ESPN goes all out with BCS rankings show

Published Oct. 16, 2010 10:31 a.m. ET

foxsports

Big-event TV rights can include sideshows.

Just as CBS' NCAA basketball tournament deal includes dibs on announcing the field, ESPN, starting Sunday, gets to unveil college football's weekly Bowl Championship Series rankings as it inherits BCS games from Fox.

Fox last season low-keyed BCS standings by announcing them quickly on its NFL studio shows. But you guessed it: ESPN will reveal BCS rankings, which don't change much except when teams lose and teams behind move up, in a movie-length yak-fest.

Sunday's BCS Countdown begins with a 75-minute ESPN show (8:15 p.m. ET). But since that's hardly time to scratch the surface, the show will continue for another half-hour on ESPNU. Too bad there couldn't have been time for the Radio City Rockettes to show up. Or LeBron James.

Brad Edwards, an ESPN researcher, picks an Oregon-Nebraska BCS title game -- not exactly a ratings blockbuster given those teams' local TV markets.

He notes BCS rankings have idiosyncratic elements such as Harris Interactive voters -- including Craig Morton, who retired from the NFL in 1982, and Pete Dawkins, who played for Army in the 1950s and is a former vice chairman of Citigroup -- forming one-third of the basis of BCS rankings.

Edwards says: "Every year, I see a few Harris voters and wonder how much college football these guys could be watching. Who knows?"

Which, he says, has made BCS analysis much more than numbers: "It's kind of social psychology. You have to get into the minds of voters to try to guess what they're going to do."

Sure beats deciding your national championship with a plain old playoff.