by Zach Bigalke

Created on: January 08, 2009

The Bowl Championship Series was the culmination of several efforts through the 1990s to bring together the top teams from across the nation to the biggest bowl games. Coming on the heels of the Bowl Coalition (1992-1994) and the Bowl Alliance (1995-1997), the BCS emerged in 1998 as the widest-ranging attempt to date to determine a national champion in college football. The history of college football is one of multiple dominant teams being sorted out by a poll of experts - whether sportswriters, coaches or a computer tabulating the results of each contest. The NCAA, born out of an effort to restrict encroaching professionalism in collegiate football following the MacCracken conferences of nearly sixty universities in 1905-1906, has never officially crowned a champion in Division I-A football... and thus the BCS is only the most recent step in attempting to determine the top teams at the end of the season.

The BCS is the most wide-reaching attempt to unite the traditionally strongest six Division I-A conferences with the top four bowl games. Traditionally, conferences have locked in guaranteed bids to bowl games. For instance, the Rose Bowl since 1947 has contractually matched the Pac-10 champion with the Big Ten champion. While this has inevitably led to exciting contests, it has not always led to there being a clear-cut number one team at the end of the season. Following the 1991 season, when the Miami Hurricanes and Washington Huskies split the AP and Coaches Polls for the de facto national crown, the Bowl Coalition united five power conferences (minus both the Big Ten and Pac-10) in an effort to force a final matchup between the number-one and number-two teams in the polls and allow a champion to be determined on the field. As conferences consolidated and expanded through the end of the century, the Coalition gave way to a new configuration in the Bowl Alliance. But without two of the biggest conferences in the fold, the Alliance suffered the same lack of legitimacy which plagued the Coalition.

Starting in 1998, the Rose Bowl, Big Ten and Pac-10 acquiesced, agreeing to release either conference champion to another bowl if they qualified as one of the top two teams to play for the crystal football. That first season, six conferences - the Pac-10, Big Ten, SEC, ACC, Big XII and Big East - received automatic bids to play in the Rose, Sugar, Fiesta and Orange Bowls. Utilizing a formula encompassing the AP and ESPN/USA Today Polls, three computer ranking systems

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