Since 1998, the Bowl Championship Series, better known as the BCS, has been a staple of college football for better or for worse. The BCS is designed to give the top two teams in Division I college football an opportunity to play for a national championship game through a system that calculates a team’s ranking in the AP and ESPN Coaches poll, an average ranking of the best six of seven computer polls, the number of losses, the strength of schedule factor and the quality wins factor (Bowl Championship). Despite its seemingly simplistic formula, the BCS is not always fair and accurate; every year since 2005, at least one undefeated team has failed to make it to the BCS National Championship Game. Additionally, in three of those four years, at least one of the teams in the national championship game had either one or two losses. The BCS has been under debate since its inception and congressional hearings, most recently in 2003, have been held to question the system’s integrity and justice.
Of the ten BCS bowl games, six teams are automatically given a bid to one of those bowls for winning their conferences from the following leagues: ACC, SEC, Pac-10, Big 12, Big East and Big 10. This leaves just four other teams to fill the voids in any of the five games. Since the inception of the BCS system in 1998, of the 57 games that have been played (a total of 114 possible teams), only ten times has a team come out of a league outside of one of the automatic six conferences: Notre Dame with three appearances out of the Independent League, Utah and TCU each twice out of the Mountain West Conference and Boise State twice and Hawaii once out of the Western Athletic Conference. Clearly there has been a significant discrepancy between the allocation of teams to BCS games over the past twelve years.
Through computer and human rankings, the BCS National Championship Game is always between the two teams ranked first and second at the end of the regular season in the BCS standings. Many conferences are put at an unfair advantage, because of the discrepancies within the BCS system and its ranking of teams. The one major flaw in the structure of the BCS is the fact that it ignores several conferences, such as the WAC, MWC, Conference USA and the Independent League.
