BCS Has Again Avoided Uproar

Everything seems simple this morning. So neat and tidy. Oklahoma won the Orange Bowl.

That means the Sooners are undefeated and undisputed as college football’s national champions. No ifs, ands or buts.

And that means the controversial bowl championship series has dodged a bullet.

Consider the possibilities had Oklahoma lost.

Florida State would be 12-1 and crowned the BCS champion. But Miami, with one loss, would probably be voted No. 1 in the Associated Press media poll.

There would be cries of protest from Washington, yet another one-loss team, which defeated Miami earlier this season.

In other words, there might have been the kind of mess the BCS was designed to avoid.

The series was born three years ago in an attempt to guarantee an undisputed champion without creating a playoff or dismantling the long-standing network of bowl games.

In the inaugural season, top-ranked Tennessee defeated Florida State to win the title. Last season, the top-ranked Seminoles defeated Virginia Tech and were widely regarded as the best team.

Even so, there were misgivings about the way the BCS determined its top teams.

The series takes a variety of factors into account, encompassing no less than two polls, eight computer rankings, strength of schedule and won-loss records. That requires pumping a raft of numbers into a formula that reads like stereo instructions.

There is much adding and dividing, weighting and averaging of numbers. At one point, low scores are thrown out, as if it were a figure skating competition.

Despite all the math, coaches still complain the process is subjective.

“Until we want to do things differently, it’s going to be arbitrary,” Washington’s Rick Neuheisel said. “West Coast guys believe there is an East Coast bias.”

The root of this controversy traces back to a Raleigh, N.C., hotel room where, in the spring of 1992, a group of college football officials huddled together and conjured a new way to handle postseason play.

There was some unrest in the game back then. Rarely did the first- and second-ranked teams meet in a bowl. Split champions were too common for some peoples’ tastes.

At the same time, some bowl executives--battling for the most-attractive matchups--were trying to get the jump on each other by extending bids a month before the end of the regular season.

So cooler heads devised the bowl coalition, a rudimentary arrangement that involved a limited number of conferences and bowl games. It was the first attempt to match the highest ranked teams at season’s end.

The Pacific 10 and Big Ten did not buy in, however, continuing to send their best teams to the Rose Bowl each Jan. 1.

The coalition lasted three years, until 1995, at which point it was replaced by the bowl alliance. This new agreement allowed for two at-large berths and did away with the time-honored arrangements that many bowls had with particular conferences, giving the alliance more freedom to mix and match teams in the postseason.

But, again, the Pac-10 and Big Ten champions stuck with the Rose Bowl.

It wasn’t until 1999 that the Rose Bowl entered the fold, joining the new BCS. The title game now rotates between the Sugar, Orange, Fiesta and Rose bowls.

The BCS is expected to remain in place through January 2006, at least until the expiration of ABC’s $400-million contract to televise its postseason games.

That might be enough time for the odds to finally catch up with the series. The potential for split champions and more controversy is something that some in the game seem to accept.

“It’s probably the best we can hope for,” Purdue Coach Joe Tiller said of the current system. “The best possible solution to getting a national champion without a playoff.”