Simple, elegant BCS improvement that will never happen.

The Game Room
1

Like it or not, we’re stuck with the BCS for another seven years or so. And like it or not, the powers that be are opposed to a playoff. Frankly, I am, too; I don’t like most of the playoff proposals I’ve seen floated.

That doesn’t mean things can’t still be improved, and I have a humble suggestion to make it happen: to be eligible for the BCS championship, a team must play at least half their nonconference games against BCS teams.

Just looking at the current top 9: Texas, Alabama and Boise State both played only one BCS nonconference game, and Texas Tech played none. All of them would be ineligible because of their pansy schedules. Of course, the real purpose of this rule is not to declare teams ineligible, but to get them to schedule tougher games. With such a rule in place, those schools would have played tougher opponents, and we’d likely have another loss or two thrown into the mix, and that would help sort things out.

Say, for example, Texas Tech played two major nonconference schools; given that they struggled to beat Nevada, I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine them losing one of those games. All of a sudden, OU’s win over TT is a lot less important, and the Big 12 South is a lot clearer.

No, it’s not a fix-all, but it’s an improvement which maintains the importance of the regular season, makes more interesting games in September, and makes narrowing it down to 2 teams in January.

Of course, this will and should never happen, for reasons that you all will tell me about in this thread …

2

It would definitely be an improvement. Another way to aid that would be to give a much higher weight to BCS games in the computer rankings so that they’d have an incentive to play other BCS schools even if they lost – something like 2x for a win vs a BCS school, 0.5x for a win vs non-BCS school, 0.5x for loss to BCS school, 2x for a loss to a non-BCS. Of course I say this with no inkling of how the ratings, rankings and weightings of all of the inputs are achieved.

3

I don’t see how it’s an improvement.

Having teams on your schedule like Indiana and most of the Big East is suddenly more indicative of being competitive than scheduling the perennial “what about these guys” teams like Boise St. and Utah?

And back to the Big East - sure they add some actual legitimacy to their argument by scheduling a few Big 12 teams early in the season, but then you burden the SEC or Big 12 by telling them they have to add even more of these “competitive” schools? Doesn’t add up.

4

Nah, all it will do it have teams schedule a creampuff from a BCS conference instead of from a non-BCS conference. You honestly think it would be fairer to reward a team that played Pac-10 cellar denizens Washington or Washington State more than one that played Utah or BYU?
Plus this would exacerbate the Top 6/other conference resentment even more. It would be damn near impossible for a non-BCS team to get into the BCS, as no Top 6 teams would schedule them. The Mountain West fans and the WACjobs would howl even louder for congressional hearings or whatever remedy they come up with.

If it were up to me, I’d just reinstate a Strength of Schedule component like in an earlier version of the formula. Not the original point penalty for a loss, that encouraged scheduling weak teams. Maybe something like the one they had in the third or fourth year, but not weighted so heavily. That one over-emphasized SoS by being equally weighted with the poll results and then some, as most computer rankings also had a SoS component. Don’t weight the newspaper poll so heavily, cause face it, all the AP poll really indicates is how long a winning streak you’ve had, which encourages scheduling weak teams.

5

Most schools have already scheduled this far out anyway (eg, LSU - Ohio State in…2019!, so it’ll be difficult to implement any schedule changes like you want. Just using LSU as an example, they’ve already booked 3 of 4 non-conf games for 2012 season.

One very simple solution that I think would help is this - simply not release the first AP and Coaches’ polls until week 5 or 6, well after conference play has started.

6

It’s an interesting proposal, but I think it’d be a nightmare logistically. First off, there just wouldn’t be enough BCS schools available to schedule. What happens the first time that LSU simply can’t get 2 BCS schools willing to schedule them? What if teams can’t make it work with bye weeks? Eventually you’ll have schools bidding huge dollars to get perennial BCS doormats to schedule them, Indiana, Iowa State, Washington State and Mississippi State would be taking huge payments from OSU, USC and LSU to play.

How would you handle Notre Dame? They aren’t in a conference, are they considered a BCS team? Are all their games considered non-conference games?

I wish there was a way to get these teams to play better non-conference games. The SEC is a joke with it’s refusal to play outside of the region. And all the College Playoff proponents seem to forget that a playoff system would make it even more beneficial for teams to play crappy schedules because the premium on being a 1 loss team would be huge. Currently the power of the Polls is the only thing getting these teams to play teams outside of the Sun Belt and MEAC.

7

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8

Basically, yes.

Yeah, every year there are several mid-major teams that are clearly better than the lesser BCS schools – I’d take Utah over Indiana this year for sure. But what about last year, when Utah was 9-4 in the MWC and Indiana was 7-6 in the Big 10? 90% of the time, a BCS-league team is better than a non-BCS school. And if you’re talking about predicting who will be better 3-4 years from now, that’s always the way to bet.

As rexnervous points out, most teams schedule several years out; that was part of my reasoning. When you’re scheduling three or four years ahead, you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get. You just don’t. All you can do is guess and make a good-faith effort to play tough teams. That’s the problem with making strength-of-schedule too much of a component – you’re dependant on how good your opponents turn out to be, which you can’t control.

Three or five years ago, Utah scheduled Michigan at Michigan. That was ballsy, and they deserve credit for it. It’s not their fault Michigan went in the crapper, and yet a strength-of-schedule formula punishes them and says they should have picked someone tougher, like Northwestern. That ain’t fair.

Put it this way. After the 2004 season, you had these teams:

Group A
– Pac-10 team with three straight 10-win seasons, and just beat Texas in a bowl game
– Big 10 team with three straight bowls
– Big 12 team with 11 wins 8 out of last 10 years
– Big East team with 26 wins over 4 seasons, including 2 bowl games

These quality teams in the early '00s: Washington State, Purdue, Kansas State and Syracuse.

Group B
– ACC team that’s never won more than 8 games, ever.
– Big 12 team with 5 out of 6 losing seasons
– Big East team with 12 straight losing seasons
– Vanderbilt

Wake Forest, Missouri, Rutgers, and, well, Vanderbilt.

And I’m not even onto Tennessee, Auburn, Miami, Louisville …

You don’t know who’s going to be good five years from now. You just don’t. You can make a guess, that’s all. ISTM that when you force a team to play at least two teams from a power conference, it’s a good guess that at least one of the two will be decent.

Revision to the rule: Instead of two games, we’ll say “half your nonconference games.” This means the Big East teams (who only have 7 conference games) need 3 non-confs, and Pac-10 teams, who have 9 conference games, only need one.

Keep in mind – strength of schedule will still count with the poll voters. USC didn’t need this rule to schedule a full 12-team slate against big-time opponents; they did it because they know they need to impress voters. In fact, many big-time programs already DO play 2 at least 2 BCS non-cons – Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, frex; this just makes cowards like Texas Tech and LSU step up and play a few tough games.

The purpose of this is to stop the worst of the worst chickenshit scheduling. It’s not a cure-all, it’s an improvement.

So, to get back to Munch’s question – no, BYU won’t count towards the minimum 2 BCS non-con games. But in an atmosphere in which everybody is playing tougher and tougher schedules, I don’t think it’d be impossible for them to get big-time games. They may have to travel a bit more to get them, but that’s fine – mid majors who have NC hopes should play tougher schedules, too.

9

See above.

For mid-majors, the game will be the same as it is now: go undefeated, and then hope there’s room at the top; and there’d be more chance for room if the big boys played each other more often.

I’m fine with that, too.

10

2019 is the exception – 3-4 years is more typical, but yeah, this would be something that would have to be put in place for the future.

That wouldn’t hurt neither.

11

Unlikely, IMO. As noted, they will be needing to play each other. Kentucky needs a BCS non-con? Hey, what a coinky-dink, so does Oregon. I’ll bet you $1000 I could go back and redo this year’s schedule to have made it work.

To the extent there might be a supply and demand issue…

… it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

They are a BCS team, just as now; since they already do play about 9-10 BCS schools a year, it’s a moot point.

Navy would have to play a somewhat tougher slate to be eligible, Army significantly tougher. If not, they can just go into a season knowing they are ineligible for the BCS championship. If they managed to go undefeated, they’d still be eligible for the AP crown – but of course, they wouldn’t really have a chance even at that, anyway. cf. Ball State. They would both be well-served to join a conference.

Sun Belt? Hell no, not after LSU-Troy and Bama-ULM. Get ready to start learning your SWAC teams …

12

furt has argued that the “low end” of the BCS conferences are cyclical; so, for example, while not long ago Syracuse and Wazzu were strong teams, they are no longer so, and the opposite is true even for such perennial cellar-dwellers as Duke (no relation) and Vanderbilt. I suppose that’s true.

But I think if teams had to schedule at least two BCS teams, that might have the effect of keeping the BCS-conference cellar-dwellers at or near the bottom. There are a lot of potential national-championship teams, and surprisingly few BCS cellar-dwellers. Looking at the conferences I’d say there are about three or four teams (and even more in the Big 12 and the SEC) who have decent aspirations of consistently competing for the NC, but only two or three consistently bad teams. For example: who’s been consistently bad in the Big Ten? Well, Indiana has a .250 conference winning percentage since 1993, so they count. Next-worst is Illinois, but they’ve had a lot of improvement lately; same is true with the third-worst team, Minnesota. Then you get to Northwestern, Michigan State, Purdue…nobody would plan on those teams being cupcakes. So you’ve got three or four teams in the Big Ten who consistently are in the national championship hunt, and only one real cupcake.

Now all of a sudden teams like Indiana are hot tickets for college ADs. If they know they have to schedule two non-BCS teams and two BCS teams, they’re going to bend over backwards to get the worst BCS teams. At the end of the day, every AD in the country is going to take a win over a bad team which hurts their strength of schedule over a loss over a good team. So now Indiana’s AD’s phone lights up, they’ll have enough ADs calling them to schedule four big-name BCS teams every year, because there are more contenders than BCS cupcakes. Indiana gets a choice now: reject the advances of the contenders to help build the program, or take the big-time teams with pockets full of cash (would this rule usher in the era of “BCS guarantee games”?) and start every year hoping against hope to sneak one non-conference win? How many top recruits would look at teams that started almost every year 0-4 and think, “That’s where I want to go?” Choosing option two is lucrative but it would doom those schools to mediocrity.

Either way, I think you’re on to something, furt, but again this is another example of why any non-playoff system is an ugly mess. If, three years ago, a college AD set up a non-conference schedule for this year of Washington State, at Rutgers, at Michigan, and Syracuse, everybody in the country would be razzing him for “a cupcake schedule,” when at the time that would have been a potentially daunting task. There are some non-conference games set up nearly a decade in advance. And ADs have no control over their conference schedules. This year Penn State didn’t play Northwestern or Minnesota, both of which would have increased their strength of schedule. Now they’re completely out of the NC picture with one loss, because their SoS was so bad. Strength of schedule is the bugbear of the BCS.

13

And that’s a feature.

I’m not so sure about all of that. If they choose to play Texas, Oklahoma, LSU and Alabama maybe … but the same instability holds for their scheduling. Imagine IU getting paid to play traditional powers Notre Dame, Texas A & M, Tennessee and Auburn in 2008 …

But more to the point, teams like IU, Vanderbilt, Duke and Baylor often go 2-2 in non-conference games anyway. If I were running them, yeah, I’d want all the gimmes I could get, but in actual fact and for whatever reason, their schedules now are not that much easier than the big boys and they still get players who are usually better than the mid-major schools, and good enough for them to occasionally be competent at the BCS level.

[/QUOTE]
Either way, I think you’re on to something, furt, but again this is another example of why any non-playoff system is an ugly mess.
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Yeah, I guess … but the thing is, every playoff system I’ve heard of is an ugly mess, too.

14

You’ve just utterly and totally made your argument moot. You are seriously arguing that a system that rewards teams like Indiana and Syracuse for being terrible with huge financial windfalls from other universities is a good thing? A system that makes it hugely beneficial for Indiana and Syracuse to remain terrible indefinitely and penalizes them for improvement financially is somehow good for college football?

Man, it would suck to be a team like Illinois, Cal, Texas A&M or Boston College who are unpredictably mediocre. They aren’t getting big money from the networks, the BCS or jersey sales like the powerhouses nor are they getting big kickbacks from the same powerhouses. I’m sure the Utahs, Hawaiis, Boise States and Fresno States would be really pissed. Brutal to be the middle class in this system, let me tell you.

Talk about stupid.

The only practical solution to fixing the scheduling issue is for the NCAA and BCS to take over nonconference scheduling for all BCS schools. Make scheduling more uniform, let the schools schedule their own region small school neighbors like UL-Monroe and Western Michigan, but 2 of every BCS schools nonconference games are scheduled somewhat randomly by the NCAA’s computers. Maybe use a NFL style system that matches the #1 in the Pac-10 with the #1 in the Big Ten, #2 in the Big Ten versus the #2 in the SEC (traditional Bowl tie-in matchups as an example) but set the schedules 4 years in the future so that the team’s strengths balance out some.

15

Memories. :frowning: Still remember watching that game. In 25 years of watching the Cougs, and still to this day, I’ve never seen a team hitting on all cylinders like we were against the horns. Best game I’ve ever seen our kids play.

As for the BCS, I’m starting to worry that if they just BARELY creep over the “playoff” hurdle, we’re going to be left with a horrible compromise for a playoff format then have to listen to “Well you wanted a playoff, why are you complaining about NOW?!?!?” I don’t understand. Do these people SERIOUSLY THINK we’re still going to be using the BCS in 2028?

16

I laugh at Playoff Honks because they seem to not understand that a playoff system would be all the same problems of the BCS times 8…with the bonus of all the Bowl tradition being nuked. Terrific.

17

I don’t think the playoff honks are going to have much sympathy when you whine you don’t get to play for the national championship when you can’t even break the top EIGHT. Not to mention, my personal pet system uses conference champions instead of rankings. Having only 8 teams would also preserve the lesser bowls.

18

I think there will be far more dissension that you realize. There have been plenty of occasions where the difference between the 3rd ranked team and the 9th ranked team is nothing but strength of schedule and perception. Right now the top 9 teams all have 1 loss or fewer and an undefeated Ball State team at 15. Now, if one of the top 2 teams wins the championship 8 of 10 times in a 8 team playoff, then I suppose it’s moot but I think that more often than not a team between 3 and 8 will win it. That makes the argument between the 7th and 11th ranked teams a lot more relevant when the 6th, 7th or 8th team wins it. Also, lets not for get that there are going to be a ton of occasions where the 5th ranked team has one loss, and that loss happens to be to the 10th ranked team. IF that 5th ranked team wins it all people will be pissed!!!

Look, I think the entire concept of a national champion is stupid and pointless. I liked it much better when Conference titles were the talk of the town, and Rose Bowl wins were just icing on the cake. I accept that we’ll probably never get back to that, but the argument that a playoff solves our problems is shortsighted in the extreme. All it does is move us farther away from the relevance of the conferences and increases the power of the “big schools”.

I’ve posted several times on the Dope that a playoff system that gives seedings based on conference champions (with a mandatory conference title game acting as a playoff first-round) followed by including the other FBS conference winners competing for the remaining “at large” playoff spots head-to-head would be the only tenable solution. It still probably kills the bowls, but at least it emphasizes the conference titles again and removes the incentive to schedule crappy nonconference games.

19

How many big-six teams are ALWAYS BAD? Not usually mediocre, but consistiently terrible? Less than five. Even at that, do you think the difference between say, Duke (always bad) and NC State (mediocre) is so huge that Texas is willing to pay Duke millions upon millions for a game? Don’t be absurd.

I suspect that what the smaller schools want instead of a cash payout is home-and-home games; if Ohio State wants to play Baylor that badly, they can play one in Waco. And yeah, that’ll be a payoff for Baylor. Call me crazy, but revenue sharing has worked pretty good for the NFL. I don’t see the harm in encouraging parity by giving the smaller schools semi-equitable budgets; who knows, maybe they’ll be able to afford to keep their coaches.

How exactly would this be different from the status quo? It’s not. And based on the early-season broadcast schedules, the networks prefer airing competitive games between lesser teams than blowouts; they’d rather show Cal-BC than Ohio St-Baylor. The middle guys play each other, which is pretty much the way it is now.

If they’re harboring national-title or BCS-game hopes, they ought to be thrilled. Right now, Utah has five teams ahead of them; two played wimp schedules. Boise has another team that played a very wimpy schedule ahead of them. Throw a loss or two in there, and both of those teams are in much better shape (although, Boise frankly needs to start improving their own schedule).

As to the idea that BCS teams wouldn’t play the good mid-majors … why do they play them now? Because the polls matter. Strength of schedule matters. I’m not suggesting that change. Some teams will duck the Utahs, but others won’t; just like now.

20

So in order to preserve the conference tradition you advocate a REQUIRED conference championship? What’s wrong with letting the individual conferences decide their champion in whatever way they see fit? There’s nothing wrong with the PAC-10 system. If the other conferences want to hurt their own teams in pursuit of the almighty $$$$$ the conference championships bring in, that’s not our problem.

My own system ranks the 6 BCS conference champions and two “at-large” bids, sets 1 vs 8 at the home stadium of the higher seed and lets them go at it. It’s gone smoothly until this year where #17 (8-3) Oregon State would represent the PAC-10 over #5 (9-1) USC.