I'm away most of this week at the Yahoo(!) compound (which, like, Xanadu), so I didn't get the live feed of the Senate Judiciary Committee's much-anticipated inquisition of the BCS on Tuesday afternoon, wherein Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch repped the Beehive State by joining the call for a Justice Department nuke on the Series via the Sherman Antitrust Act. Because I've been honed in on political pressure on the BCS for about eight months, I see ramifications spinning off in every direction, but one line from the proceeding in particular caught my eye:

[Hatch] turned his indignation on one of his witnesses, University of Nebraska at Lincoln Chancellor Harvey Perlman, a fan of the BCS system. [And a directly interested party. -- ed.] "Let's take last year's Utah team," Hatch said. "What more could they have done to play their way into a national championship game?"

"Senator," Perlman replied, "it's hard to respond to this without appearing to be disrespectful of Utah."

"And you don't want to be, in this room," Hatch told the witness.

Perlman offered his haughty answer: "They could've played the schedule Nebraska played last year."

"Well," Hatch argued, "they played a lot of big-time teams."

Perlman offered pity for the spurned Utes. "That's the way the world is, I'm afraid," he said.

Replace "the schedule Nebraska played" with "the schedule Florida played" or "the schedule Oklahoma played" or "the schedule [insert powerhouse] played"; Nebraska, specifically, is not important here. (A good thing for Perlman, because the Huskers haven't beaten a ranked team since 2001.)

What is important is that of course Utah could not have played the schedule Nebraska (or Florida or Oklahoma) played. It's literally not possible on multiple levels under the current system, which is precisely the issue Hatch and his BCS-hating colleagues are attacking here.

I don't know if it's "disrespectful" to the Utes or their upstanding representatives to point out that, by and large, the Mountain West is inferior to the "Big Six" conferences, historically, financially and competitively. For the two or three quality teams at the top every year, half the schedule automatically consists of UNLV, San Diego State, New Mexico, Colorado State, Air Force and Wyoming; for Utah, TCU and BYU last year, it also consisted of Northern Iowa, Weber State, Utah State, Stephen F. Austin and SMU. As Perlman says, this is an inherently disqualifying schedule no matter how successful any team may be against it, even in by far the best of the non-BCS conferences.

But the question from there is: How could Utah, TCU, BYU or Boise State improve its schedule to match a Big 12 or SEC-worthy gauntlet? And the answer is: They can't. Even if they're ambitious enough to go looking for goliaths to slay, smaller schools are still lucky to score one national power in the non-conference lineup, and those teams can turn out to be enormous disappointments. Utah last year, with regular season wins over a traditional power (Michigan), a solid, ranked contender from a "Big Six" conference (Oregon State) and two ranked teams from its own league, played the absolute maximum of a schedule for a team in its position; the only way it could have been better is if the Wolverines had held up their end of the deal by not descending into the worst spiral since the Great Depression. Still, there was zero talk about Utah as a snubbed contender prior to the Sugar Bowl, because it was abundantly clear just how watered-down the bottom half of their slate was; even after they vaulted onto the national map with the pounding in New Orleans, the heads on the Utes' wall still didn't measure up to the other contenders.

The only possible solution for a mid-major program to play a major schedule is to actually join a major conference. And we can be sure that will not be happening at any point in the near future.

So: Big schools overwhelmingly a) Have no interest in tough mid-major games outside of the conference, b) Raise the standard for mid-majors to enter the roped-off, big-money bowl games that determine the so-called championship, and c) Won't let mid-major teams into the conferences, an exclusion that costs the smaller schools millions of dollars every year. Indeed, as Perlman says, this is frequently "the way the world works." And when it works this way, it is called a cartel, and we call on government to enforce its laws to shut it down with haste. That's what Hatch and lawyers from the Mountain West alledge, anyway.

I'm still generally on the fence about Congressional intervention in this case for many reasons, libertarian instincts foremost among them. But something tells me this is not exactly the defense the BCS will be using as the saga lurches forward.