The BCS and Its Flaws: a Crash Course On How to Fix the Nightmare

The Football Bowl Subdivision, formerly known as Division I-A, is the only organization in the world of American sports that lacks a playoff system. All other college sports, including all other divisions of football, which include the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA), Division II, Division III, and the NIAA, follow a tournament-styled playoff system to determine the champion for that particular season.

Instead, the FBS is governed by the Bowl Championship Series, more commonly known as the BCS. Its flawed selection process disappoints fans year in and year out, especially in the many years where there are multiple undefeated college football teams, including this year.

 The BCS only recognizes certain conferences as being worthy of automatic bids to play in their bowl games. The approved BCS conferences are the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Southeastern Conference (SEC), the Big East, the Big Ten, the Big Twelve, and the Pacific-10 (Pac-10).

Granted, these conferences are filled with powerhouse members, such as Florida, USC, Texas, Ohio State, and many others, but the BCS completely neglects many other solid conferences. Other divisions in the FBS include the Western Athletic Conference (WAC), the Mountain West Conference, Conference-USA, the Sun Belt, and the Mid-American Conference (MAC).

There are three teams that currently belong to no conference (Notre Dame, Navy, and Army), and are known as independents. Because they are able to schedule any opponent in the nation at any given week however, the independents are eligible for a BCS bowl game if they play well enough to merit one.

But let’s face it—none of those three teams have been any good for quite some time, while the Mountain West and the WAC continue to put up spectacular teams that never get their chance to play for the National Title.

Since the BCS was first established in 1998, there have been many years with more than two undefeated teams, leaving those perfect teams not chosen to play for the National Championship as the odd men out.

Imagine how that would feel. You’ve won every game on your schedule, but just because of a system of computers and coaches voting, you’re told you’re not good enough to play for the title because two other teams are better perfect teams than you are.

Since the formation of the BCS, Tulane (12-0 in 1998), Marshall (13-0 in 1999), Auburn (13-0 in 2004), Utah (12-0 in 2004), Boise State (13-0 in 2006), and Utah once more (13-0 in 2008) have finished the regular season undefeated, won their bowl game, and still were not eligible to be National Champion.

With the exception of Auburn, who plays in the SEC, all of these other teams are from non-BCS conferences. And in 2004, three teams finished undefeated, yet only the University of Southern California was chosen for the BCS National Championship, having utterly slaughtered a previously undefeated Oklahoma team that had too many close wins to have been the consensus No. 2 best in the nation.

This year, there is a similar problem. Alabama, Texas, Cincinnati, Texas Christian University, and Boise State have all finished the regular season undefeated. However, only Texas and Alabama were chosen to play for the BCS National Championship.

It is widely accepted that Alabama is a no-brainer and easily the nation’s best team, but Texas looked unimpressive (to say the least) in their conference championship game against Nebraska, and had the referees not corrected a blown call (putting an extra second back on the clock for Texas after the game clock erroneously continued after a pass out of bounds, allowing Texas to kick the game-winning field goal), there would have been chaos in the BCS.

Without Texas being undefeated, that would have left the other four teams as contenders. In spite of the fact that Cincinnati plays in a BCS conference (the Big East), and hence would probably have been chosen for the other spot in the Championship Game, we will never know what the outcome would have been, as Cincinnati won a lot of close games, while TCU and Boise State destroyed everything in sight, winning many games by more than twenty points each.

The BCS National Champion is chosen by all coaches in the FBS voting the winner of the BCS National Championship Game as the No. 1 team in the final poll. However, the Associated Press is not bound by these rules, allowing them to make an alternate decision and crown their own National Champion, forcing two teams to share the National Championship.

This happened as recently as 2003, where LSU downed Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl (before the invention of the BCS National Championship Game, each of the four BCS bowls would rotate which one was the National Championship game) and USC dealt a similar beating to Michigan in the Rose Bowl, prompting the Associated Press to crown the USC Trojans as their National Champions.

Since there are multiple undefeated teams this year, and the nation seems quite unhappy with the selection of Texas as the second team to participate in the BCS National Championship Game, this could be the year the Associated Press again votes for its own National Champion.

In a perfect world, the AP would vote for the winner of the Fiesta Bowl—the matchup of undefeated teams TCU and Boise State, both from non-BCS conferences—as its National Champion, which would defy the convention of certain conferences being superior to others.

There are, however, other solutions that could change the way the BCS operates. The Mountain West and WAC are both decent conferences on their own, with a handful of very good teams at the top of each conference.

Geographically, both conferences are in the same region, so to take the best teams from each conference and hence create a power conference from them could enable that new conference to be added as the seventh member to the BCS.

If this new conference was composed of Boise State, Fresno State, Nevada, Hawaii, TCU, Utah, Brigham Young University, and Colorado State, as well as taking Southern Methodist University and Houston from Conference-USA, it would be a difficult conference for the BCS to ignore, as all of these teams have had outstanding recent successes, and Boise State, Utah, Hawaii, and TCU have all received invites to BCS bowl games.

The other possible solution would involve the institution of a playoff system.

This system could be composed of sixteen teams, including the conference champions from all six BCS conferences, as well as ten at-large teams, being the ten highest-rated teams aside from the conference champions.

This would allow members of non-BCS conferences to play for the championship, and more than that, it would give the fans exactly what they want: a fair playoff system.

Upsets can happen on any given Sunday (or Saturday, in the case of college football), and this would truly test each team, enabling them to prove that they are, without doubt, the best in the nation.

In addition, these extra games would provide extra revenue to both the schools participating and the NCAA as a whole, enabling college’s governing body of sports to disperse the money as needed and help keep schools from having to make extreme and ill-fated budget cuts that damage the education of the students more than anything else.

By no means would this eliminate bowl games. 

All other teams that are bowl eligible (meaning they have at least six wins, and coming against quality opponents rather than division FCS teams just looking for a paycheck in exchange for their bruising) would still participate in the second and third-tier bowl games.

The current BCS bowl games (the Orange Bowl, the Rose Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, and the Sugar Bowl) and two other top-tier bowls, such as the Cotton Bowl and Gator Bowl, could serve as the national quarter-finals and semi-finals.

The BCS National Championship game would still serve as the championship game, and the winner of that game will truly have earned the right to call themselves National Champions.