Why bcs works

While the National Championship game often turns out to be a dud, there is nothing to suggest that different teams should have been in it. Take the last two years. Is there anything to suggest that any other team would have done better than Ohio State against Florida and LSU, even though they got routed in both games? Had there been a tournament in , Ohio State would have beaten Michigan and USC and any other contenders just as soundly as they had in every game of their undefeated regular season.

This year is a good example as well, although you still can make cases for USC and Utah pictured above after winning Allstate Sugar Bowl. Oklahoma dominated teams all year except for one misstep to Texas. Florida showed excellent poise in the quarterback position and across the team, coming back from a bad loss better than ever. Both teams had Heisman candidates, with Oklahoma's Sam Bradford eventually winning the award. Nebraska and Penn State both won their bowl games, and Nebraska was crowned the national champion.

The Bowl Coalition was followed by the Bowl Alliance which was really in effect from to This was a more focused agreement between the Fiesta, Sugar, and Orange bowls that, once again, tried to match the two best teams to compete for the national title.

Its last year was marred by a split national championship between Michigan and Nebraska. They had consistently won conference championships, and in they finished the regular season ranked 5 in the AP Poll. Despite that, they were excluded from a Bowl Alliance bowl because their conference was not part of the alliance.

They wound up playing Kansas State in the Cotton Bowl, winning, and finishing the season LaVell Edwards testified in Congress sound familiar?

And therefore, the Bowl Alliance gave way to the BCS in , a system that we all know makes it possible for a non-automatic qualifer to make it to a top tier bowl game. However, it also makes it fairly difficult to compete for the national title for the likes of TCU, Boise State, Utah, and so forth. However, as you can see, these teams made their first appearance in the BCS in , after a full 7 years of being completely shut out. From onward, they've had 6 BCS bids, an average of 1 per year.

Enough of the history lesson, let's dive into how the BCS is calculated. The BCS employs the Borda count method of voting for, and nominating their two teams to play for a national championship game. Wikipedia's description of Borda counts:. The Borda count is a single-winner election method in which voters rank candidates in order of preference.

The Borda count determines the winner of an election by giving each candidate a certain number of points corresponding to the position in which he or she is ranked by each voter. Once all votes have been counted the candidate with the most points is the winner.

Because it sometimes elects broadly acceptable candidates, rather than those preferred by the majority, the Borda count is often described as a consensus-based electoral system, rather than a majoritarian one. I thought it was pretty interesting that the BCS formula employs the same voting methodology as presidential elections in the small island nation of Kiribati.

The bolded portion is important, and we'll get into that later. Anyway, the current BCS formula employs three components, all equally weighted : the Harris Poll, the Coaches Poll, and the computer rankings. The Coaches Poll involves 58 voters. Without the BCS determining the national champion, we would lose several important aspects of college football.

The bowls do more than just provide the best month of the football year. If you are selected for a bowl, then you receive a payout, and if you win, then you receive a bigger payout. I assume that most fans do enjoy their very nice stadiums and million-dollar coaches. Without the bowl system, these things cannot be afforded.

With money paid out from a bowl appearance, colleges can not only make their athletic facilities nicer, but also their academic ones.

The votes are typically kept anonymous throughout the season except for the final poll at the end of the calendar year, in which the votes are made public. They also submit a vote in the pre- and post-seasons, unlike the Harris Interactive. This is the last of the elements that go into compiling the rankings. The compute ranks each team by way of four computer ranking systems used by each team.