

In a letter, a copy of which was provided to The Wall Street Journal before it was made public, the 21 signatories—who include Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago and Andrew Zimbalist of Smith College—assert that the BCS is a cartel that "secures market access and revenue" for its favored members.

The argument over the fairness and legality of the BCS is the central front in the ongoing war over college football's controversial postseason system. Some ancillary issues regarding the BCS have attracted greater attention this offseason, including the Fiesta Bowl's firing of its president amid allegations of financial improprieties and Connecticut reportedly losing nearly $1.8 million on its Fiesta Bowl trip because of unsold tickets.

Read the Letter to the Justice Dept.

"But the core issue is that six conferences have bearhugged the goodies and agreed to run things for their mutual benefit," said Len Simon, a San Diego antitrust lawyer who also teaches at the University of San Diego and is one of the signatories.

This isn't the first time that BCS critics have made this charge. In October 2009, Sen. Orrin Hatch—whose home-state Utah Utes were left out of the 2008 national-title game despite going undefeated—sent a 10-page letter to President Barack Obama to ask the Department of Justice to investigate the BCS. A Justice official wrote back in January 2010, saying the department was determining whether to investigate the BCS under antitrust laws.

Since then, however, "We have not heard anything from anyone at Justice," BCS executive director Bill Hancock said. "We believe that's because they have concluded that the BCS does comply with the law."

The professors claim that the BCS's control of access to the most important postseason games shields major-conference schools from competition and injures schools in the five non-major conferences, whose champions aren't guaranteed a BCS berth and have never appeared in the BCS title game. Consumers also are being harmed, the professors allege, because college football's lack of a playoff limits output. "Consumers aren't getting what they want," said Dan Rascher of the University of San Francisco.

Since the BCS began during the 1998 season, there have been 57 BCS games, meaning 114 available berths for teams. Of those 114, schools from the non-automatic-qualifying conferences have received seven berths—none in the national-championship game. In head-to-head matchups against the major-conference schools, the mid-majors are 4-1. (Fellow mid-majors Boise State and Texas Christian played each other in the January 2010 Fiesta Bowl.)

But six of those seven mid-major appearances have occurred since 2006, when the BCS grew to five annual games (from four) by adding a stand-alone national-title game. Last season, TCU defeated Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl, the traditional postseason home of the Big Ten and Pac-10's top teams.

Lately, college football's major conferences have hardly sounded like they're in a mood to give more ground to the smaller schools. In December, when Karl Benson of the Western Athletic Conference spoke of getting chances to play "on the big stage" during a panel discussion of conference commissioners in New York, the Big Ten's Jim Delany said, "The problem is your big stage takes away opportunities that my teams created in 1902."

"That's a remarkable statement, because it's not apparent why non-automatic qualifying conferences should pay tithes to the AQs for fielding championship teams in the '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s," said Matt Sanderson, co-founder of Playoff PAC, a political-action committee dedicated to replacing the BCS with a playoff.

The BCS argues that mid-major schools have had increased access in recent years, and that the system has produced better matchups than what the postseason did before its advent. A recent Wall Street Journal story pointed out that if college football had a full-blown tournament—one that's as upset-laden as this year's college basketball tournament was—the resulting matchups might not be very appealing.

"Just look at the bowl games that happened only because of the BCS: USC-Texas, Boise State-Oklahoma, Ohio State-Florida, Auburn-Oregon, TCU-Wisconsin," Hancock said. "The BCS has benefited everyone in college football."

But hardly everyone agrees. Dave Berri, a sports economist at the University of Southern Utah, said that on the first day of class every semester, he asks his students: Who is the national champion in football? He tells them they can use any statistical method they choose to produce the answer—but no one ever gets it right.

"The answer is, you're all wrong," Berri said. "There is no answer. They only play 12 games; they don't play the same teams; the sample size is too small to begin with. It's pointless."

Berri, one of the antitrust letter's signatories, said he'd like to see a postseason system that distributes revenue and opportunities more evenly. "There are a lot of things wrong with college sports," he said. "This is just one of them."

Write to Darren Everson at darren.everson@wsj.com