A Proper Postseason: Comparing the BCS to a Plus-One (Part I: 1998-2002)

In May, eleven conference commissioners and Notre Dame's athletic director met to discuss the Bowl Championship Series, major college football's current postseason format.

Much has been made of the fact that SEC commissioner Mike Slive proposed the popular "plus-one" update of the BCS formula. In essence, the plus-one is a four-team seeded playoff.

Proponents point out that the method would expand the pool of possible title-game participants to four teams. This, they say, would enable any team with a legitimate claim to a title shot play for it on the field. Its small size would not devalue the regular season the way a larger-scale playoff would; with only four spots, one untimely loss could still knock a team from consideration.

Opponents cite that a four-team playoff would generally still leave controversy over the worthiness of its participants-- the fighting would just be over who's number four, rather than number two. The consensus is that plus-one would quickly expand to a larger-scale playoff, which none of the commissioners or school presidents want.

Additionally, the Big Ten and Pac Ten conferences are more interested in keeping their traditional ties to the Rose Bowl than implementing a playoff system.  But it isn't just those two conferences opposed to a change. Everyone at the BCS's May meeting, save for Slive and ACC commissioner John Swofford, rejected the plus-one idea.

While there are many more ins, outs, and what-have-yous in the discussion of college football's postseason, this article's focus is on how a plus-one format would have affected the postseasons during the BCS era.

There is no specific plus-one model that has taken root, so for the purposes of this article, we'll choose one.

The Model

Any format for a plus-one will necessarily use the BCS standings. Simply taking the top four teams of the final BCS rankings would make sense; however, it seems reasonable that there should be a clause to include the possibility for a team from outside the six "power" conferences (SEC, ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Pac 10, and Big East).

Let's assume such a rule would be in place, specifically: if any team finishes the regular season undefeated, with a strength-of-schedule ranked in the upper 25% of FBS teams, they automatically receive a berth in the plus-one, regardless of final BCS rank.

To keep it safe, we'll limit it so that only the highest-ranked team outside the BCS top 4 can use this automatic bid. Thus, only one undefeated team outside of the top 4 could bump out at BCS top-4 team--and only if the top-4 team was not also undefeated.

Some pundits want the stipulation that every team in the plus-one must be a conference champion. This automatically assumes that the second-best team in a conference can't be among the top four teams nationally--a clear fallacy. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume there is no such stipulation.

The History (1998-2002)

Now that we know how our plus-one model works, lets look at how it would have changed each of the last ten bowl seasons. First, a few notes:

Based on the way voting has gone for the final BCS polls the last two years, it's safe to assume that poll voters would re-evaluate how they ranked teams if they knew that the top four would play off.

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