Jim Naveau: Replacing BCS will be a rough ride

I suppose it should be as unsurprising as athletes and rock stars dating models, but every so often you get a reminder that sports fans can be, well, just a little crazy.

Here's the latest reminder of that:

Two Jacksonville, Fla., men, Chris Telmosse and his nephew David Truax, are so upset about the lack of a college football playoff that they're driving a recreational vehicle around the country to promote a boycott of next January's Bowl Championship Series national title game.

Hit 'em where it hurts, they say. Make the advertisers on the BCS championship game feel the wrath of those football purists whose lives are incomplete without a 16-team college football playoff.

The two BCS haters have decorated the RV to look like a football. It bears their message to boycott the BCS by not watching the championship game. They're selling anti-BCS T-shirts for $9.95. And they've got a Web site.

The playoff proponents left Jacksonville on April 14 and have hit Auburn, Ala., Baton Rouge, La., College Station, Texas, and Austin, Texas, so far on their ride in pursuit of pigskin perfection.

Tellmose describes himself as a businessman and his nephew is a graphics major at Florida State College in Jacksonville, not to be confused with Florida State University in Tallahassee.

The two men said they talked about this idea for a couple years before deciding to hit the road.

Apparently, it took them a while to convince themselves it might be a good idea to spend close to $10,000 of their own money, drive around the country in a used RV and preach a message that those in charge of college football really couldn't care less about.

Tellmose is considering missing his son's high school graduation and his wedding anniversary to carry the message to the masses.

Their crusade, while perhaps heartfelt and certainly attention-grabbing to a degree, is doomed on two levels.

First, asking college football fans to boycott the BCS championship game is like requesting that a choc-aholic abstain from chocolate on Easter morning. It's like taking a beer drinker to a beer tasting festival and saying he can't partake of any of the samples.

Second, there are powerful forces allied against the idea of a college football playoff who wouldn't be intimidated by a caravan of a hundred or a thousand RVs carrying anti-BCS banners.

Anyone who thinks there can be a smooth and quick transition to a playoff system underestimates the determination of people who have power and money to hold onto that power and money.

The day the BCS conference schools, the bowls, the cities hosting those bowls and, of course, the television networks, figure out a way they all can get even more money and even more power by having a playoff system, that's the day you'll see a playoff. But not one minute sooner.

The major conferences who get teams into the BCS bowls love the multi-million dollar payouts those bowls dole out.

The teams who have a chance to play in one of the current 33 bowls aren't in a hurry to change things. The television networks who televise those games like the guaranteed programming every December and January.

ESPN just signed an agreement for $125 million to broadcast the BCS games from 2011-2014.

So, to be blunt, Telmosse, Truax and their RV are on a road to nowhere. They might have fun but they won't have a playoff anytime soon.