The problem would not be who plays for 1 and 2 ,if they had more teams,it would just move down to who got cheated out of being in the final 4,6 or 8. You can not satisfy football fans.
I think the 6 week gap from the end of the season to the bowls is too long. I don’t think it matters who plays the last game, somebody will be pissed.There is no perfect system.
Which is precisely why they wouldn’t ask for that game, duh.
There is no perfect system, but there is a better system than what we currently have. Some kind of playoff would be best.
The current system rests entirely on the assumption that only two teams have an argument for being considered the best. Even when there are merely three teams with the credentials, the system breaks down.
This year there were seven one-loss teams along the sole undefeated team; almost all of them would have been near-automatic bids to the championship games if not for their loss.
The top tier of college football outsources their post-season solely for monetary reasons. The BCS created only more issues than it was intended to solve.
The BCS is a money grab by the big conferences. There is not much evidence that the SEC or Pac-10 is dramatically better than the Mountain West, but the formers have more money than the latter. The big conferences don’t want a playoff because it might expose them. In my earlier link(post #98), it explains that the Utah Atty Gen is going after the BCS with an anti-trust argument. Basically, the poorer conferences have a systemic disadvantage. Maybe the big conferences were heads and shoulders above the poor conferences a decade ago, but the Utahs and Boise St.'s have almost caught up. On the field play has shown that, at least with the two teams cited, they can hang with the big boys. The only reason they are left out of the running is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
You mean if the previously seeded #1 team in the nation can’t beat a team that, the previously left out of the National Championship picture, Utah Utes beat? Yeah, actually I WOULD expect that to keep them out of the NC picture.
If the magic touchstone for getting into the playoffs is winning a conference, that problem goes away pretty quickly, doesn’t it? 
The trouble with calling someone a “Champion” who hasn’t actually proved it through a system that allows them to establish via actual results a superiority over all others in the same system is that those who haven’t been demonstrably inferior by result can claim the title for themselves, and feel justifiably aggrieved that they aren’t considered the “Champion.” It used to be that this didn’t apply; there was no “champion” for Div I-A football, only two polls that tried to answer in a very unscientific way the question of who was the best college football team that year. The original idea of the BCS system (an attempt to pair up the #1 and #2 teams in the nation for a final showdown) had a certain allure. We always used to sit up and take notice when the schedule or a bowl game managed to produce such a match-up.
But the stretch from calling such a team “#1” to calling the winner of such a game the “Champion” is where the difficulty lies. It attempts to cash in on our country’s mania for the playoff concept (as noted, the VAST majority of the world doesn’t indulge in this silliness, preferring to let an entire season speak for itself), the major colleges and the major bowls have cobbled together a system that tries to maintain an untenable status quo that gives the illusion of a Champion without the actuality of a true playoff structure.
It is absurd for the commissioners of conferences, or the heads of universities to assert that somehow a playoff would have a significantly different effect upon the athletes of a Div I-A school than at a Div. III school. If you are willing to interrupt the academic lives of the true scholar-athletes, why would you hesitate to interrupt the academic lives of the pretend scholar-athletes? No one cares about their academic efforts the rest of the season. No one cares about the effect of the basketball playoffs on schools with a quarter system, who have final exams across March Madness. No one cares about the baseball/softball playoffs and their effect upon the final exams of those players. Yet somehow we are to believe that football players are particularly important to protect? Get real. :rolleyes:
The real reason the system is what it is is that the major colleges/conferences are reaping a huge windfall out of it as it stands, and they don’t want to risk screwing that up. Everything else is secondary to that.
When I saw the thread title, I thought this was about the Utes (Indian tribe), and perhaps the BCS was some Federal agency I’d not yet heard about. Instead I learn that these are sports terms. Who knew?
I don’t see why the major football conferences, with attendances that range from 100K to 40K, should be forced to share the revenues that they earn with conferences that average attendances of 40K to 10K, and no one watches on TV.
(Of course, there are exceptions to this. Duke and Northwestern are part of the BCS conferences and have low average attendances, but they have deep historical ties to the Big Ten and ACC respectively. BYU and Utah also have BCS-style average attendance, but play in a league along the likes of Wyoming and Colorado State, which very much don’t).
Should the NHL invite AHL teams to the Stanley Cup Playoffs? Pacific Coast League teams to the Major League Baseball Postseason? No one complains when those leagues limit their championship to franchises with a certain level of support and commercial viability, but when it comes to BCS, it’s suddenly a moral travesty.
Also, IANAL (yet, 1 more semester to go) but the Utah AG’s claim of an antitrust violation doesn’t even pass the laugh test. It’s good political grandstanding, though.
Random thought that I just had:
*(Note: I’m still in favor of a 4-team playoff system, but this is in a parallel universe where an 8-team playoff was possible.)
If there were an 8-team playoff, that included 6 conference champions and 2 at-large teams, it shouldn’t necessarily be the “Big-6”; just the 6 best. In this scenario, Utah would have gone in as MW champs. Florida, Southern Cal, Penn State, and Oklahoma would have been in as conf champs as well. The 6th slot would go to either VaTech or Boise State, whichever was ranked higher at the end of the season. Cincinnati would be left out. The 2 at large slots would go to Texas and 'Bama, because of their end-of-regular-season rankings. No conference can have 3 teams in the playoff.
Basically, we’re doing away with the Big-6 getting an automatic preference.
What say you?
I say that anytime you have slots being awarded on the basis of the “rankings,” you will get significant difficulties. One slot on that basis, maybe. But you are proposing essentially that ALL the slots would be ranking determined. Ugh.
What else would it be determined by? Win-loss record?
Conference championships, as I postulated earlier.
I think they have it all wrong. Utah beat Oregon State which beat USC… that’s pretty compelling.
However, the Trojans are not #1. I think another team has a more compelling argument.
Of course, with the evil biased media loving the Gators so much, I don’t see it getting much traction…
Hell, by that widget, my alma mater, University of Rochester, is better than Florida. <lol>
Note: Utah can’t be beaten through that method.