The Bowl Championship Series was started in 1998 to ensure that the top two college football teams play in the national championship.
The system is also in place to pick the match ups for the other four bowl games: the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, the Allstate Sugar Bowl, the Citi Rose Bowl and the FedEx Orange Bowl. The BCS uses a combination of polls and computer generated rankings to rank the teams.
The BCS system seems like a good idea from afar but what throws a monkey wrench in to the whole thing are the "BCS busters." A BCS buster is a team not from a non-BCS conference that manages to make a BCS bowl game.
Some notable BCS busters have been the Urban Meyer-coached Utah Utes from 2004 and the Boise State team that knocked Oklahoma off in the Fiesta Bowl in 2006.
This past year, Utah again was a BCS buster, finishing as the nation’s only undefeated team. Many thought they should get a share of the national championship after there was no clear champion at the end of the season.
There have been skeptics from the beginning of the system. Many people believe there should be a playoff system, but which form of playoff?
Every other college sport uses a playoff system to crown a national champ. College football is the only sport in the world that can actually say they aren’t sure who their national champion is.
The BCS playoff issue has become so big of an issue that even the President of the United States thinks the system in place should be axed. The critics say that the regular season is so important that it is basically a playoff and that you would hinder the importance on conference games by having a full playoff. Also, the money the NCAA pulls in from sponsors of the dozens of postseason bowl games is too great to pass up.
Look at March Madness, for instance. According to most fans, it is the most exciting part of the sports year. Every year everyone looks forward to seeing who the "Cinderella" team will be. It makes for exciting TV, and if college football takes it up it is pretty much guaranteed to bring in more viewers than ever before.
The playoff system that should be put in place is to take two mid-major conference teams, a.k.a. BCS Busters, and mix them into a 10-team playoff to decide a true national champion. It would make the bowl season the most anticipated sporting events of the year.
This idea will bring in more money than before with more sponsors, plus everyone will have their bracket filled out as they do with basketball.
No one can say the BCS hasn’t been given a chance. the system has been around for 11 years now and it just doesn’t work. Even ask our new President, Mr. Obama.