Every year when the Sweet 16 rolls around, my thoughts drift to football. Even though the NCAA tournament is essentially rigged so that the teams from major conferences have the advantage, schools like Davidson and Western Kentucky still manage to crash the NCAA's party.

And that's exactly why you'll have to pry the college football bowl system from someone's cold, dead (and rich) hands before it changes.

College football protects its golden gooses. College basketball exposes them. We'll never know whether a team that was the equivalent of Davidson could make it to a college football Sweet 16 because to do so would be to embarrass one of the traditional powers and upset a lot of boosters. And that's a shame.

Even though one player, such as Stephen Curry, can make a bigger difference in basketball than he can in football, it would still be a lot of fun to watch a great quarterback carve up an overrated Southern California secondary. Instead, those matchups only happen in smaller bowls or in video games. There is something beautiful about a sport than actually lets its poster team -- Duke -- get de-pantsed on national television because it has no inside game.

Ohio State's football team, which has played a cupcake schedule the past two years and then gotten throttled in the national championship game, should thank its lucky stars that common sense, in college football, is overruled by money.