Bowl Championship Series
The Bowl Championship Series was a college football post-season selection system that created four or five bowl game match-ups involving eight or ten of the top ranked teams in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision of American college football, including an opportunity for the top two teams to compete in a national championship game. The system was in place from the 1998 season to the 2013 season and was replaced in 2014 by the College Football Playoff.
The BCS relied on a combination of polls and computer selection methods to determine relative team rankings, and to narrow the field to two teams to play in the BCS National Championship Game, held after the other college bowl games. The American Football Coaches Association was contractually bound to vote the winner of this game as the BCS National Champion and the contract signed by each conference required them to recognize the winner of the BCS National Championship game as the official and only champion. The BCS was created to end split championships and for the champion to win the title on the field between the two teams selected by the BCS.
The system also selected match-ups for four other prestigious BCS bowl games: the Rose Bowl Game, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl. The ten teams selected included the conference champion from each of the six Automatic Qualifying conferences plus four others. The BCS was created by formal agreement by those six conferences ; Big East, now the American Conference ; Big Ten Conference ; Big 12 Conference ; Pac-10, now the Pac-12 Conference ; Southeastern Conference ; and the three FBS independent schools, and evolved to allow other conferences to participate to a lesser degree. For the 1998 through 2005 seasons, eight teams competed in four BCS bowls.
It had been in place since the 1998 season. The BCS replaced the Bowl Alliance, in place from 1995 to 1997, which had followed the Bowl Coalition, in place from 1992 to 1994. Prior to the Bowl Coalition's creation in 1992, the AP Poll's number one and two teams had met in a bowl game only 8 times in 56 seasons. The AP's top two teams met 13 out of the 16 seasons when the BCS was in place.
In the 2014 season, the BCS was discontinued and replaced by the College Football Playoff, which initially organized a four-team playoff and national championship game. Ten years later, the playoff expanded to 12 teams.
History leading to the creation and dissolution of the BCS
The NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision is the only NCAA-sponsored sport without an officially organized NCAA tournament to determine its champion. Instead, the postseason has historically consisted of individual bowl games.The bowl system began in 1902 with the first ever East–West game in Pasadena, California, held at Tournament Park on New Year's Day in conjunction with the Tournament of Roses parade. This game was an exhibition game pitting a highly rated team from the west coast against a team from east of the Mississippi River. This was an ideal time for a postseason game, as fans could take off work or school during this holiday period to travel to the game. In the first game, the University of Michigan Wolverines represented the east and easily defeated the west's representative Stanford by a score of 49–0. Due to the lopsided victory the game did not resume until 1916.
The game was renamed the Rose Bowl in the 1920s when play shifted to the Rose Bowl stadium, built by the city of Pasadena in conjunction with the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association. By the 1930s, the Cotton Bowl Classic in Dallas, Texas, Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida, and the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, Louisiana were also held on January 1 to showcase teams from other regions of the country.
By the 1940s, college football conferences began signing contracts that tied their championship team to a particular bowl. In 1947, the Big Ten Conference and the Pacific Coast Conference, a forerunner of today's Pac-12 Conference, agreed to commit their champions to play in the Rose Bowl every year, an agreement that continued under the BCS. This system raised the possibility that the two top-ranked teams in the final poll would not play each other in a bowl game, even in situations when there was a clear-cut top two. Indeed, since the AP began releasing its final poll after the bowl games in 1968, the two top-ranked teams in the final regular-season AP Poll had only played each other in a bowl six times until special bowl arrangements began in 1992. Under these circumstances, it was not uncommon to have the Coaches Poll crown a different national champion than the AP Poll, resulting in a split championship. This situation arose a total of ten different seasons before BCS was formed.
For example, in 1991, the University of Miami Hurricanes and the University of Washington Huskies both finished the regular season undefeated and were considered the strongest teams in the nation. Since the Huskies were locked into the Rose Bowl as the Pac-10 Conference champion against Big Ten champion Michigan, they could not play Big East member Miami, who played in the Orange Bowl. Both teams won their bowl games convincingly and shared the national championship, Miami winning the Associated Press poll and Washington earning the top spot in the Coaches Poll. A split national championship has happened on several occasions since then as well.
Other teams have won the national championship despite playing presumably weaker schedules than other championship contenders. The BYU Cougars ended the 1984 season as the only undefeated and untied team in the nation, and the nine-time defending champions of the Western Athletic Conference. The Cougars opened the season with a 20–14 victory over No. 3 Pittsburgh, and won the Holiday Bowl against a 6–5 Michigan team that had been ranked as high as No. 2 that season. As the No. 4 ranked team at the end of the regular season, Washington was offered a slot against BYU in the Holiday Bowl; Washington declined, preferring instead to play in the more lucrative Orange Bowl where they beat No. 2 Oklahoma to complete a Pac-10 sweep of New Year's Day bowls. Washington was voted No. 2 following the bowl season with their only blemish a late season loss at Pac-10 champion USC. Coupled with winning its last 11 games in 1983, BYU finished the 1984 season with a 24-game winning streak. Several coaches and reporters claimed that BYU had not played a legitimate schedule and should not be recognized as national champion. Not only was Pittsburgh the only ranked team the Cougars faced all season, but at the time BYU played in the mid-major WAC. Nonetheless, BYU was a near-unanimous choice as national champion in final polls.
To address these problems, five conferences, six bowl games, and leading independent Notre Dame joined forces to create the Bowl Coalition, which was intended to force a de facto "national championship game" between the top two eligible teams in the rankings. By entirely excluding all the other conferences, the Bowl Coalition also made it impossible for a non-Bowl Coalition team to win a national championship. This system was in place from the 1992 season through the 1994 season. While traditional tie-ins between conferences and bowls remained, a team would be released to play in another bowl if it was necessary to force a championship game.
However, this system did not include the Big Ten and Pac-10 champions, as both were obligated to play in the Rose Bowl. The Coalition made several attempts to get the Tournament of Roses Association, which operates the Rose Bowl, to release the Big Ten and Pac-10 champions if necessary to force a championship game. However, those negotiations came to nothing, in part because the Tournament of Roses Association feared jeopardizing its long-standing contract with ABC if one or both teams were needed to force a title game. In 1994—the last year of the Bowl Coalition—undefeated Penn State, from the Big Ten, played Oregon in the Rose Bowl while undefeated Nebraska played Miami in the Orange Bowl. In a system that paired top-ranked teams, Penn State would have played Nebraska for the national championship.
The Bowl Coalition was restructured into the Bowl Alliance for the 1995 season, involving five conferences and three bowls. The championship game rotated among these three bowls. It still did not, however, include the Pac-10 or Big Ten champions, the Rose Bowl, or any non-Bowl Alliance teams.
After a protracted round of negotiations, the Bowl Alliance was reformed into the Bowl Championship Series for the 1998 season; former Southeastern Conference commissioner Roy Kramer is considered to be the "father" of the BCS. The Tournament of Roses Association agreed to release the Big Ten and Pac-10 champions if it was necessary to force a national championship game. In return, the Rose Bowl was added to the yearly national championship rotation, and the game was able to keep its coveted exclusive TV time slot on the afternoon of New Year's Day. However, beginning with the 2006 season, the BCS National Championship Game became a separate event played at the same site as a host bowl a week following New Year's Day.
The new Bowl Championship Series not only included the Big Ten and the Pac-10 conferences but also teams from mid-major conferences, based on performance. No mid-major team, however, or team from any conference outside of the six aligned conferences, ever played in the BCS Championship Game, causing increasing controversy. This controversy had become even more intense in light of the 4–1 record that mid-major teams had against teams from the six automatic qualifying conferences in the BCS Bowl games they had been allowed to play in. The performances and perfect record of Texas Christian in the 2010 season and Boise State in the season prior to that also fueled the controversy surrounding the perceived inequalities that the BCS seemed to perpetuate. However, little headway was made to institute an alternative system, given the entrenched vested economic interests in the various bowls, until after the 2011 season, which saw LSU and Alabama—both members of the SEC West division—play each other in the 2012 BCS Championship game, where Alabama defeated LSU in a shutout win.
Thereafter, acknowledging the many game, polling, and other related controversies, fans' complaints, and declining game viewership, among other factors, the major conferences decided to institute the College Football Playoff, which began in the 2014 regular season. As a legal entity, the holding company "BCS Properties, LLC" continues to control the College Football Playoff.