The New BCS Conference Rules
By Pete Fiutak
Because BCS and its bizarre corporate shill of a president, Bill
Hancock, couldn't screw up the system enough, and because the various
formulas weren't crazy enough to figure it out, the powers-that-be just
decided to make things a whole lot stranger for the Mountain West.
Of course, this comes out during NFL draft time so no one will notice,
and at the end of the day all this amounts to is the BCS giving the
Mountain West four years to prove it's pretty enough to get past the
bouncer.
Try to keep up here (considering the practicality of the rules are as
simple as reading stereo instructions in Latin). Here's what the
Mountain West and WAC fans have to try to pay attention to over the next
few years to see if their conferences can qualify for the ever-elusive
automatic BCS bid. For the MAC, Conference USA, Mountain West, Sun Belt
or WAC to get its champions an automatic bid into the BCS, along with
signing off their eternal souls, written in blood, they have to (and I'm
dumbing this down) ...
1) Be ranked among the six best conferences in the country over the next
four seasons according to computer formulas.
2) Have enough teams ranked in the BCS top 25 to achieve a certain level
compared to the other top conferences.
3) Continue to have one team ranked high in the BCS standings. In other
words, there has to be at least one killer per year that gets ranked
among the big boys. As long as the non-BCS league's conference champion
is ranked higher than at least one BCS conference champion, everything
will be fine.
The more important part of the equation is part two as a point system
will be put in place that will end up counting for 50% of the formula.
This is a bad thing for the smaller Mountain West, who'll be lucky to
have at least three of its nine teams consistently in the final BCS
rankings, and forget about it for the other non-BCS conferences.
The earliest all this can kick in is 2014 as the BCS is in a sort of
self-evaluation process to see if the little guys are worthy of the
automatic dough, and once again, it's all exclusionary and it's all
insane.
BCS, ditch the automatic bids. The top ten teams in the final BCS
rankings get the sweet bowl bids with No. 1 and No. 2 playing for the
title. No one cares if the 18th ranked ACC champion is playing in the
Orange Bowl over the Chick-fil-A. Fans want to see the best matchups
possible, and if you're going to have this cockamamie system, then use
it and be consistent. Otherwise, just admit that the big six conferences
don't want to invite anyone else to the party.
