Every year colleges from all over the country compete in the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) which is the conclusion to the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) college football season.
Why are there so many Bowl Games?
Coming from a sport like professional NFL football where you have one final culmination game like the Super Bowl, or coming from a sport like NBA Basketball where you have a final Championship Series played between two teams, the college bowl games can be incredibly confusing.
When you consider the vast number of colleges that take part in NCAA sports, the reasoning behind such a complex system becomes a little more sound.
In the NFL you have 32 teams competing to play in one final game -- the Super Bowl. Because there is such a small number of teams, these teams get to play each other multiple times per season.
In the NCAA Division I, you have 119 Division I-A teams and 119 Division I-AA teams making a total of 238 Division-I teams that play in a regular season that lasts less than three months. Even if your team played two football games every day of the week for the entire season, there's no possible way they could play every other team in the league.
Enter the BCS Rankings.
The NCAA splits up the teams into 12 subdivisions loosely assigned by region. The 12 subdivisions for Division I sports are:
- Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC)
- Big East Conference (Big East)
- Big Ten Conference (Big Ten)
- Big 12 Conference (Big 12)
- Conference USA (C-USA)
- Division I FBS Independents
- Mid-American Conference (MAC)
- Mountain West Conference (MWC)
- Pacific-10 Conference (Pac-10)
- Southeastern Conference (SEC)
- Sun Belt Conference (Sun Belt)
- Western Athletic Conference (WAC)
As you can imagine, selecting the top teams from each of these divisions is hard enough, but ranking them on a national level between divisions that have never played each other is even tougher.
Which teams play in a particular bowl is determined by complex mathematical formulas that the NCAA deploys to assign the BCS rankings every Monday. The formulas take in not only the team's win-loss record, but are a culmination of four major components.
Each team is assigned points in each of these categories every time the standings are recalculated. The teams with the lowest number of cumulative points rank higher in the BCS standings.
The four components of BCS ranking are:
1. Subjective Polls
The Associated Press (AP) and ESPN conduct polls among national sports writers and select college football coaches. These polls are based on their own opinion about the teams performance that week. Both of these groups know a lot about football and the NCAA trusts their opinions and factors it in to the BCS rankings.
2. Computer Rankings
There are 8 highly complex computer algorithms that are run to determine the points assigned to this category in determining BCS standings. These formulas take into account many factors such as who won the game, the margin of victory, penalties assessed, win-loss record of both teams, and a whole lot more.
In determining the points of this category, the lowest ranking is dropped from the calculation and the remaining seven are averaged together to produce the team's computer ranking.
3. Strength of a Team's Schedule
The strength of a team's schedule is a factor determined not only by the win-loss record of your opponent that week, but also the record of your opponent's previous encounters with other teams in your subdivision.
4. Number of Losses
Each loss that a team has adds one point to their final BCS standings. Remember that BCS standings are ranked by the lowest number of total points from these four categories. One point may not sound like much, but it can be enough to dismiss your team from the BCS Bowl Championship Game and relegate it to one of the lesser bowls.
Now that you know the complex process that the NCAA undertakes to assign rankings every year, you can better appreciate how difficult it is for teams to make it into the BCS -- even if your favorite team misses the mark by a few points.
Richard Silvers - My wife and I are practitioners of a paleolithic diet. Much of my writing covers the topics of health, nutrition, fitness, and weight ...
Join the Conversation