BCS playoff system set to die. Will NCAA football ever be the same again?
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Late Wednesday afternoon, Bowl Championship Series executive director Bill Hancock said the words that many college football fans have been waiting more than a decade to hear: “The BCS as we know it with the exact same policies will not continue.”
- Hancock made the declaration at the end of a day of meetings of BCS leaders at a hotel in Hollywood, Fla., to negotiate possible new formats for when the BCS’s current TV contract expires after the January 2014 bowl games. College football’s 11 major-conference commissioners plus Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick will meet again Thursday and hope to release a shortlist of formats under consideration.
Hancock clarified that his statement doesn’t mean that there will be a major-college football playoff for the first time in the sport’s history. But the status quo is over. That could clear the way for a four-team playoff, the most-discussed option so far, the specifics of which have yet to be hammered out.
Under the current method, a formula of human and computer polls selects the Nos. 1 and 2 teams at the end of the regular season and places them in one of four bowls that rotate as national championship sites: the Orange, Fiesta, Sugar and Rose Bowls. The winner is the recognized BCS champion.
But critics have railed at undefeated teams being left out of the title game, and others being edged out by inscrutable calculations.
“I feel optimistic about the progress we’re making,” Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said.
The BCS is working ahead of an October negotiating window with broadcast-rights holder ESPN. Leaders hope to work out a new format by midsummer, gain approval of the BCS presidential oversight committee, then take it to ESPN, which has the first right to negotiate.
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