Don't Fear De Remer: End the BCS B.S.

On October 23rd, college football teams and fans alike will be eager to see the first 2000 edition of the Bowl Championship Series rankings--the system that has determined the participants in college football's national championship game for the past two years with minimal controversy. The triumph of the BCS in producing a Tennessee-Florida St. national championship in 1998 and a Florida St.-Virginia Tech national championship in 1999 have made the BCS a superficial success.

But the sparkling record of the BCS thus far has merely covered up the system's glaring holes. It's only a matter of time before the system will deny a deserving team of the chance to play for the national title.

College football statisticians claim that the BCS can't fail. They say that they have tested the BCS with data from the past 20 college football seasons and that the BCS produces the desired national championship every time, so therefore it must work. They fail to acknowledge, however, the common sense fact that a system's success with a few specific examples from the past does not guarantee its success with realistic outcomes in the future.

The BCS index is calculated by adding together four factors: composite poll ranking, composite computer ranking, strength of schedule ranking divided by 25, and total number of losses. The two teams with the lowest index play for college football's national championship in either the Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, or Orange Bowl, depending on the year.

The BCS has fallen under a great deal of controversy since its inception, since people have a natural aversion to using computers to determine their fate. Most arguments against the BCS have focused on the computer rankings which favor teams that run up the score. But the biggest problem with the BCS is its overemphasis on strength of schedule.

Without a doubt, strength of schedule is an important consideration in determining the relative abilities of two college teams. That is why both voters and computer rankings take strength of schedule into considerable account in their respective ranking criteria.

Although every voter and computer will place a different emphasis on strength of schedule, the combined opinions of each should, in theory, produce rankings which give the optimal weight to strength of schedule. The problem, however, is that by using strength of schedule as an additional factor in the rankings, it is given far more weight than the average desired weight of computers and voters, and possibly far more weight than any single computer or living human being would ever want.

The BCS designers didn't even intend strength of schedule to have so much weight. Early BCS literature considered strength of schedule to be only of minor consequence, since it could only differentiate teams by at most four points (since there are about 100 division 1-A teams, and the BCS adds in the ranking divided by 25). But in practice, when two teams are ranked one-two or two-three in the polls and computer rankings, the strength of schedule points can far outweigh the effects of the polls.

It was the strength of schedule factor that forced No. 2 Virginia Tech to sweat through the end of the year in 1999, as it enabled No. 3 Nebraska to get within striking distance. Although the Hokies schedule was significantly weaker than the Cornhuskers, most polls and computer rankings still placed Virginia Tech far ahead of the Nebraska due to the dominance that the Hokies demonstrated on the field every week. But the overemphasis on strength of schedule in the BCS allowed the Cornhuskers to get closer to the No. 2 spot than they ever should have been.

It was the strength of schedule factor alone that put UCLA at No. 2 in the BCS rankings for most of 1998. That year the Bruins had one of the worst defenses statistically in Div 1-A, and they struggled to beat both Stanford and Oregon St., the two cellar teams in the Pac-10 that year. For those and other reasons, both major polls had UCLA ranked below the other two undefeated teams at the time, Kansas St. and Tennessee. But the BCS enabled UCLA to be No. 2 in the country, and only a few hundredths of a point away from the top. Thankfully, Edgerrin James and Miami dealt the Bruins a season-ending loss, deservedly knocking them out of national title contention.

I'm certain some BCS-lovers believe that the polls and the computer rankings underemphasize strength of schedule, that the BCS rankings are merely the righteous compensation, and that anyone who disagrees suffers from some anti-Nebraska or anti-UCLA bias. Even if this opinion is remotely accurate, none of these followers can possibly justify the inherently flawed way that the strength of schedule rankings are calculated.

Although the media as a whole does not recognize this, the BCS narrowly avoided a major disaster with Michigan's ranking in 1998. I like to call the following scenario the Michigan-Hawaii dilemma.

Defending national champion Michigan (8-3), after finishing its grueling Big Ten schedule with a disappointing loss to Ohio State, played a final 12th game against winless Hawaii (0-11).

Most teams in Division 1-A college football play 11 games before bowl games, but some teams often end up playing 12 due to conference championship games, "pre-season" games such as the Kick-off Classic, and other commitments. In this case, the Michigan schedule-makers decided an extra game in Hawaii would be good for the team in 1998.

The game went pretty much as expected. The Wolverines built a 41-3 lead in the third quarter, and then sent in its reserves to preserve a 48-17 victory over the hapless Rainbows.

But what did this game to due to Michigan's BCS ranking?

Going into the Hawaii game, Michigan was ranked 14th in the BCS, and its schedule was ranked 11th. But since strength of schedule is calculated based on a weighted combination of the sum of the records of opponents and the sum of the records of opponents' opponents, the extra 12th game against Hawaii--a winless team playing a weak schedule--crippled Michigan's strength of schedule ranking. The Wolverines plummeted entirely out of the published BCS rankings.

Nobody noticed this and nobody cared, because the BCS rankings only matter for the top teams anyway.

But what if Michigan had been one of the top teams in the country in 1998? What if Michigan had beaten Ohio State and Notre Dame that year and gone into the Hawaii game with a 10-1 record? This isn't too unlikely, considering that the Wolverines were national champions in 1997.

Likely, without the Hawaii game, Michigan would have been second in the BCS rankings, behind undefeated Tennessee and ahead of the actual No. 2 Florida State. But the strength of schedule penalty caused by the extra game against Hawaii would have been enough to knock Michigan behind Florida State and out of the national championship picture.

So, in other words, under the current BCS system, playing an extra game against a bad team will always hurt a team's BCS ranking. Yes, the BCS rankings would have looked more favorably upon the Michigan football players if they had chosen to spend their weekend in Hawaii binge drinking and sunbathing rather than playing an actual football game. If the Wolverines had triumphed 73-0 over the Rainbows, the BCS would still have given them a slap in the face.

Maybe "good teams" just shouldn't play "mediocre teams" like Hawaii. But how fair is that? The aforementioned Hawaii team went from 0-12 to 9-4 in one season, under the tutelage of former Atlanta Falcons coach June Jones. Not every bad team is mired in perpetual mediocrity.

While the BCS should reward teams for playing difficult schedules, why on earth should a team be penalized for playing an extra game in Hawaii? It is only a matter of time before such a disaster costs a team the national championship.