Reforming the college football Bowl Championship format

Bowl Championship Series or the BCS as it is also known is essentially a computer-based ranking system, which is responsible for the determination of the national ranking of Division I College Football Programs. These ranking determine which teams would play for the National Championships. However, several issues and controversies do tend to arise in such a ranking system, especially when it so happens that the Bowl Championship Series Rankings differ from the other popular UPI or the AP rankings that had been followed to date. (About Bowl Championship Series, (BCS) College Football)

The Bowl Championship Series was established well before the 1998 Season. The purpose was to effectively decide the National Champions for College Football, while at the same time, maintaining and keeping up the well established 'Bowl System', which is today, as a matter of fact, more than a hundred years old. The Bowl Championship Series has today become a veritable showcase for the game of College Football, and at the end of the Season, some of the best teams are matched against each other. (Welcome: Bowl Championship Series) In 2005, USC and the University of Oklahoma met as opposing teams in the National Championship Game, but they also shared one common thing between themselves, which was that they were able to play for the National Title, just because of the fact that the Bowl Championship had been arranged and was in place on time, and because of the fact too that the Bowl Championship was actually established to carry on the hundred year old traditional of College Football Championships, and also to determine the heroes and winners of the college football title.

It must be noted that the Bowl Championship Series runs through the regular season of 2005, up to the Bowl Season of 2006. It consists of the following Bowls: Rose Bowl, Nokia Sugar Bowl, FedEx Orange Bowl, and the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, and it must also be noted that before the starting of the 1998 Season, these bowls joined up with the Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big 12, Big 10, Pacific 10, the University of Notre Dame, and the Southeastern Conferences in order to form the Bowl Championship Series, with Conference USA signing up the Agreement as well. What is important is that the Bowl Championship Series has effectively managed to work out a system that would counter the haphazard selection processes that were the rote until the early 1990's, when some Bowls would make their selections after perhaps seven or eight games.

According to this system today, the selection process can be completed at the end of the season, and this would in turn result in better match ups. What this means is that for the very first time in football history in the United States of America, the Bowl Agreements have opened up more, so that the final result would be that there would definitely be more excitement about college Football than there ever was before. Traditional as well as regional factors are taken into consideration for the first time as well, during the selection process initiated by the Bowl Championship Series, and this means that the four Bowl Championship Series Champions would be able to host the following host champions in the years that the national championships are not being played on their sites. (About the BCS: Bowl Championship Series)

However, the important question to be asked at this point is whether or not the Bowl Championship Series is the best idea for post season play. According to Dave Frohnmayer, the President of the University of Oregon, the primary intention of initiating this Bowl Championship Series was so that the entire group may be able to achieve a better understanding and a comprehension of the various mutual concerns, and also to have a better chance at attempting to improve post season play. There was in fact, intense concern and debate among the media personnel and also among others, about whether this access to post season play was indeed appropriate, and also whether this would be ideal for post season championship opportunities, and also what exactly it means to play a championship game. (September 8 Post-Meeting Press Conference Transcript: Bowl Championship Series)

Today, this is a raging debate, and there has been conflict created by the desire to stage National Championship Games of football between the best teams of the season, when as a matter of fact, there are no real conventional play off systems that would be able to decide which those teams would be. Today, ranking of teams is based on their records of wins and losses during the season, but at the same time, it must be remembered that each team plays only a small fraction of eligible opponents for the game. This makes today's system both complex and contradictory, as well as under determined, and not really worth following. In the United States of America, Inter-university football games are a huge business, and these games are more often than not given wide coverage on national television, and they are watched avidly by fans of the game.

However, strangely enough, there is no real national championship for college football, as compared to sports like soccer and basketball, and the reason for this may be that the game is most often played in the so called 'conferences', which are nothing but groups of a dozen or more colleges, chosen on the basis of their geographic locations across the nation, and in one typical season, about 75% of the games are played among the teams that belong to the same conference. What this would entail is that there would be an undisputed and unrivalled champion for each conference, but at the same time, not many overall games would be played between conferences so that there may be an unambiguous winner of all the numerous conferences. In some sports, played on the basis of the conference system, an overall champion would be ultimately chosen through the playing of a separate knock out tournament that would be organized among the various winners and the runner ups of the individual conferences.

In college football, however, perhaps due to certain traditional or historical reasons, there is no such post season tournament held. The fans of the game have been demanding a true National Championship for the game, and this was why several of the major conferences have today adopted the Bowl Championship Series System, wherein one of the four existing Bowl Games, as mentioned earlier, namely the Rose, the Fiesta, the Sugar, and the Orange would be designated the national championship game on a rotational basis. This would be able to effectively match up the top two teams of the so called 'regular season', which in the year 2004 was the Orange Bowl, while in the year 2005 it would be the Rose Bowl. However, the main problem even today is the manner in which to decide which the top teams really are. (A Network-Based ranking system for U.S. College Football)

What, for instance would happen if there were three undefeated teams; one would not be able to simply choose one undefeated team and declare them champions. A playoff would of course be bale to determine the ruling champions, but if there were for example, three undefeated teams, then how would one playoff and settle the score? Two of the three would probably have to play against another undefeated team, and this means that it would also have to play twice to win it, while the third team would get to play against a possibly lesser team, with one single loss. This brings another issue to the forefront, which is, why shouldn't one loss teams be regarded as the undefeated teams, and why shouldn't these teams have an equal shot as the other teams at the Championship? Perhaps the real and true problem may not be the playoff system, or the Bowl Championship Series, but the fact that there are in fact more than 116 Division 1- A schools taking part in the college football championships, and the very scope of college football is so very large and enormous that it is extremely difficult for anyone to be able to narrow it down to either two, or four, or even eight best teams who would deserve to play for the championship above the others. (Bowl Championship Series... The Final Word)

It is the general opinion today that most probably, certain Math Majors, with too much time on their hands, must have come up with the appropriate solution to the various problems regarding college football as detailed above, and this was exactly how the Bowl Championship Series must have been formulated and developed. The Bowl Championship is today responsible for the selection of the participants of the game from the Orange, Sugar, Rose and the Fiesta Bowls, and each year, one of these teams would be able to host the National Championship Game. The game participants would be the two top teams according to the polls conducted by the Bowl Championship series. It must be mentioned at this point that the original polls which were used until the 2004 to 2005 season, used certain criterion like for example, the team's average, the team's computer ranking average, its schedule rank, its number of losses, and also a quality win component. This sort of tough as nails formula would make sure that the teams would be prepared to play much harder and tougher games and compete more aggressively, with relatively more pressure on them to win.