Bowl Championship Series (BCS)

The NCAA created the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) in 1998 in order to create a definitive National Championship game for college football. The series would include the four most prominent bowl games (Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Fiesta Bowl), while the National Championship game would rotate each year between one of these venues. If, for example, the Rose Bowl was to be played as the National Championship one year, the other three games of the series would still follow their normal procedures for picking teams, such as considering conference champions and at-large bids. The ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Big East, Pac 10, and SEC Conference champions would all be guaranteed a spot in one of the BCS games, while the remaining spots would go to at-large teams. The BCS selection committee uses a complicated, and often controversial, computer system to rank all Division 1-FBS teams and the top two teams at the end of the season play for the National Championship. This computer system, which factors in newspaper polls, online polls, coaches’ polls, strength of schedule, and various other factors of a team’s season, has led to much dispute over whether the two best teams in the country are being selected to play in the National Championship game. The BCS system was slightly adjusted in 2006, as the NCAA added a 5th game to the series, called the National Championship Game. This would allow the four other BCS bowls to use their normal selection process to select the teams in their games while the top 2 teams in the BCS rankings would play in the new National Championship Game.