With the Oregon and Ohio State championship game over and Ohio State the new champions, you may be wondering why there had to be a second game for these two teams anyway. Why weren’t the two top teams in the country, Alabama and Florida State, automatically set to play in the BCS Championship game? In fact, why didn’t they call the championship the BCS Championship Game? What’s going on?
What’s happening is that the BCS Championship game doesn’t exist anymore, because the BCS format doesn’t exist anymore. The BCS, or Bowl Championship Series, was the third format used to select the teams that played in bowl games and to determine which two teams would play in the BCS National Championship. It was used from 1998 to 2013, and succeeded the Bowl Alliance, which was another selection format that existed for two years and was preceded by the Bowl Coalition, which also lasted two years. Judging by the fact that the BCS existed 15 years, you can tell that it was far more successful than the previous two formats, but after 15 years, people objected to many of the methods used to deliberate the teams playing in bowl games, which is what the CFP, or College Football Playoff, is striving to change.
The BCS selected teams using a combination of polls and computer selection methods to select the teams, and certain teams were given instant tickets to BCS bowl games depending on whether their conference automatically qualifies and on their national ranks.
Before continuing with how the selection process worked, I want to go over the difference between bowl games and BCS bowl games, and I want to explain what it means to be an automatically qualifying conference. First of all, there are 39 bowl games that are invitational games for teams that are good enough, but there were 4 bowl games that were considered to be “BCS bowl games.” This distinction was significant because, for the first 8 seasons of the BCS, the championship game would be one of those bowl games. The championship game would rotate through the four bowl games every season, so in 2002, the championship was the Rose Bowl, the 2003 championship game was the Fiesta Bowl, the 2004 championship game was the Sugar Bowl, and the 2004 championship game was the Orange Bowl.
However, after 2006, the championship became a separate game, and the BCS bowl games are just high level bowl games. Also, to qualify for these bowl games, you needed to be high ranked, and you needed to be in a AQ, automatically qualifying, conference. The automatically qualifying conferences are the Pac-12, the Big 10, the SEC, the Big 12, the ACC, and the Big East conference. The reason that these bowls are called automatically qualifying conferences is that the champions of each of these conferences was given an instant ticket to one of the 5 or 6 bowl games. In fact, even though all 11 conferences are said to be equal, a top 25 ranked team from a non AQ conference will not have a bowl game berth unless they are ranked in the top 12 or if they are ranked in the top 16 and are ranked higher than a champion of an AQ conference. However, this does not secure them a spot in a bowl, because most non-AQ conference teams would only play in bowl games if the champions of AQ conferences were in the championship game. Luckily, the championship game was apparently exempt from this, because the top two teams in the country will be in the championship regardless of conference. It relies only on ranking.
This is how the BCS functions, but people had issues with how the computer aggregates decide how the rankings stand, because they feel that a formula shouldn’t be used to say that certain teams are better than others. People also despised how the bowl games were tied to certain conferences, so bowl games, which are supposed to be special exhibition matches, would have predictable matchups, and capable and deserving teams from “lesser” conferences can’t play. Finally, people say that a playoff system would be more useful in determining which two teams can play in the national championship, because a formula can’t prove how good a team is on the field.
The CFP strives to change some of these issues by destroying the notion of AQ conferences, so all teams have a chance to play in a CFP bowl game if they are skilled enough. However, this means that powerhouse conferences like the SEC could have more than one team in the playoffs or playing in major bowl, because there are no conference restrictions. The CFP also has a much simpler ranking process, because the official College Football Playoff rankings are not made by a combination of polls, but instead by a special committee made of 13 people, and these people don’t need to necessarily to have past experience with football. For example, Condoleezza Rice, the former Secretary of State, is on the committee, as is the retired Lieutenant General Mike Gould. However, there are plenty of college football legends on this committee, such as Archie Manning and Tom Osborne, and that is why this is the committee dealing with the task of ranking the Top 25 teams in the country every Tuesday and choosing which teams participate in the CFP. They rank the top 25 teams by looking at how many championships the team has won, what the strength of their schedule is, what their head-to-head competition would be like, what their win-loss record is for the season, and their bowl game history.
This selection committee resolves some of the problems the BCS had, but they also have the opportunity to raise new problems. With the BCS, every game factored into your ranking and was vital to being a bowl contender, but now the selection committee is in charge of that, so a undefeated team may be passed over for a team with only one or two losses, which doesn’t seem so bad if you take the schedule strength of the teams into mind, but the BCS still valued individual games more. The BCS also made sure that one conference would never dominate the bowl game and championship scene, be it the Big 10, ACC, SEC, PAC 12, and all the others. However, the BCS also had stupid conference restrictions and the existence of AQ conferences, which nullifies that pro. The BCS also had the rankings and championship teams decided by computers, which was the only reason individual games had so much weight, and while computers are smart, they don’t understand football the way coaches, former players, and fans do, which is why the committee exists.
Finally, the CFP has potential for great underdog stories, as shown by the 2014 Ohio State Buckeyes team. They came into the season with their star quarterback, Braxton Miller, injuring his shoulder and put out of commision for the entire season, and things didn’t look too good for J.T Barrett, the second-string quarterback, after the loss to Virginia Tech, but the Buckeyes rebounded and won every other game in the season, including a hard-fought double overtime against Penn State. J.T Barrett ended up setting many Buckeye and Big Ten records, and when he was injured in the last game of the Buckeyes’ regular season, Cardale Jones, the third string quarterback, came in and led OSU to win three games, including the CFP National Championship Game. The Bucks came into the playoffs as the undeserved underdog, as many people believed that TCU or Baylor deserved the 4th playoff spot. However, this young, inexperienced, OSU team has proven themselves, and this story would have never happened with the BCS. The CFP will surprise us, and it will give us playoffs based off skill, and teams will be judged by experienced football experts, instead of computers. We are in for a golden age of college football.