The only thing worse than leaving the destiny of your football team up to a bunch of sportswriters and coaches, is to leave your destiny up to a bunch of computers. The Bowl Championship Series, or BCS, was created to have the first and second placed teams play each other at the end of the season to see who the real national champion is. Granted, it does match up the two top-ranked teams. However, there is still a wide margin for error and this system has been opposed by many critics. I, along with many other college football fans, would like to see the NCAA move to a playoff system to determine the national champion at the end of the season.
Under the Bowl Coalition and the Bowl Alliance, the two systems that were in place before the BCS, the winners of designated conferences would be obligated to play in certain bowls. A good example of this would be in 1997 when the Michigan Wolverines, who are from the Big Ten conference, played in the Rose Bowl and the Nebraska Cornhuskers, from the Big Twelve, played in the Orange Bowl. These teams played in separate bowls, and not against each other, because of alliances that their conferences had with these bowls. The result, as Tim Layden cleverly states, is that "the officials called for a measurement, trotted out the chains and, you bet: It was one game short." .
The two top-ranked teams in the polls never even got a chance to play one another and the national championship was left to the voters in the associated press and the coaches" polls. Well, Michigan won the media poll and Nebraska won the coaches" poll, resulting in a split championship. What a shame.
In 1998, after much criticism, the NCAA adopted a new form of ranking system, the BCS, that is "made up of four components: the average of the two traditional polls (writers" and coaches"); the average of eight different computer polls (two of which were replaced because they relied too heavily on margin of victory); strength of schedule (based on the opponent's final record, not at the time the teams played), and number of losses.
