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The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) was created to select a National Champion in College Division IA (now FBS) football. It has failed, and failed in a terrible way.
Now that the BCS is in place, it is unlikely there will ever be the changes made which would give it the least bit of validity. The BCS, by lack of thought or planning, left the control of the teams to the presidents of the schools. The schools will never give up that control.
The BCS first planned to make a fair selection of the top two teams to play for the National Title. Were the BCS planners naive or just lacking judgement?
The BCS is comprised of 120 FBS schools which are assigned to numerous conferences. All of these conferences have different rules which affect how their teams play. The lodging, transportation, and recruiting rules are different in each of the various conferences.
The schedules of the schools are not controlled by the BCS. Therefore, all of the 120 teams play different teams under different conditions. Some of the teams play most of their games in their section of the country. Some teams play small, lower division schools, who are not even eligible to compete in the BCS. Other schools play only BCS eligible teams. The BCS doesn't care.
Some of the 120 schools play in non-BCS conferences. The BCS gives a limited number of those schools access to the BCS bowls, depending on their ranking. It is interesting that a non-BCS conference school humiliated their opponent in a rare BCS bowl game last season. The BCS ranking system had Alabama ranked as their top team for most of last season, and Utah demolished them in their bowl game.
The first system that the BCS attempted was to use a combination of the Coaches' Poll, the AP Poll and a random set of privately operated computers. This system ultimately failed when it became obvious to the AP that the "random computers" didn't work under any guidelines and most of the operators knew nothing about sports.
The AP pulled out of the BCS selection and started selecting their own champion. The BCS decided to find a bunch of people, some knowledgeable and some not knowledgeable about the game of football. They became the Harris Poll.
The voters in the Harris Poll rank the teams by, well, I guess no one knows how they actually do it. The Coaches' Poll decided this past year not to allow their votes to be known to anyone. That might be because one SEC head coach votes for people he knows from high school. He said he did it out of respect. Oh, I get it.
The last of the "three-prong" attack on common sense are a bunch of guys sitting around computers, just "doing things their way." The BCS doesn't control how they operate their computers. The saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out."
Common sense will lead you to a simple fact. If, in fact, the computers are accurate, there should be no need to have more than one. That one computer should be at the BCS "center of technology," or something. No way, no how should a half dozen or so computers decide on who is going to play for the National Championship.
In summary, consider the following:
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