WASHINGTON — Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch urged the Justice Department yesterday to investigate college football's Bowl Championship Series for what he views as violations of antitrust laws.

Hatch made the comment after conducting a standing-room-only hearing in the Senate subcommittee with antitrust oversight, where he serves as the top Republican.

"Frankly, there's an arrogance about the BCS that just drives me nuts," he told reporters. "Hopefully this hearing will open the door to have some people reconsider their positions. And if nothing else, the Justice Department ought to be looking at this." He said that it's clear to him that the BCS is in violation of antitrust laws.

Justice Department spokeswoman Gina Talamona said: "We're aware of his request and will respond as appropriate."

Hatch said that the BCS is exploiting a position of power, "and it's just not right."

Hatch's comments followed up on testimony by a lawyer for the Mountain West Conference, which does not get an automatic bid and has pressed for changes to the BCS. Utah, which is in the Mountain West, was bypassed for last year's national championship game despite going undefeated in the regular season. The title game pitted Florida against Oklahoma — each with one loss.

The lawyer, Barry Brett, called the BCS "a naked restraint imposed by a self-appointed cartel" in written testimony, and said that a Justice Department investigation would serve the public interest.

Under the BCS, some conferences get automatic bids to participate while others don't, and the automatic bid conferences also get far more of the revenue than the other conferences. Hatch and other BCS critics view that as anticompetitive behavior, while the BCS says it simply recognizes the teams people want to watch.

"I don't think it's arrogant if you've thought about something for five or six years, and concluded that's it's really hard to do something different," said Harvey Perlman, chancellor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the new chairman of the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee.

ELSEWHERE

YAHOO, NFL SETTLE

Yahoo Inc. and the NFL Players Association have reached a settlement over the use of players' statistics, photos and other data in Yahoo's popular online fantasy football game, but details were not released yesterday.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Yahoo sued the NFLPA last month in U.S. District Court in Minnesota, claiming Yahoo shouldn't have to pay royalties to use the data because the information is publicly available.

Yahoo dropped the lawsuit Monday, and a judge formally dismissed it yesterday. Officials from both parties said a settlement was reached.

MURDER-SUICIDE LIKELY

Tennessee's state medical examiner said yesterday that investigators have been hesitant to conclude that Steve McNair's girlfriend killed the NFL star and herself because she didn't appear to have a motive, but that murder-suicide is the most likely scenario.

After the couple was discovered shot to death on Saturday, police were quick to label McNair's death a homicide. He had been shot twice in the head and twice in the chest, while 20-year-old Sahel Kazemi was dead from a single gunshot to the head. Under her body was a gun she had purchased less than two days before the killings.

Investigators were waiting on ballistics tests on the weapon before issuing a ruling on Kazemi's death.

"If we had known on Sunday about the gun I think we would have been very comfortable in ruling murder-suicide," medical examiner Bruce Levy said.