As another college football season winds down, the now seemingly annual dispute of what is wrong the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) standings begins to heat up.
If you are not familiar with how the championship system works, every “major” conference winner in Division I (FBS) automatically receives a berth to a BCS bowl game, which is a bowl game that has prestige and not some low-tier game sponsored by some car insurance company that nobody even knew existed.
The conferences that clinch automatic bids include the Pacific-10, South Eastern, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12 and the Atlantic Coast conferences. The rankings are determined by typing in the records of each team, but then adding factors like strength of schedule, score differential of wins and a whole bunch of meaningless garbage.
At the end of the season, the first two teams atop the standings at the end of the year are given invitations to the BCS National Championship game.
However, every year some non-major bowl team, such as the University of Utah, Boise State and this year’s favorite potential snub Texas Christian University, are left out of the chance to become the champions of football — even if they finish the season undefeated.
It wasn’t until after moving to Utah from the grand bias of the East coast that I realized the people around here view the BCS as much more than a four-letter cuss word. In fact, I’m considering re-enacting the famous bar of soap scene from A Christmas Story just for writing the acronym BCS over and over again.
The sad truth is that my hometown of Rochester, N.Y., is just over an hour’s drive away from Syracuse University, which has turned from a football powerhouse to the laughing stock of FBS football within the past decade.
Nevertheless, if Syracuse miraculously won the Big East conference, they would have a spot in a BCS bowl game and score major recruiting points to build the success for the future.
A team like Utah, on the other hand, would have to finish 11-0 in the much tougher Mountain West conference — which was the case last season.
Yet the smaller conferences that have broken into a BCS bowl game (Mountain West and Western Athletic) are 3-1 in such games.
Boise State and Utah have crashed the hopes and dreams of such major programs as Alabama, Oklahoma and Pittsburgh since 2005.
The most recent BCS standings released Sunday place TCU at no. 4 and Boise State at no. 6, while Cincinnati (a major conference team) splits them apart at the no. 5 position.
If all three schools finish undefeated, Cincinnati would most likely leap-frog TCU because they would have a “stronger” schedule than the Horned Frogs.
This has angered fans of each of these non-BCS colleges for the last five years or so and that anger will continue into future.
However, the truth is TCU and Boise State, which are in prime positions to shake the BCS permanently, will never have a chance to play in the BCS championship game until the system is fixed.
Utah didn’t win the championship last year because the BCS is flawed. Championships should go to the undefeated, no matter whom they play throughout the course of a season and not because some computer said they were the best team in America.
The computer says the SEC is the best conference in NCAA, but the SEC teams refuse to schedule a team such as Boise State because they want to field a team in the title game and not have to settle for the second-or-third-best bowl game. Boise State has made several attempts recently to schedule teams like Florida in its season to boost its chances for an at-large bid and a national title.
The demands by Boise State: one game, one chance, we’ll travel to your school and you won’t be obligated to travel to our infamous blue-turf field later on. The demands have fallen on deaf ears and the team will have to settle with poor out-of-conference games, which have been the reason they have missed the title games before, until someone actually gains enough courage to play them.
The BCS is a waste of time and money in trying to prove who the real football champion is and, until it is fixed, it will always be a joke. Computers shouldn’t tell us who the best teams are, winners tell us that. If another team wins a championship on some lame computer technicality, then there’s no point in having a national champion if they aren’t the best.
There is no point in naming a champion if only a select few schools have a chance to win it — it’s just common sense. Make a playoff system, much like the FCS and all other forms of college football so this debate will not have to linger and the complaints won’t have to be heard over-and-over again.
Carter Williams is a general assignments reporter for the University Journal he can be reached at cwilliams@suujournal.com
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