I love college presidents when it comes to sports. Most of them know very well how athletics make a mockery of academia . . . well, of course, at everybody else's college. Athletic departments pretty much operate as wholly owned independent subsidiaries of the Corporation of Alumni Amusement. Of course, presidents always show up at football games, to sit in their 50-yard-line box, there to show the rich alumni that they do dearly love sports, even as they go to bed every night praying that the NCAA won't catch their athletic department's cheating until they've moved on to the next job.

At least nowadays presidents at a large number of small-cap athletic universities have found honesty. Forty-four of them have formed the Presidential Coalition for Athletic Reform. But please understand what "reform" means here . . . well, it means exactly this: the Weak 44 want more money for their football programs. A blow for candor! This is the most truthful declaration in college sports since that noble president of the University of Oklahoma declared to the state legislature: "What we want is a university that the football team can be proud of."

The Coalition presidents are exercised about the fact that the Bowl Championship Series is controlled by six conferences comprised of 62 teams plus Notre Dame -- which is a football conference unto itself, even if it can't beat anybody -- and these Heavy 63 universities split in excess of $100 million a year, while allowing all the other Division I-A colleges to pick up about $5 million worth of table scraps. The Heavy 63 maintain that they have all the glamour teams the television networks desire, and so, essentially, the football nobodies ought to be grateful that they're getting the pittance they are.

This argument has been put to the test some this year, for instance when outcast teams such as Northern Illinois and Bowling Green beat members of the football social register. However, even with some congressmen -- well, at least those from states who don't have colleges in the Heavy 63 -- screaming that the system is "un-American," don't expect any changes in college football.

Despite the fact that every other NCAA sport, as well as the lower football divisions, have playoffs to determine their national champion, Division I football maintains its elite Bowl Championship, wherein only two teams are consecrated to play for the title. The reason given is that the players from the Heavy 63 schools must not be taken away from the classroom. This is utter nonsense, of course. The maintenance of the anachronistic bowl system -- which grew up decades ago, before airplane travel, so various Sunbelt cities would have a profitable annual holiday excursion package -- means that college coaches can keep their teams practicing for weeks after the regular season ends in November. The bowl system is much more of a threat to academics than any fair playoff among the top four or eight teams could ever be.

But the Heavy 63 are in league with the big bowls, and so two of its teams will be delegated to play in the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 4th to determine a national champion. College football, you see, manages to remain both All-American and un-American, both.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to SI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available at bookstores everywhere.