BCS National Championship 2012: Are BCS Controversies Coming to a Close?

The Bowl Championship Series may finally be taking steps to reduce the intense amounts of annual controversy that proceed after the regular season of college football.

This year it reached a tipping point when Alabama was selected by the BCS voters and computers to play in a rematch of a regular-season game against LSU in the BCS championship game over two other deserving one-loss teams, Oklahoma State and Stanford.

Now Ralph D. Russo of the Associated Press is reporting that the officials of the BCS will be meeting tomorrow to discuss formatting changes to the postseason in college football’s major division.

Bill Hancock, executive director of the BCS, says that they will be discussing “everything imaginable” at the meeting but has already ruled out a large-scale playoff, like the NCAA tournament, to determine a champion.

College football purists consider the regular season to be important and unique, but there are simply too many good young players going to too many great schools in this day and age for only two teams to be in contention for a championship every year.

Hancock acknowledged those concerns by saying, “the larger the playoff field, the more damage to the regular season.”

A common format that has been championed by many is the plus-one system, in which four teams would be eligible to compete for the BCS National Championship by first playing in one playoff game to get there.

That would have worked well this season and would have allowed LSU, Stanford, Oklahoma State and Alabama to have an equal chance to compete for the crystal ball.

Would this completely eliminate controversy? Of course not.

Say Houston had won the Conference USA championship game and went undefeated; would they have deserved a spot over any of those one-loss teams?

What about the No. 7 ranked Boise State Broncos, who were relegated to the Las Vegas Bowl to play a 6-6 ASU team after a phenomenal one-loss season?

Obviously, there still will be issues with the system, but at least the BCS is acknowledging that there is a major flaw with their current process and taking steps to fix it.