Welcome to our summer book series… know this: Dan Wetzel is a hero of mine.

And no, not just because he wrote the logical book “Death to the BCS” along with the help of Josh Peter and Jeff Pazzan.

Back when I was covering college football for CSTV, I sat next to the Yahoo Sports writer at the 2006 West Virginia-Louisville game. Later that night, not realizing I had parked in a gated parking lot that was locked-up 90 minutes after the game ended, Dan was nice enough to give me a lift to my hotel.

Turns out, Wetzel is not only a good samaritan but also a great college football writer. And a soldier in the cause for getting rid of the ridiculous Bowl Championship Series that has ruined college football for 13 years now.

Though the book came out last fall, I decided that after this 2011 college baseball season was done, I’d finally sit down and read the anger-inducing expose’ Wetzel penned. And it live up to billing. Division I football is the only sport in all of the NCAA to decide its champion without the use of a playoff. Even though I knew reading this book would get my blood boiling, I do suggest you give it a look-see if you haven’t already. Granted, Wetzel and Co. repeat their mantra over and over throughout the book, but they also lay out in very understandable ways why money, greed, power, arrogance and back-stabbing are the biggest reasons that logic doesn’t decide things in the most popular sport in college athletics.

And if you don’t think this effects college baseball, just imagine how less in-peril baseball programs would be if Wetzel’s plan for a 16-team playoff and it’s projected $750 million payday to be spread among colleges and universities would be.  We could welcome back fully-funded programs at places like Iowa State, Syracuse, Wyoming, Colorado and finally get Wisconsin on board too.

Although I can’t plagiarize the entire book – though I’d want to – here are the 10 most important passages in the book.

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1- The Introduction Line:

We discovered an ocean of corruption: sophisticated scams, mind-numbing waste, and naked political deals — enough to prove that the confused excuses spat out by the suits in charge and regurgitated by the well-paid public relations people are empty drivel. While the sleaze should be enough to cause the death of the BCS, it’s simply emblematic of a long battle best represented by two men. One stands for common sense and the possibilities the great game can offer. The other is about protecting the one-sided system that enriches and empowers the very few who led college football into this morass. You’ve heard of the first. His name is Joe Paterno [who is] as steadfast a proponent of a playoff as ever. You might not have heard of the other. His name is Jim Delany. He’s the former district attourney who is the commissioner of the Big Ten, who belongs to the group that hijacked college football and refuses to let go.

[Editor's note: Keep in mind, Jim Delany is not only one of the main culprits responsible for stiff-arming the MWC, the WAC, CUSA and the Sun Belt from automatic entry into the BCS and its pool of money, he's also the clown who, once discovering his Big 10 was a mere "mid-major" in baseball, suggested that the CWS add two more teams to its field. Those two being exclusively northern teams.]

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2- The Approval Rating (page 2):

Delany helped run the BCS amid widespread skepticism. It’s been a bigger disaster than anyone could have imagined. It’s approval rating hovers around 10 percent. And yet Delany draws the following conclusion: “it’s been incredibly successful.”

[Editor's note: This despite teams from the Mountain West and WAC proving to be much much better competition in BCS games that the ACC and Big East the last few years.]

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3- The Rich Get Richer (page 3):

While the big six conferences hogged 82.3 percent of the $155.2 million paid out by BCS games last year, the Mountain West, WAC, MAC, Conference USA and Sun Belt Conference scraped along with the leftovers. The Cartel and the BCS exist to consolidate control among the power conferences and position themselves to never let go. Suggesting a playoff to the Cartel is futile because it doesn’t care how big the postseason revenue pie gets or even if its slice would grow. It simply wants to ensure that no one else holds the knife. The six Cartel members work with a legion of henchmen — the executive directors of a couple dozen bowl games and a few high-powered athletic directors and school presidents — to dictate how the sport operates.

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4- Awesome, Now Politics Enters the Picture (page 31):

As a not-for-profit entity, the Fiesta Bowl itself can’t make donations to politicians. State campaign finance records show that since 2000, fourteen Fiesta Bowl employees donated more than $38,000 to politicians, according to the Arizona Republic.

The Fiesta Bowl did acknowledge to the newspaper that it spent $4 million “on lobbyists, trips, dinners and golf retreats to build relationships with athletic officials who control the BCS and to garner support from politicians.” That’s $4 million that could and should be sitting in the coffers of colleges that need it or the bank accounts of real charities that depend on it.

[Editor's note: Since the book came out, Fiesta Bowl director John Junker has been fired for serious indiscretions, including the aforementioned solicitation of donations to political candidates, along with things like a $30,000 birthday party for Junker in Pebble Beach and an apparent cover-up during the initial investigation.]

Former Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker... emphasis on "Junk".

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5- The Lie of Bowl Payouts (page 37):

It was December 2008, three weeks from kickoff, and the Motor City Bowl still needed a team to play Central Michigan. Schools were bargaining for the right to play in the bowl, the winner would be whichever team decided to take the least amount of money of the game’s advertised $750,000-per-team payout.

San Jose State offered to take just $250,000 and accept the rest in face-value tickets, even though those tickets would be hard to even give away, much less sell, for an anonymous bowl game in iced-over Detroit.

Florida Atlantic offered to relinquish all cash and, as compensation, take $750,000 in tickets to a stadium that would have tens of thousands of empty seats. For the honor of playing in a D-list bowl, FAU was willing to be paid nothing. Soon the Motor City Bowl’s matchup was announced. Central Michigan’s opponent would be Florida Atlantic. And the media continued to suggest a payout of $750,000 per team.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and bowl payouts.

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6- What a 16-Team Playoff Could Be Like (page 58):

Better than traveling to some dull municipal facility for a bowl game in an unfamiliar place that doesn’t carry the smell of Runza meat pies and Big Red hot dogs, staples of Nebraska home games. Nebraska players and coaches would cherish the chance [to host]. Games in front of a partisan crowd… The opportunity to finally see how those SEC teams handle an icy field and bone-chilling winds. The prospect of riding home-field advantage, the reward for a superlative regular season, to a national championship.

Most of all, the people to whom (Nebraska President Harvey) Perlman should answer, his students and faculty, [would] reap the benefits. In a time of budget cuts and soaring tuition, Nebraska — and every college and university in the country for that matter — could use the millions of dollars a playoff would send its way.

[Editor's note: As Wetzel and his team of writers point out early in the book, their plan would call for a 16-team playoff where the top seeds would play at home through the first three rounds and a championship game at a neutral location.]

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7- Even With A 16-Team Playoff, Lesser Bowls Would Still Play On (page 77):

If the Cartel doesn’t mind currently spending $80 million to subsidize the bowl games when their gross revenue is $220 million, it isn’t going to suddenly pull the plug on the lower-tier bowls when a playoff would generate $750 million.

Brains are the only real threat to bowl games. The system is safe until a conscientious president looks at the financial disaster that is the majority of bowls, starts asking questions and sees what the bowl system hath wrought.

It would take a group of BCS-conference schools to realize they’re paying for those bowl cocktail parties, an independent-thinking faction of presidents to take on the Cartel and proclaim it has twenty better places to spend $1.7 million than on some bowl with a 0.4 TV rating in Arizona.

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8- The BCS Doesn’t Even Accomplish What it was Supposed To (page 83):

For a system with one distinct mission — “It is nothing more than an attempt to match the No. 1 and No. 2 teams,” according to the official BCS web site — it is rather awful at its job. Of the twelve national championship games since its inception, at least seven have provided questionable matchups. Which is no surprise when the top two teams are determined by coaches who vote along political lines, Harris Poll electors with obvious regional biases and computers whose influence is neutered by the restrictions the BCS places on them.

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9- BCS Makes Non-Conference Scheduling Suck Even More (page 93):

To compete for a spot in the BCS title game, the road map is simple: Own a brand name and don’t lose in the regular season. Texas didn’t in 2009 and the Longhorns won the human vote ahead of undefeated Cincinnati, TCU and Boise State. Texas, jobbed by the BCS the year before, learned how to work the system perfectly.

“They don’t penalize you for playing weaker teams,” former Michigan AD Bill Martin said. “Would we love to play Texas? You bet we would. I’d schedule them right now. We would love to play the traditional schools. But that isn’t how it works anymore.”

According to research by ESPN’s Pat Forde, there were fifteen games in 1988 between non-conference teams ranked in the preseason Top 20. In 2009, there were four. For the entire country. Over the entire season, which expanded from eleven to twelve games.

[Editor's note: The expanded pussification of college football non-conference schedules has gotten way out of hand. With a playoff, where every conference champion gets into the field along with five at-large's, it probably wouldn't improve TOO much, but at least it would get a little bit better as teams might try to challenge themselves a little bit more.]

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10- Another Unbeaten Doesn’t Get its Chance (page 168):

In 2009, when the University of Cincinnati was en route to becoming just the second BCS conference team to go unbeaten and be shut out of the title game, the school’s Superfans were enraged.

To counter the Cincinnati uprising, the Cartel set up an appearance for executive director Bill Hancock on Dan Patrick’s radio show, where Hancock said that as a consolation prize he’d give Bearcats coach Brian Kelly a hearty pat on the back and tell him, “You guys had a great season and you’re to be congratulated for it.”

The fight between fans and the BCS isn’t just a matchup of slow-witted executives and angry customers. It’s a clash of cultures and generations and it’s one the Cartel will never win.

Each year, another group of young fans demanding modernization of the sport is born while a group that still believes in the value of backslaps and cherishers of memories of the Bluebonnet Bowl fades away. The demographics will eventually topple the system.

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And one to grow on…

11- The Final Salvo (page 192):

It’s the Cartel that for far too long had it easy, allowed to spit arguments that carry no merit. Their decades-old talking points are built on false premises, their unsound economics, their antiquated system useless in a modern world they can’t change, their bowl schemes bleeding schools dry while middlemen cash checks.

When presidents see what’s really going on, and when the media learns the particulars of the system, and when fans clear the smoke screens and when everyone collectively ignores misdirection and forces the Cartel to address the reality of its racket, and when the ideals espoused by Joe Paterno supplant those of Jim Delany — that’s when the BCS falls like a house of cards.

And that’s when players, coaches and fans finally get the champion they deserve.