by Quentin Morris

Created on: December 04, 2008   Last Updated: December 10, 2008

The Bowl Championship Series, or BCS, is one of the most controversial rule changes to be brought into college football in recent years. The BCS standings are designed to make sure that the top two teams always play each other for the national championship, so that if there are two teams which are clearly above the rest they don't end up playing in different bowl games. In this case, if they both won, voters decided the championship. Now one has to win fair and square.

Understanding this system, however, is far from easy. The BCS uses a complicated formula to rank the college football teams. Firstly, the formula takes into account media polls (The Harris Interactive Poll) and coaches' polls (The USA Today Coaches' Poll). In the Harris Interactive Poll, the voting points that a team is awarded are divided by a maximum possible 2850 points, while in the coaches' polls the voting points are divided by a maximum possible 1575 points, to establish the rankings.

Computerized rankings are also used, which can establish such important factors as the difficulty of a team's schedule. In the computerized rankings, made up of six individual calculations, points are given to each team. 25 points are awarded to the top team, 24 point for the second place team and so on down the table. The best and worst ranking of each team are discarded, leaving four rankings. These are added up and divided by 100, the maximum points available, to determine where each team is in the table. This is called the Computer Rankings Percentage.

Finally, the BCS standings are calculated by taking the average of the Harris Interactive Poll, the USA Today Coaches' Poll and the Computer Rankings Percentage. Each of these components counts as one third of the final BCS poll. The team with the highest average ranks top of the table. The BCS standings are then used to select the teams that will participate in the national championship game. It is also used to establish any other automatic qualifiers for the game and, if there are too few teams, a larger selection pool. BCS standing are released eight times each season.

The BCS standings remain unpopular due to their complicated rankings procedure. Until more transparency is introduced into the way the calculations are made, the BCS will continue to create controversy in the world of college football.

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