by Mark Schwartz

Created on: July 01, 2009

College football is a great sport, but the way the national champion is determined has always been the subject of much scrutiny and debate. In a sport where teams play 12 regular-season games, and there are over 100 teams, it is not feasible to do the fairest thing of all, which is to have each team play each other team (even pro football doesn't do this). As a result, the best system for crowning the national championship will still be an unfair system in some ways. The current system, the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) is a fair system.

The BCS is fair to the main group of schools that formed it. These schools from the six major conferences (Big East, ACC, SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, and Pac 10) are given a fair chance to play for the national championship if they win all their games and, by extension, their conference championship. They are also given a share of the BCS revenue, even if they don't appear in a BCS game. The BCS is a huge improvement over the previous system, which rewarded individual conferences with their champion's pre-determined bowl games, but often prevented the two best teams in the nation from competing on the field in a championship game. The BCS has simply given some central control to this process, and ensured that bowl matchups allow for top ranked teams to meet in bowl games. Again, there is always going to be a certain amount of unfairness inherent in the process, and the BCS is the fairest system that has ever been used.

What about the teams from non-BCS conferences? Isn't the BCS system unfair to them? For the most part, the champions from the six BCS conferences are those most likely to be championship-caliber teams. There are occasionally teams outside of the BCS conferences good enough to compete for the championship, and those teams are given consideration and not automatically excluded by the BCS process. The largest portion of the BCS championship formula is the human polls, and those polls are what typically exclude these non-BCS conference teams from championship game appearances, not the system itself. If the majority of sportswriters thought that a non-BCS conference team was one of the best in the country, it is likely they would end up in the championship game. Aside from an appearance in the championship game, the BCS is fair to the non-BCS conference teams in terms of revenue. Before the BCS was formed, these non-BCS conference teams would have had no realistic shot to play in a major bowl and therefore get a multi-million dollar major bowl payout. While it is true that the BCS generates a lot of money for BCS conference teams, it also generates money for non-BCS conference teams.

What about the recent controversies over the BCS system? Most of those controversies come when there are more than two teams with a legitimate claim to a championship game appearance. This doesn't always happen. When it does, no system would be able to fix that problem perfectly. If a plus-one format of an extra game after the bowls games was used, the 3rd team who didn't get invited to that game would have a legitimate gripe. Same for the 5th team in a four-team playoff, and the 9th team in an eight-team playoff. The BCS recognizes these challenges, and is continually tweaking the system to help please the greatest number of fans.

No system is or ever will be perfect, but the BCS is a fair and highly successful system that has improved college football and greatly increased its popularity in recent years.

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