5 Random Things About the Bowl Championship Series (BCS)

Personally, I’m a fan of the college football bowl system, as you can see on my diatribe on the non-necessity of a playoff. Of course, this might have something to do with the BCS being so kind to my favorite school, but let’s not digress. For all of the complaints about the Bowl Championship Series, it is a far-sight better than it’s predecessors: chaotic randomness (pre-1992), the Bowl Coalition(1992-1995), and the Bowl Alliance (1995-1998). You see, before the BCS there was an extraordinary amount of controversy with certain conferences not being invited to prestigious bowls, multiple national champions in any given year, the #1 team NOT playing the #2 team in a bowl, and more. It really was a mess, and while the BCS isn’t perfect, at least it has brought some semblance of order to the college football landscape. So, in honor of the progress that college football has made, here are 5 random things about the BCS.

1. The concept of having a unified system of bowl games is actually fairly new. Prior to 1992, every bowl was determined based on conference tie-ins, and not based on trying to pit the best teams against each other. Those conditions led to co-national champions on multiple occasions, coming to a head in 1990 and 1991. Hence, the Bowl Coalition was born, a collection of five conferences and six bowl games. However, it was limiting in that it did not include the Big Ten, the Pac-10, or the Rose Bowl. After not really solving anything, the Bowl Coalition was scrapped in favor of the Bowl Alliance, which added a few more bowls, but still suffered from excluding the other conferences and the Rose Bowl. Finally, the Bowl Championship Series was born in 1998, and it solved the problems listed above: all of the major conferences were included, multiple at-large teams were included, and the Rose Bowl (the Granddaddy of Them All) was included.
2. Just how are teams selected for inclusion in the BCS?
   • The top two teams are guaranteed a slot in the national championship game, and will play each other.
   • The champions of the following conferences get an automatic berth in a BCS bowl: ACC, Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, Pac-10, and SEC.
   • The highest ranked champion outside of the above conferences gets an automatic bid if they are ranked in the top 12 (or the top 16 if they are ranked higher than a champion from one of the above conferences).
   • No more than one team each from the following conferences will make it in any given season: Conference USA, the Mid-American Conference, the Mountain West Conference, the Sun Belt Conference, and the Western Athletic Conference.
   • Since Notre Dame is independent, they gain an automatic bid if they’re ranked in the top eight.
   • The third-ranked team is guaranteed an automatic bid in a BCS bowl if they haven’t already earned it based on the rules above. If that doesn’t apply to them, this provision falls to the fourth-ranked team.
3. Confused yet? There’s even more rules and provisions that apply, but those are the most prominent ones. The BCS rankings are actually determined using a convoluted set of human and computer rankings to determine the overall BCS ranking. I won’t get into that here, suffice it to say, that maybe it does pay to be a math major. One of the benefits of the BCS, though, has been the way in which the rules and guidelines have changed over the years. Each year, if some aspect of the system doesn’t work, it gets scrapped or tweaked. For example, the BCS included the AP poll until the AP voted against the BCS and chose a different national champion in 2004. Also, teams used to get rewarded for beating higher ranked teams during the season, but this was scrapped because of the obvious preference given to the BCS power conferences.
4. The SEC is the most dominant conference in the BCS. Since the inception of the BCS, the SEC has a record of 13-5 in BCS bowls (a winning percentage of .722), and has been to the national championship game 5 times, winning every time. (Here’s hoping Alabama keeps up the trend.)
5. Who’s the most dominant team in BCS history? Well, that’s hard to say, and here’s why:
   • Several teams are undefeated, but this includes teams that have only appeared in one BCS bowl. The team with the most BCS bowl appearances without a loss, though, is LSU, with four.
   • LSU and Florida are the only two schools in history to win two BCS national championships each.
   • Ohio State has been to eight BCS bowls, the most of any school, but they have a record of 5-3, including losses in the 2007 and 2008 national championship games.
   • USC has the most wins in BCS bowls, with six. USC’s only loss in a BCS bowl was the 2006 Rose Bowl against Texas, one of the best bowl games in history:
     

Bonus: The bowls that make up the BCS are the Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and National Championship Game.

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