Why I hate the BCS

As a graduate of the University of Florida, you might think I have nothing to complain about this year, given that UF's football team has been matched up with the Oklahoma Sooners for the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) Championship Game on January 8, 2009, in Miami, Florida. Especially so since Florida and Oklahoma were chosen from seven major college teams with identical one-loss records. That doesn’t include two unbeaten teams hailing from “non-BCS” conferences.

So how is it that Florida and Oklahoma have been weeded out from among the competition to play in a “championship game”?

For the answer to that question, we have to go back to 1994. That season, a powerful Nebraska team finished the regular season 12-0 and ranked #1, but there were some complications.

The prior season featured a newly expanded Big Ten Conference with the addition of Penn State, and the Nittany Lions treated their new conference mates rudely, going 10-2 in 1993. With a veteran team returning, Penn State steamrolled the Big Ten in 1994, going 11-0, smoking Michigan and Ohio State by a combined 94-38 in the process. So this should set up a classic #1 vs. #2 bowl match-up, right?

Wrong. By joining the Big Ten Conference the year before, Penn State had locked itself into the Rose Bowl if it won the league title. Furthermore, the Rose Bowl game was the only major bowl that had two lock-ins, as the Big Ten champion was always pitted against the Pac 10 champion. In 1994, a relatively weak Oregon team won the Pac 10 with an 9-3 record, including blow-out losses to Hawaii and Utah, two teams considered to be fairly weak college football teams.

So #1 Nebraska was packed off to play the University of Miami in the Orange Bowl, where they defeated the Hurricanes 24-17. Penn State drilled Oregon, but this was not near enough to convince pollsters that it deserved the mythical national title, especially since Nebraska had played a mightier opponent in its bowl game.

The resulting poll finish – #1 undefeated Nebraska and #2 undefeated Penn State – sowed in college football fans a deep resentment against the existing bowl structure. It seemed silly that, when there are two clearly superior football teams, the “system” prevented their playing one another.

In fact, major universities had tried to prevent just such an outcome in 1992 by instituting the Bowl Coalition. The only problem was that the Big Ten and Pac 10 conferences opted out of the coalition, not wishing to break their traditional ties to the Rose Bowl. As fate would have it, it was those Rose Bowl tie-ins that created the 1994 crisis.

Eventually, after much heated discussion and debate, the Big Ten, Pac 10, and Rose Bowl joined the party in 1998 to create the current Bowl Championship Series configuration.

The only problem is that history has shown us that results like 1994 happen only once a decade or thereabouts. It is rare to have two teams – and only two teams – that are clearly more deserving of “championship game” invitations. When that does occur, the BCS is perfectly suited for cutting through the politics to match up those two teams.

But what happens the other nine out of 10 years? You know, those years, like this one, when as many as eight or nine teams have legitimate claims on the national championship. Then the BCS breaks down, and what we get is a sham championship game between two arbitrarily chosen teams.

What I’ve never understood is why we have decided that it is better to shoehorn two teams into a “championship game” instead of determining the champion after the bowls have been played. Why is it so important to figure out the mess before the bowls rather than after them? What we have today is no less arbitrary than the old system, what I would call the AP/UPI system, when pollsters with each news service would vote at the end of the season. When two clear teams emerge as #1 and #2, then they should be obliged to play one another, but when we don’t have that scenario, we should be able to pull the plug on the BCS and revert back to the way it was.

But today we long so much for the “mythical” national championship to be “actual.” It is a craving that might, over time, ruin the delicate balance of major college football. It is the only sport sponsored by the NCAA that has no sanctioned champion and no means to determine one. Some people see this as a problem to be rectified. I see it as the secret to the sport’s success as a sport and as a business. The BCS comes dangerously close to compromising the integrity of the sport by forcing on fans and the media a reality that doesn’t really exist. Even the old pollsters’ take-it-or-leave-it rankings never claimed so much for itself.