The Bowl Championship Series has done its share of spitting and sputtering since Southeastern Conference Commissioner Roy Kramer and his cohorts began it six seasons ago.
But was the method used in the past to determine college football’s national champion any better–or a lot worse?
Trying to find a solution to a less-than-perfect system that previously relied strictly on human votes, and therefore human bias, the BCS began employing outside computers. Resembling the kind used for college basketball’s equally infamous RPI (Ratings Percentage Index), they did much of its dirty work.
The BCS went a step further than the Bowl Alliance or the Bowl Coalition, which had been established in 1992 to give five major conferences–the Big East, Big Eight, Atlantic Coast, Southeastern and Southwest–as well as Notre Dame tie-ins to four major bowls: the Orange, Sugar, Fiesta and Cotton.
Seven outside computers were brought in to balance the prejudices of the Associated Press poll of writers and broadcasters and the ESPN/USA Today poll of coaches. Variables such as strength of schedule and opponents’ strength of schedule, number of losses and quality wins are now factored into the equation.
The result: For the third time in the last four years, there is an uproar about the matchup in the BCS championship game. And for first time, the team ranked No. 1 in the human polls did not go. Southern Cal whipped No. 4 Michigan 28-14 in the Rose Bowl instead.
But from the relatively safe distance of his lakefront retirement home in Tennessee, Kramer said he and the other conference commissioners who came up with the BCS formula accomplished nearly everything they set out to do.
– They wanted to create more interest in the regular season.
Would anybody have cared about end-of-season games between Hawaii and Boise State or Notre Dame and Syracuse had they not affected the national championship picture, helping LSU leapfrog over USC? Would fans in Baton Rouge find friends with satellite dishes to watch the Trojans play Oregon State?
“I think it has been enormously successful because it has added a whole new flavor of life, so to speak,” Kramer said. “I don’t know what the call-in shows would have done without it. People in California are interested in what happened in Oklahoma, and people in Louisiana are interested in what happened in California. It’s had a kind of nationalization effect.”
– They also wanted to preserve the traditional bowl structure.
“One of the things that had happened was that the bowls had gotten so competitive that we were making choices for the bowls in mid-October,” Kramer said. “One of the things we wanted to do was to slow down that process by creating a system that would select the four major bowls, and the other bowls would have to wait.”
– Lastly, they wanted to set up the possibility of a true national championship game.
“When we started this, we were going to use the two [human] polls, but the people at Associated Press and the football writers came to us and said they wanted to cover the news, not create the news,” Kramer said. “They wanted to be a factor in it, but they didn’t want to be the sole factor. We didn’t want to go with one poll, the coaches’ poll. We thought we’d have some philosophical problems.”
Kramer and the commissioners of the other three leagues that made up the original Bowl Coalition–the SEC, Big East, ACC and Big 12–were joined in full partnership by the Big Ten and the Pac-10 in 1998. They understood that the new formula, like the old one, was potentially flawed.
“We all realized we could have a dispute or a controversy, perhaps co-champions,” Kramer said. “From a personal standpoint, I don’t think that’s all bad. Two hundred guys get a ring instead of 100 guys. Maybe that’s what college athletics should be about. We’ve had co-champions before.”
Having co-champions always produced some type of discussion, but nothing like the avalanche of vitriol that has occurred in the last month.
“When we had it back 10 or 12 years ago, or maybe 15 years ago, we just didn’t have all those mediums to talk about it constantly,” said Keith Tribble, executive director of the Orange Bowl. “People talked about it and then it was over. Now you’ve got chat rooms, sports talk radio, all sorts of things. It just keeps perpetuating itself.”
The last time there were co-champions was in 1997, when top-ranked Michigan played No. 8 Washington in the Rose Bowl and No. 2 Nebraska met No. 3 Tennessee in the Orange Bowl. The Wolverines won a close game 21-16, and the Cornhuskers blew out the Volunteers 42-17.
The writers and broadcasters voted Michigan as the nation’s top team, but the coaches went for Nebraska. The Bowl Alliance, like the Bowl Coalition, would become history.
