The college football Bowl Championship Series is a funny thing. Or, I guess if you cheer for a team that is not in a BCS conference, it is an annoying thing.
Let me put this in perspective. Every year, one team from each of the six BCS conferences - the ACC, the Big Ten, the Big East, the Big 12, the PAC-10 and the SEC - gets an automatic bid to one of five BCS bowl games. That is to say, if every team in the Big Ten were to end the season with a 6-6 record, one would still get to play in the Rose Bowl.
This means that even if a team from a mid-major conference like BYU, Utah, Hawaii or Boise State has a perfect record, it is not guaranteed a spot in a BCS bowl game like schools from the ACC and Big Ten. They are certainly able to make it in as an at-large"" bid but that will only happen if the BCS conferences do not have enough automatic qualifiers to fill up the ten bowl slots.
So what's the big deal? Why does anyone care?
Well, how does national television exposure, a NCAA championship, and $187 million in payouts sound? That's right, BCS bowl games mean big recognition and big money to the participants. Six conferences annually get a stake in the $187 million that is handed out every year. The annoying thing is that for everyone else, especially for those mid-major schools, they need to fight tooth-and-nail for a chance to play in one of these big bowl games.
One loss, and schools from the Mountain West Conference, the Western Athletic Conference and the Mid-American Conference are likely out of contention for a BCS bowl game. One loss, and those schools can kiss the shot at a nationally televised game and millions of dollars of funding for their schools goodbye.
If you watched Wisconsin play Fresno State three and a half weeks ago, the announcers kept talking incessantly about how it was a make-or-break game for the WAC school. The way the BCS is set up, schools like Fresno State who have ""weaker"" schedules must win basically all of their games to be considered ""as good"" as a BCS conference team. Lose one, and forget it, they are deemed unworthy to run with the big dogs.
What doesn't quite make sense, though, is that these smaller schools with weaker schedules in mid-major conferences are really, really good, but will never get automatic bids like the six big conferences do. If you take a look at the BCS bowl results since 2000, the injustice is clear. The ACC has won fewer BCS bowl games in the past seven years - none, to be more specific - than either the Mountain West or the WAC.
Boise State and Utah each have a BCS victory. The ACC gets an automatic bid every year, and for the past seven years, their place in the BCS bowl game has been squandered, while the mid-majors stand back and shake their heads. All the glory and profit lost to a conference that, despite getting an automatic chance year after year, cannot produce a BCS winner.
There is a clear-cut solution: playoffs. Every other NCAA sport has them. It gives those smaller mid-major schools a legitimate shot at a national title - something that, as Boise State and Utah have proven in the past, is a shot they deserve. The problem is, of course, money. The sponsorship dollars, all the money that goes to the schools, the national hype and exposure'¦ it is too well-established to be toppled by the demands of some mid-major standouts. But the fact of the matter is schools in the Mountain West and the WAC and even the Mid-American are getting a raw deal, especially when automatic entries from the ACC aren't even winning.
That BCS is a funny thing.
Think that any playoff talk is now useless since the Badgers have two losses? Tell Andy at avansistine@wisc.edu.
