MWC's Craig Thompson: BCS Computers, Pollsters Don't Know

The following is an excerpt from It’s Possible! Realignment and Playoffs – College Football’s Opportunity by Scott N. Galloway. 

Issue One: The system of determining a National Champion is based on opinion, not competition.

The college football national championship has historically been known as a “mythical” national championship. The World Book Dictionary defines myth as, “a belief, opinion, or theory that is not based on fact or reality.”

Dating back to the 1930s, a panel of sportswriters selected a team to be crowned “national champion” at the end of the regular season. For many years there have been two teams named, one by the Associated Press and the other by United Press International. I doubt that the sportswriters of the 1930s would have ever thought that their entertaining little poll would evolve to someday be used to determine which schools would be granted millions of dollars and which schools would not. In fact, Alan J. Gould, the originator of the AP poll, said: “Newspapers wanted material to fill space between games. That’s all I had in mind, something to keep the pot boiling.”

Remember 1984? I do. I remember Brigham Young University went undefeated and was crowned “National Champions” of college football by the Associated Press. Did BYU deserve to be called national champions?

My friends who were fans of the Southwest Conference believed that if BYU had played in the tough SWC, they would not have been able to go undefeated. I am sure my friends who were Southeastern Conference fans felt the same, as did my friends who were Big 8 Conference fans.

It has been said that the national championship being awarded to Brigham Young in 1984 was the catalyst for the eventual development of the Bowl Championship Series and the division of the eleven conferences into two tiers comprised of those schools that can and cannot get into the premier bowls.

The creation of the Bowl Championship Series was supposed to give us a playoff for a national championship. Now, at the end of the season, two teams are selected to play in a “national championship” bowl game. While the BCS system appears to be an improvement because it chooses two teams to play for a championship, the BCS system still relies on subjective opinion to decide which teams get to play for the championship.The BCS has been and will continue to be controversial as long as opinion determines who gets to play in the championship game.

Can you imagine a panel of sportswriters selecting the two NFL teams to play in the Super Bowl? Visualize, if you can, Little League baseball foregoing all the regional playoffs and the World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania to allow computers to pick two teams to play in a final championship game.

Popular voting may work for elections and American Idol, but not for true athletic competition. Read what Craig Thompson, commissioner of the Mountain West Conference said before the Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection said:

The current BCS system is based on a

fundamentally flawed premise: that computers

and pollsters can look at six or seven outstanding

teams, all of whom have lost no more than one

game (and few, if any, of whom have played

each other), and decide which are the two best

and should play in the national championship

game. But, it is impossible to know which of

those great teams are actually the best – unless

they play each other. Computers don’t know,

pollsters don’t know, and the BCS surely does not

                        know. Moreover, nearly half of the FBS teams

            are eliminated from the national championship

            even before the season begins. None of the 51

            teams that play in Non-AQ Conferences can, for

            all practical purposes, ever win a BCS national

            championship given how the current system

            is constituted. These teams are, in effect, done

            before day one. A system that produces this result

            is patently unfair.

Even the way the National Collegiate Athletic Association conducts championships in football in the other divisions and in other sports has too much subjectivity in the process. Can you imagine the NFL, NBA or MLB assigning a committee to select the teams that get to participate in postseason playoffs? If other athletic organizations can conduct championships without opinion polls, the fans that fund sports can expect colleges to design a system that can, too.

Praise for It’s Possible! Realignment and Playoffs - College Football's Opportunity

“Galloway provides a sensible way of restoring sanity to big-time college football at the same time that he outlines a championship playoff system. His reorganization of conferences and schedules would cut costs, boost revenues, and bring parity to a system that currently favors select universities. This would create the outcome uncertainty and excitement that characterizes the NCAA basketball tournament and show universities that Division I football could be sustainable. For anyone concerned with the future of college football, this book provides food for thought and a basis for constructive discussions.”   

Jay Coakley, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus
Sociology Department
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) Hall of Fame