Collegiate Times

Amidst the countless uncertainties that accompany each NCAA Division I-A football preseason, there have always be three universal consistencies: the final rankings will look nothing like the preseason ones, Notre Dame will be overrated, and a fierce debate will once again spark over the Bowl Championship Series system. College football has the single best regular season in sports, if only because every single game means life or death for a team's national title hopes. However, lately, the BCS ranking system has made it impossible to determine a true national champion. Since its inception in 1998, the BCS has been revised time and time again due to widespread discontent among the media, coaches and fans. Yet year in and year out the BCS has found new ways to fail football fans nationwide.

That is not to say there hasn't been substantial change to the system - only that the changes have proved ineffective. In recent years The Associated Press Poll was changed to the more comprehensive Harris Interactive Poll, the number of computer rankings has changed from seven to six, and most recently a fifth BCS game was added in an effort to offer more opportunities for mid-major conference teams to participate in a BCS game. In 2007 the four BCS bowl games (Orange, Sugar, Fiesta, Rose) will be played as usual with the addition of a fifth "National Championship" game. The title game will rotate every year between the four traditional BCS venues. That means that every year one of those four sites will host two BCS bowl games.

The way the BCS ranks Division I programs grows more and more complicated every year, resulting in more and more disgruntled college football fans.

Essentially the system is based on three components, each resulting in 1/3 of the final score for a team. These three components are the Harris Interactive Poll (formerly the AP Poll), the USA Today Coaches Poll, and a combination of six computer rankings. Based on these three factors each team is given a score and the two teams with the lowest score at the end of the season play for the title. The problems with the system are too many to list, however here are a couple that are annually mentioned when a call for change is made.

One the most frequent problems is that a team from a major conference can go undefeated throughout the season yet never get an opportunity to play for the national title.

This happened most recently in 2004 when Auburn completed a perfect regular season, despite an arduous SEC schedule, and still finished third in the BCS rankings behind USC and Oklahoma. USC went on to blow out Oklahoma by 30 points, and Auburn rolled on to defeat Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl. Football fans across the country never got a chance to see the two best teams in college football face off for the national title.
Another major problem is the influence the computer rankings can have late in the
season. Time and time again teams that have been ranked highly all throughout the regular season have lost in their conference championship game and still gone on to play in a BCS bowl games. While a loss late in the season will largely affect the human rankings of those teams, the computers can only factor in strength of schedule and other raw data. They are unable to account for a team's momentum, injuries or quality of play heading into the post-season.

In 2001, Nebraska lost in the last game of its regular season to Colorado and missed its opportunity to play in the Big XII championship game. Colorado went on to win the conference, a win which was rewarded with a heavy boost in their position in the human rankings. However, after the computer calculations had been entered Nebraska was ranked slightly higher than Colorado and consequently went on to face Miami for the national title.

With such widespread discontent with the system as it is today, it is hard to believe that sweeping changes are not around the corner. The most viable option for an overhaul of the post-season system would be the inception of an eight team playoff series. Every single NCAA sport determines its champion through some sort of playoff series - with the exception of college football. Why the disparity between Division I sports? An eight game series could easily be split up into four regions similar to the way NCAA basketball handles its field of 64.

The BCS could simply take the top eight teams in the final rankings and seed them, then use the four traditional BCS venues as sites for the playoff games. Other ranked teams that did not make the top eight could still participate in various bowls, thus allowing corporate sponsors around the nation to retain their college football sponsorship. The criterion for a team becoming bowl-eligible (six wins) would not have to change - and with this system the NCAA could finally crown a true national champion without the annual controversy that surrounds BCS title games.

There is one simple reason the National Football Foundation and the NCAA have yet to initiate the change to a playoff series, and that is money. The way BCS bowls are set up today is designed to generate huge revenues for their respective sponsors, and any change to the status quo threatens corporate sponsors' profits. Fox Sports, who recently acquired from ABC the rights to cover the bowl championship series, is in no position to threaten a proven profit machine - especially not in their first year broadcasting the games. While each year the movement for change picks up momentum, it is slow going and there are no signs of real modifications in the near future. It seems that sports fans will once again enjoy another fantastic regular season of college football only to be disappointed by the annual ambiguity over who really was the best team in college football.