Seeing Double in Bowl Plans

College football leaders Thursday formally unveiled a postseason plan they are calling “double hosting” but could have been dubbed “Noah’s Ark” because it involves two of everything.

Two Rose Bowls, two Fiestas, two Oranges and two lumps of Sugar, please, every four years.

Well, sort of.

Confusing?

The world has come to expect nothing less from the bowl championship series.

Conceiving a system in which each of the major bowls will host two games every fourth year, its own annual game and then a BCS national title game about a week later, might even have been the easy part.

Details remain to be resolved, however, before tickets can go on sale for the 2010 Rose Bowl and the 2010, um, Rose Bowl?

“There are just a myriad of logistical issues,” Rose Bowl Chief Executive Mitch Dorger said Thursday, “but they’re all workable.”

How we got here: Last February, college presidents approved a plan to add a fifth BCS game to the national title mix, opening two additional “at large” bowl positions.

This satisfied the needs of the five major football-playing conferences not in the BCS, which had threatened antitrust action unless the six-conference BCS became more inclusive.

As many as 12 bowls, including the Gator, Cotton and Peach, clamored to become the fifth BCS bowl but, in what might be called an end-around, the BCS commissioners chose not to add another bowl game to the rotation, in part because the original four BCS bowls wanted to keep the national-title rotation at every four years, not five.

Instead, they chose “double hosting.”

In this plan, each BCS bowl will present two bowl games every fourth year -- thus opening the two additional at-large slots each season.

A so-called “non-BCS” school will receive an automatic BCS bid if it finishes 12th or better in the final BCS standings.

The new format, assuming it can be sold to the TV networks -- indications are that it can -- will go into effect after the 2006 regular season.

Two years remain on the BCS’ original contract with ABC, but the Rose Bowl needed at least the framework of a new plan before it began new contract talks with ABC, starting today.

Dorger said the “double hosting” plan was better than the current BCS arrangement: “We believe it is more traditional.”

The Rose Bowl joined the BCS in 1998 to help college football more easily determine its national champion.

Before 1998, a first- or second-ranked champion from the Pac-10 or Big Ten was bound to the Rose Bowl and could not be released to another bowl.

In joining the BCS, however, the Rose Bowl lost some autonomy and, many would say, some of its luster.

In 2002, the bowl was the site of the national title game between Miami and Nebraska on Jan. 3, two days after the Rose Parade, on a Thursday night.

In the new arrangement, the Rose Bowl will return to its traditional Jan. 1 slot -- Jan. 2 if Jan. 1 falls on a Sunday -- and its Pac-10/Big Ten tether will remain largely intact.

There were concerns among the other BCS bowls that the Rose Bowl was getting too good a deal, in that it was less likely to have to take a “non-BCS” school in some years.

In this case, though, there weren’t many options.

“The Rose Bowl is the only bowl in the system that has two conferences as partners,” incoming BCS coordinator Kevin Weiberg said on a conference call Thursday. “It is a close-ended bowl. So the challenge with this model was figuring out how to work around that in a way that respected the history and tradition of the Rose Bowl.”

To make the deal work, the Rose Bowl agreed to take a non-BCS team in what Dorger said were “certain scenarios.”

Dorger said he was confident his bowl could put on two games, one week apart, although he acknowledged there was much to be resolved.

“There are staffing issues, scheduling issues,” he said. “What would happen if you have some team for a national championship game come out here early? There has to be some limitations on who can come when and how long they can stay. How do you get the turf on the field taken care of?”

Under terms of the present contract, the Rose Bowl will have the BCS national title game after the 2005 season. Dorger assumes the Rose Bowl’s next turn in the rotation would come up after the 2009 season, in which case his Rose Bowl staff has six years to work out the logistics of presenting two games in one week in January 2010.

Weiberg said the bowl rotation order in the next contract had not been determined.

Also at issue is “branding.”

How different will the Rose Bowl game be marketed from the Rose Bowl’s national title game?

“Those scenarios still need to be worked out,” Dorger said.

In all likelihood, BCS commissioners will try to separate the national title game from the host bowl game in marketing and presentation, although Dorger noted that the national title game every four years would still be at the Rose Bowl.

“We’ve said that we sort of don’t want to totally destroy our image,” Dorger said. “The fact is, when we put a game on, it has a certain look.”

No one said grinding out a new BCS future was going to be easy.

Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer, chairman of the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee, might have summed it up best when he said, “This is a progress report on a work in progress.”