion?

What do you do if your team has been invited to play in a bowl game nearly 5,000 miles away and two days before Christmas? Well, if you’re East Carolina Pirates fans, you buy up the tickets allotted to your school for the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl against Boise State and give them away as Christmas presents to military personnel stationed away from home on the islands.