BCS – Sports Politics At Its Finest
College football fans are well aware of the BCS (Bowl Championship Series), but the casual sports fan just hears another annoying acronym. The BCS isn’t so much a “thing” as it is an arrangement between 11 major football conferences and the four major bowls (Orange, Sugar, Rose, Fiesta).
Basically, the BCS Standings, which are determined by combining three independent polls, calculate the top two teams in the country. They play in the BCS National Championship Game, which rotates among the locations where the four major bowls are held. Then, a draft order of sorts is determined each year where each BCS bowl gets to pick the next best team. Six conference champions receive automatic bids, which leaves just four more slots. There are some restrictions, such as the Rose Bowl is still true to tradition in that the Big 10 champ faces the Pac 10 champ (assuming neither is title-bound), and Notre Dame (an independent team) has some guarantees if they finish high in the rankings (8th or higher), so the selection process for the bowls gets a little complicated.
In the end, the BCS arrangement produces matchups for the four major Bowls with some attempts at sticking to tradition and a fifth BCS bowl, the National Championship Game. The whole point of the arrangement is for college football to have the ability to present a matchup of #1 vs #2. While many fans have been wanting a true playoff system for years now, previous agreements, television contracts that extend for several years, and a general unwillingness by the NCAA to adopt a playoff format has squelched the idea, at least for the time being.
The BCS partners believe the current system is better than the “old” way of bowl games because a champion is decided on the field. Personally, I think this way stinks because it only provides one intriguing matchup. Why does it matter who wins the Fiesta Bowl if the traditional opponents aren’t included AND the shot at a national championship is impossible? I always felt that it was more exciting when these bowls presented matchups like #1 vs #6, #2 vs #10, #3 vs #5, etc. A possible champion wasn’t limited to just one game and any game involving a top 5 team had legitimate title implications. Now it’s just #1 vs #2 and all the rest.
Extra point: when you hear the term “non-BCS” team, such as Utah playing in the Sugar Bowl in 2009, it refers to a team that plays in a conference not granted one of the six automatic bids. It does NOT mean that the team is not eligible to play in a BCS bowl.
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