Weekly Affirmation: The BCS Decade That Was

The Bowl Championship Series is twelve years old, but it has finally seen the completion of its first calendar decade. We'll see if the system is renewed when it comes up for re-examination in 2014, but for now - with fresh wounds being absorbed in Fort Worth, Tex., and Cincinnati, Ohio - it's worth recalling a just-ended decade of college football tragicomedy.

By Matthew Zemek
 
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Ways to Shaft College Football Teams and Fans: The Damage the BCS Can Do In Ten Years

2000: The BCS ignores the head-to-head between Florida State and Miami. Hmmmm... just like the head-to-head in 2001 between Nebraska and Colorado. Just like the 1993 head-to-head between Florida State and Notre Dame. Just like the 2008 head-to-head between Texas and Oklahoma. Just like the 1978 head-to-head between USC and Alabama. See, everyone? The BCS - inside its own era or beyond it - has clearly addressed and solved the issues that have plagued college football ever since the AP poll made its mainstream debut in 1936!

Sigh.

2001: The BCS allows an obscure season-ending weeknight game - TCU 14, @ Southern Miss 12 - to give Nebraska a Dewey decimal point win over Colorado for the championship game in the Rose Bowl, all while Oregon - the real No. 2, with only one loss compared to Colorado's two losses - is left in fourth place by Roy Kramer's creation. As college football writers would continue to say throughout the remainder of the decade, "You can't make this stuff up."

2002: No damage done, only because Ohio State and Miami made it easy for everyone and provided the one and only scenario which eliminates controversy at the end of a college football campaign.

2003: Mark May of ESPN spent the past weekend saying - and this is a paraphrase - "Before the Big 12 Championship Game, everyone was saying if Texas wins, the Longhorns will go to the BCS title game. You can't change now!" That sentiment - which is weak on its face, due to the claim that the Longhorns had not closed the sale going into their battle with Nebraska - actually possessed some merit heading into 2003's Big 12 Championship Game, when an Oklahoma team already dubbed one of the greatest of all time (a death knell, as USC would learn two seasons later against Vince Young and Texas) was penciled in the Sugar Bowl by a sizable number of football observers.

With USC and LSU already owning one loss, the possibility of the Sooners not making the 2004 Sugar Bowl was positively microscopic. But a funny thing happened on the way to New Orleans: While LSU and USC smartly took care of business, Oklahoma pulled a face-plant and looked more than mortal in a 35-7 loss to amped-up Kansas State. Suddenly, the script had to be thrown into the trash bin, and a fresh evaluation of candidates was needed.

Well, at least in theory.

As was the case in 2001, a team that didn't win its own conference still played for the national title, while - in a faint but real repeat of 2001 - scores from other games (Notre Dame-Syracuse and Boise State-Hawaii) influenced the decimal point count in favor of LSU over locked-outside-the-candy-store USC.

Of the many worrisome realities evident in the 2003 BCS debacle, the most alarming problem - still unresolved today - was that the entire college football community was left in the dark on the final weekend of the regular season. Some people had better math and predictive skills than others, but no one - players, fans or journalists - could fully and definitively determine exactly what needed to happen in order for certain BCS standings to emerge.

If this sport had real governance and meaningful accountability mechanisms, we would have known heading into Championship Saturday that Oklahoma (these are all hypotheticals, by the way) needed to lose by no more than 14 points to K-State; that LSU and USC needed to win by 17 and 28 points if OU lost by more than 14; that out-of-town games X, Y and Z had to be won by certain teams; and that once-No. 3 LSU could leapfrog No. 2 USC with a win of 30 points or more, no matter what USC did.

For 95 percent of the season, we can speculate and wonder about the polls - polls which need to be abolished, but polls which are apparently here to stay for the time being. However, when the final weekend of the season arrives, everyone in college football needs and deserves to know EXACTLY what must happen for certain outcomes to emerge. Lose the computers and the coaches' poll, so that we're spared the embarrassment of Les Miles voting Cincinnati eighth on his final ballot this season (among other travesties in the final release of the coaches' votes). When it comes to the final game of each regular season, a selection committee - which is long past due in football as an answer to the NCAA Tournament in hoops - either needs to announce the finite scenarios before the weekend, or establish a review process that will make a decision removed from the ticket-selling hopes and plans of the various BCS bowl organizers.

Mark May, you wondered why Texas was suddenly questioned this season; it was in 2003 - when OU's place went unquestioned, and LSU leapfrogged USC despite a Trojan win over Oregon State - that your line of thought owned even more merit. BCS con jobs are all rather ludicrous, but the 2001 and 2003 fiascoes clearly take the cake.

2004: Preseason poll: Oklahoma and USC in the top 5, Auburn outside the top 15. Any questions?

2005: The magic bullet scenario rides to the rescue, as Texas and USC stage the mother of all Granddaddies in Pasadena. Bliss... but only because the One Salvific Situation emerged.

2006: The people who voted Florida over Michigan for the right to play Ohio State were using sound instincts and good judgment... but only as a practical political matter. What is forgotten in the wake of Florida's national title game rout of Ohio State is that in a fairer world governed by an elastic plus-one system, Michigan should have played Florida to determine No. 2.

In an enlightened alternate universe, the Gators and Wolverines would have met in a de facto semifinal - in the Sugar Bowl, ideally - while Ohio State could have played USC in the Rose Bowl with only the Buckeyes (not the two-loss Trojans) being able to advance to a plus-one championship game. Such an elastic system - with provisional allowances - seems best suited to a non-playoff world. Oh, the money Wolverines-Gators and Buckeyes-Trojans would have made for college football in January of 2007. But no, those TV-friendly matchups just weren't viewed to be in the best interests of the sport, just like the plus-one itself.

Yes, Florida earned the 2006 title; that's not under dispute. What should be remembered about that BCS season is that Michigan - though rightfully kept out of the title game under the given system - deserved a better outcome and, moreover, a chance to prove its worth against Chris Leak and a certain backup quarterback who ran the ball really well in short-yardage situations.

2007: Let's put it this way: 2007 - "The Season That Sanity Forgot" - was so dadgum crazy that even a brilliantly-conceived system wouldn't have been able to account for the permutations and train wrecks that unfolded at every turn in a wacko Autumnal apocalypse. Anyone who missed out on New Orleans had only itself to blame.

The lingering stench from the 2007 season came in the form of the non-championship BCS bowls, which cried out for extra-spicy showdowns in a season with such a muddled and unsatisfying resolution. Football fans deserved, and football journalists needed, the clarity that would have been provided by a Georgia-USC Rose Bowl and an Oklahoma-Virginia Tech Orange Bowl.

Sadly but predictably, they got neither.

As Boise State and TCU are sequestered in the "Quarantine Bowl" - a term coined recently by writer Clay Travis of FanHouse.com - the image of two brothers being forced to fight each other to the death against their wishes comes to mind. The brazen act - clearly designed to protect the BCS hierarchy from future palace revolts and Boise-Oklahoma-style uprisings - shows how enmeshed in politics the BCS bowl cabal really is.

If the old "poll and bowl system" was political, do realize that at least half of the sport's big matchups were locked in to conference titles. The 2007 season - and this Boise-TCU arrangement in the Fiesta Bowl - offered fewer contractual tie-ins to specific January bowl games, making the crass wheeling and dealing all the more outrageous. When older political shenanigans occurred, college football fans received better New Year's Day matchups.

A Seattle political columnist said a few years ago that in Chicago, corruption at least delivers basic services, and that exchanged money fixed a pothole here or a traffic light there. In Seattle, however, corruption exists without creating improvements in city infrastructure or other municipal offerings. The BCS is not just good, but GREAT for college football, whenever the One Salvific Situation comes to light. But in every other instance, this mechanism is like Seattle politics: Except for the 2002 and 2005 seasons, the past decade has unleashed all the evils attached to the moneychangers in the college football temple, but without the satisfying bowl matchups fans deserve.

Slam the poll-and-bowl routine and its substantial susceptibility to the buck; that "method" doesn't own a positive place in this 140-year-old sport's history, to be sure. Nevertheless, the pre-BCS, pre-Bowl Alliance era did enflesh and preserve longstanding traditions that gave college football added resonance and attractiveness as a sporting entity. The cluttered and deliciously clamorous conclusion to a season on New Year's Day is something this sport needs. Yes, the creation of a fifth bowl game makes it necessary to play one bowl game on January 2, but that's as far as any college football season should extend.

2008: See 2000 for details. Oh, and 2001. Oh, and 1993. Oh, and 1978 (among other years). Head-to-head? What head-to-head?

And for those who will claim - as they rightly will (rightly not in the sense that they're right, but in the sense that a greatly impoverished system forces fan bases to use the arguments that are in their best interests, lest they get hosed) - that Texas Tech was part of the Big 12 South's three way tie, just recall the Red Raiders' non-conference schedule in 2008: FCS-based Eastern Washington; a 7-6 Nevada team; a 1-11 Southern Methodist team; and FCS-based Massachusetts. A Bill Snyder blue plate special for Mike Leach and Co.

Texas Tech - in a comparison of resumes - clearly placed a DISTANT THIRD in a three-way competition with Texas and Oklahoma. Tech won its big game against Texas at home and by the slightest of margins, whereas Texas's big win in that three-team traffic jam came on a neutral field, and OU's big victory came at home (lopsided, yes, but at home, against the weakest sister in the three-lady lineup). The Red Raiders deserved to play in a BCS bowl - the system's unwillingness to allow three teams from the same conference to play in high-value games has always been ridiculous - but Tech wasn't remotely close to deserving the Big 12 South title.

The defining comparison involved in "Texas-Oklahoma '08" was the strength of OU's non-conference schedule - wins over TCU and Cincinnati - compared to Texas's unique conference win over Missouri plus the head-to-head scalp. Oklahoma advocates possessed a fair argument, especially since Texas's best non-conference win came against 10-3 Rice, but the unfortunate demise of 0-12 Washington dragged down OU's schedule strength, as did the unplanned yet undeniable series of occurrences that stuck FCS-based Chattanooga on the Sooners' docket.

In a sane world, no local dispute - a division championship and therefore a ticket to a conference championship game (and, by extension, the league title) - should be handled by national mechanisms such as the BCS standings, but under the circumstances that existed, the burden of proof lay on the Oklahoma side to make an overwhelming case beyond reasonable doubt in a court of football law. Did the Sooners own such a level of proof? Maybe... ah, but the very word "maybe" indicates reasonable doubt. If only Jake Locker hadn't been hurt in 2008, and if only that darn Pac-10 referee hadn't thrown a flag on Locker before a late-game extra point in week two of the season against BYU... such is life when the BCS is determining division champions in conferences.

2009: Texas fans to the world:

"You saw how we got jobbed in 2008, right? You remember how outraged everybody was, right? They don't use the term 'Texas Justice' casually, you know. Now we're even. Hopefully, the good folks at TCU and Cincinnati will be compensated in the future. When, at the end of the 2010 Big 12 Championship Game, Landry Jones throws a pass that hits the ground with one second left; the clock operator flips a triple-zero on the board before being overturned by replay; and kicker Patrick O'Hara boots a 46-yard field goal to give Oklahoma a 3-2 win over Nebraska, we'll all know that 12-0 TCU should be voted No. 2 over the 12-1 Sooners, who still couldn't beat us but leapfrogged us in a three-way tie with Texas A&M."