The Bowl Championship Series, BCS to its friends, BS to everyone else, comes to a just and almost poetic close Monday night.
As Florida State played in the first three BCS Championship games, so will it appear in the final, at the Rose Bowl. The Seminoles lost that first one on Jan. 4, 1999 to Tee Martin’s — not Peyton Manning’s — Tennessee Volunteers, but are favored to bid the oft-controversial system farewell in a wave of happy tomahawk chops this time.
As Auburn was one of the BCS’s most poignant victims — unbeaten in the 2004 season but omitted from the title game — it will be the beneficiary this time: A one-loss team whose SEC credentials assured it a spot in the final act.
“Anybody got a problem with this matchup?” said former Heisman Trophy winner and current ESPN analyst Desmond Howard, giving credit to the doomed system.
“I believe Auburn deserved to be here,” he said. “(And I) believe Florida State deserved to be here. So to me they got it right when you get the two teams that deserve to be here. That’s what it was set up to do.”
“We all complained about the BCS and everything that goes on,” FSU coach Jimbo Fisher said last month, “but it’s funny how many times they get it right.”
There might be a little unrest in East Lansing, Mich., where there lives a once-beaten team that thinks it is pretty deserving now, but no need to further muddy already turbulent waters.
The next season will begin the College Football Playoff phase of this experiment in big-time student-athletics. Everything will make sense then, right, when they pluck four teams from the masses to engage in something akin to a real life playoff? Just don’t let the wails of the fifth-best team unsettle you while enjoying college football’s move to a system more in line with the American appetite for brackets.
Sixteen seasons of BCS debate will be buried beneath the green, green grass of the Rose Bowl on Monday night. Obituary writers are obliged to include something flattering about the deceased, and certainly we will get to that.
Ah, but the less fond memories of the departed are just so tempting.
Who will ever forget the halting, half measures in which this all began? First the Bowl Coalition (1992-94), then the Bowl Alliance (1995-98) before finally getting everyone on board behind the whole BCS idea. Knocking the Rose Bowl off its high Palomino and convincing it to join the group was such a delight.
Oh, and the cries of the coaches who felt jobbed by the system still ring so clearly.
“It stinks,” Pete Carroll once declared back when he was at USC and the Trojans were actually omitted.
Former Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville was campaigning for justice years after the wrongs of 2004, more so when USC’s title from that season was vacated after the Reggie Bush affair.
When Oregon was left out of the championship in 2001 in favor of a Nebraska team that did not even win its division of the Big 12, Mike Bellotti compared the BCS with a cancer.
Who could ever forget the fun of weighing the algorithms of the Colley Matrix, back when even more of the BCS ranking system was left to the computer’s cold calculations. Or the seating of the Utahs and Boise States of the world at the kids’ table.
A constant throughout the BCS generation was the cry for some kind of playoff. Looking back, its supporters say the system turned out not to be an impediment to a playoff, but rather a necessary step toward it.
Bill Hancock, the executive director of the BCS who will oversee the College Football Playoff, dislikes dismissing the BCS as merely a bridge to a playoff. “But,” he said, “it’s real clear that there wouldn’t be a playoff if there hadn’t been a BCS.”
To Hancock, the BCS was not just the Neanderthal waiting around to evolve into Homo Sapien. It was, he claimed, “the most creative thing that ever happened to college football.”
Bringing together the conferences and all their competing interests, involving the bowls, creating the selection process were all acts of great inspiration Hancock argues.
Making this particular sausage was often messy business, though, involving a constant tweaking of the ranking process that suggested they were just making this up as they went along. How exactly they arrived at the top two teams seemed sometimes a mixture of science and voodoo.
“All the changes we made early on — which were made in good faith to try to make the thing better — led toward folks not understanding it as much. It was too complicated at first. Everyone in our group looking with 20/20 hindsight realizes that now,” Hancock said.
No. 1 and No. 2 were forced together, and that did represent a victory. In nearly 60 years before the coming of the BCS, the top two teams in the AP ranking faced each other only eight times in a postseason bowl game.
It was also an era in which college football exploded in popularity, the mass appeal leading to huge TV deals and great upheavals in the conference alignments. That was not coincidental to the coming of the BCS, said Gary Stokan, head of the Chick-fil-A Bowl. The Atlanta game will be part of the rotation hosting a national semifinal game (the first in 2016) and will bid for the occasional championship.
“It was very, very successful in that it made college football a national sport and a national brand that has led it to become the No. 2 sport in the nation in fan interest, only behind pro football,” Stokan said.
“When they created the BCS, they mostly viewed it as an upgraded bowl-selection process, and certainly it has been that,” Hancock said. “But they never dreamed that it would turn the game from mostly a regional game into a national passion. People in the SEC had to pay attention to Boise State-TCU. Iowa State-Oklahoma State had a new meaning all over the country.
“Also, I don’t think they ever imagined the passion it would generate on the other side for people wanting something else.”
Hancock laughs at the idea that having once been the front man for the argument against a playoff, he is now the advocate for the coming four-team shootout.
“Our goals were to preserve the regular season and preserve the bowl system and this four-team tournament is a win-win. It gives the fans what they want and also achieves our goals,” he said.
Under the new system, a selection committee will arrive at the four finalists, which is certain to gin up plenty of debate. But that’s OK, Stokan points out, because fans have a much easier time arguing with a person than a machine.
“I think people would rather point to someone rather than something and get an answer and make them accountable for what their position is,” he said.
So, as we gather at the Rose Bowl on Monday night to bury the BCS, draped in faint praise, we can take comfort in the knowledge that the sport’s leadership has finally gotten it all right. Four teams. A big, splashy playoff. A great emotional payoff. January Madness, for certain.
At least until the lobbying for an expanded, eight-team bracket begins.
“That began the day after we announced this playoff,” Hancock said.
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