Check out the BCS Playoffs page

Last summer conference realignment dominated the off season headlines, and it got confusing. This season, realignment is certainly on everyone’s mind, but a more pressing matter has emerged, namely the real progress the BCS has made toward a playoff system.

The BCS commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director have come to the conclusion that a four-team playoff would be the best course of action for naming a college football national champion starting in 2014, when the next television contract is set to start.

But the details are fuzzy. No one knows quite how we’ll choose those teams, where those games will be played, or who will even be eligible. So we here at BCS Know How have created a landing page for all of your playoff information and needs.

Some news breaks? It’ll be there. It’ll also serve as a sounding board for you. We already have taken the temperature of the college football fan base and saw that a playoff was the only agreeable solution. But there was significant disagreement about how to implement it. As the commissioners and ADs make those decisions, sound off about it there, or here.

And make sure you’re keeping up with us on Twitter @BCSKnowHow for all of the latest news in 140-character dispatches.

I’ll always be of the opinion that preseason rankings only add to the problems people have with the way college football crowns its champion, but with something as innocuous and fun as the SB Nation Blog Poll, why not take part?

I’m a well-documented USC fan and have been called out by the guys at SB Nation a few times for giving them a little too much love in my polls, but I think I’m justified this time. Can’t help but expect big things from the Trojans this year.

Pac-12 and SEC dominate my top 10 and probably everybody else’s, along with one each from the Big 12, ACC and Big Ten.

I’m hesitant to give Texas and Florida any benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise, but I’m somewhat alone in this sentiment. It’ll be interesting to see how these traditional powers do or do not bounce back in 2012.

More to come in the next few weeks as we reset for 2012. And with all the playoff chatter, keep it tuned here or @BCSKnowHow to stay up to date.

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Scroll down for full results!

One of the best things about the BCS Know How State of the BCS survey is that is gave us an insight into statistics and opinions that haven’t really been explored before.

Most notably, we wanted to see how badly the BCS was hated, who wanted a playoff and who thought they were getting the short end of the stick.

With the more than 3,100 results all tabulated and reviewed, it’s pretty obvious. Atlantic Coast Conference fans feel a little peeved about the BCS.

By splitting our sample into fans who self-identified as being from the states where each of the six AQ conferences have teams, we could easily see who among the six groups want change the most.

And it was pretty clear — ACC fans have real beef with the BCS.

In our original survey, 73 percent of respondents said they wanted a playoff. But in ACC country, more than 81 percent called for the overhaul many have wanted for seasons and a system ACC fans think their teams might have benefitted from.

ACC country also accounted for the largest portion of respondents who said they were at least “somewhat unhappy” with the current system of crowning a national champion — 90 percent were at least a little peeved at the system that hasn’t given the ACC a champ in quite some time.

Not surprisingly, fans from states with SEC teams were a little warmer to the ideas behind the current BCS after having produced each of the last six BCS national champions. Yet, given the fact that the SEC seems well suited for the BCS system, the response was not much warmer than average.

Of the six major AQ conferences, SEC fans only wanted a playoff 66 percent of the time, well less than the 73 percent among all respondents. SEC country also had the highest density of “plus-one” supporters, with 29 percent supporting that system against just 20 percent support overall.

SEC fans claimed the BCS formula was a fair process for evaluating teams 36 percent of the time, well clear of the overall feeling toward the formula, which got a cold 29 percent approval rating.

There certainly is some overlap between “fan groups,” and the process of saying fans from states with teams are automatically fans of those teams. But the mentality of the fans can spread among neighbors and friends, so it’s as good a look as we can get right now.

[Teams were assigned the conference they will be a part of on opening day this season.]

For fun, we also included a group lovingly called the “Little Sisters” subgroup, fans from Idaho, Utah and Hawaii — three states that have given us recent memorable “BCS Busters” in Boise State Broncos, Utah Utes and the Hawaii Warriors. We excluded Texas (TCU) for obvious reasons.

Among this group, and even though realignment will soon have given both Utah and Boise State a chance to play with the AQ conferences, the hatred was even more deep-seeded than in ACC territory.

A whopping 99 percent of respondents from the three states were at least “somewhat unhappy” with the BCS, while 94 percent called for a playoff to be put in place. Fans from the three states gave the BCS a paltry 11 percent approval rating.

Here’s a collection of the entirety of the geographical findings (overall results in BOLD).

Take a look and leave your comment below:

Your view of the current postseason system in the Football Bowl Subdivision:

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How would you change the system?

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How pleased are you with the way a champion is crowned in FBS college football?

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Is the current evaluation method used by the BCS (human polls, computers) to judge teams fair?

Our BCS Know How survey revealed of the 93 percent of respondents who wanted a change to the way college football crowns its champion, nearly three-quarters want a playoff. But what kind?

Here are some of the more interesting responses, from you, the fans:

Proponents of making your conference finish a priority in selection for a playoff system:

At the very least there should be a minimum of eight teams in the playoffs, better yet sixteen.  Don’t win the SEC West?  Sorry, no championship game for you this year.  Don’t win the SEC?  Sorry again, maybe next year Alabama. It is grossly unfair that you are telling Boise State “Look, you guys go undefeated and maybe will let you into one of our lesser BCS bowls” all the while holding theside door open for Alabama as they slip you a suitcase full of Benjamins.

Preservation of the most important bowls with a playoff thrown in:

I would keep the four BCS bowls (Rose Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl and Fiesta Bowl), honoring the traditional matchups of these bowls as much as possible. The winners of these four bowl games would play in a four team playoff, seeded after the bowl season based on rankings.  The Semi-final matchups would be hosted by the higher seeded team, while the championship game would be held on a neutral site.  The BCS bowl games would need to be held earlier in the bowl season in order to accommodate the extra two games.  They could be held on Christmas and Christmas eve, and then have the “final four” on New Years Day.  Leaving the championship for the following week.

The 4 existing BCS bowl games would serve as quarterfinals – with all played on new years day. 5 of the 8 spots would be filled by the major conf champions.  The other 3 would be filled by three playin games consisting of the 6 highest ranked remaining teams.

Lose about 10-15 bowl games, play all minor bowls christmas week. Have two revolving BCS major bowls (eg. rose, orange,) with #2 and #3 play, #1 plays #4 at home. Major bowl teams play new years week. The kicker will be that the 4th team will be an at large winner of a minor bowl game, utilizing some voting/BCS formula. This makes every bowl game matter and draw nation wide audience. It also makes it so small schools can’t say they are excluded. #1 team in nation gets home court for major bowl and national championship. I believe this system satisfies the concerns of all parties.

Keep the bowl system as is. Do away with the “BCS” games, and revert those back to their original bowls.  The top 6 teams do NOT play a bowl. Take the top 6 and seed them for a playoff to follow bowl season.  #1 and #2 get byes, #3 vs #6, and #4 vs #5 with the lower seed getting home field. Then #1 gets the winner of #4 vs #5, and #2 gets the winner of #3 vs #6 at the lower seed’s field. The 2 remaining teams play at a neutral site in the National Championship game.

Slightly rearrange the schedule:

Eliminate one of the regular season, non-conf. games. The New Year’s Day bowls will have to be moved to mid – december; conf. championships will have to be at the beginning of Deemnber. New Years day is the Final Four, the next week is the NC. Every team will have to join one of eight conferences in order to participate (that means you, Notre Dame. Put up or shut up.

4-team playoff, get rid of the BCS, and revert bowls to the previous system. Start the season 1 week earlier. Play conference championship games Thanksgiving weekend. Host semi-finals the first weekend in December. Losers in the semifinals advance and play in the previous bowl system (i.e. a Big 10 champion that lost in the semi-final would still advance to the Rose Bowl). Protects the regular season, the bowl season, and finals.

Unusual playoffs:

Flexible playoff. All undefeateds qualify. If no 2 unbeatens get a top 50 SOS, let the one loss teams in.  If still no, let two loss in. When you have two teams with a top 50 SOS qualified, bracket those that are qualified with lowest seeds playing extra games. Keeps the season relevant as you never know what it will take.

Create a four-team playoff of conference champions, with a caveat that a top 3 team can bump out the lowest ranked conference champion.

Split the conferences up into 9 equal share conferences and then have a sixteen team playoff with no more than two schools from each conference qualifying for the national championship playoffs. You can then have smaller satellite bowls for this left out and having winning records.

Rely on conference standings. Forget overall records – if a team can’t place high in their conference, then they shouldn’t be considered in any playoff series. Conference championships, could be played at lower-tier bowls, giving them some meaning. Use the upper-tier bowls (e.g., Pac-12/Big-10/Rose Bowl) as a part of any playoff series. The Rose Bowl is played by conference champions who have proved they’re the best in their conference. The other conferences shouldn’t be afraid to do the same, and the top bowl games will mean something.

We’ll have some more numbers and responses later this week.

More results: Conference by conference and fans’ playoff proposals. 

Fans overwhelmingly want a change in the way college football crowns its national champion, and they want it now.

A BCS Know How survey has found that a whopping 93 percent of fans believe the way a national champion is crowned in college football needs altering — and playoffs are the top choice to supplant the BCS among all 3,195 respondents collected over 10 days.

A whopping 73 percent of respondents favored instituting a playoff for college football’s Football Bowl Subdivision in some manner, with the inclusion of a “plus-one” format a distance second at 20 percent.

Fans were cautiously optimistic about when change might come to college football, as 78 percent of fans believed a change would be announced within the next three years — with 24 percent expecting an announcement within the year.

The call for a playoff dominated the results of the survey, with the most popular choice among playoff formats being an 8-team playoff (46 percent of playoff supporters). Debate raged, however, as to how best to select the teams that competed in the revamped system.

Responses included everything from selection committees to a preservation of the BCS rankings simply as a process of selection for the playoffs.

As a group, respondents were overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the process of selecting a champion, as 51 percent described themselves as “very unhappy” with the way a champion is crowned in college football. An additional 35 percent of respondents said they were either “unhappy” or “somewhat unhappy” with the process.

Yet, overwhelmingly, fans showed support for the regular season, as 68 percent of respondents feel the season’s length is “just right,” while 28 percent wanted an even longer regular season.

In order to facilitate the games added by playoff systems, 44 percent of fans preferred ending the season later, while 34 percent asked the season be started sooner.

The data gets even more interesting when we delve into some of the free response questions, and we’ll release more information throughout the week, giving you a wide spectrum view of how the college football community responded to the most in-depth and specific fan survey of the BCS ever held.

We’ll talk about responses to the BCS formula itself, the difference in taste across geographic region and level of fandom as well as take a look at some of the more creative and unusual responses.

The survey was facilitated by Qualtrics with an approximate margin of error of 1.73 percent.

Quinnipiac University and Sports Illustrated have held similar surveys in the recent past, but neither was as specific or detailed.

Take the survey

Less than two weeks into our State of the BCS survey and nearly 3,000 people have completed the five-minute questionaire about what they’d like to see for college football’s postseason.

In order to expedite the process, we’re going to be closing polling Friday, April 6 at the end of the day to get started on data crunching and getting the results out faster. So far, to say the results are interesting would be a wild understatement. You will definitely be surprised at some of the responses collected.

But before we talk about the end, let’s talk about the next few days. The absolute best thing would be to double, or even triple the number of responses we’ve got. In the next five days, email your friends, tweet at some of the bigger CFBers on Twitter, post it to Facebook pages, anything you can think of.

The more people we can get to respond, the more accurate and interesting our results will be. Once we’re done collecting, we’ll roll our the responses over the course of 6-10 blog posts, and we’d love to get some real attention — especially because the BCS itself is talking revamping the system.

So spread the word! Let’s get this thing really rolling in the last few days and make some noise.

Here’s the link again:

https://qtrial.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_9GKIV9MM4Sys1ik

Thanks and talk to you all very soon!

Most notably, the release did not use the terms “plus-one” or “playoff” but did promise that every “concept that enjoys broad support” was discussed in intricate detail.

The group once again stressed a focus on protecting the importance of every regular season game and “honoring the bowl tradition.”

Here is the full text of the release, as posted to the Every Game Counts Facebook page and distributed to members of the media:

As part of our continuing discussions about how to decide college football’s national champion while maintaining the best regular season in sports, we met today in Dallas. The meeting was constructive and highly detailed.

While no decisions have been made about the overall structure, our talks have entered the “brass tacks” level. For every concept that enjoys broad support, there are a host of intricate details that we’re talking through.

For example, if we change the current format, would we play some games on campus or all games on neutral sites? If some games are on campus, is that too much of a competitive advantage? If all games are at neutral sites, would fans be able to travel to two games in a row? How would teams be selected? By a committee, by the current ranking formula, or by a different formula? When exactly would games be scheduled, considering finals, holidays and our desire to avoid mid-January games?

As we discuss the upsides and downsides of our decisions, we are united in our desire to protect our great regular season and honor the bowl tradition, while maintaining the collegiate nature of our sport.

We’re making good progress toward our self-imposed goal of making a final recommendation this summer to our governing bodies.

The group is set to meet again April 25-26 in Hollywood, Fla.

Share your opinion with us about how you’d change the BCS as part of BCS Know How’s State of the BCS survey.

Take the survey

With March Madness in full swing, college basketball is once again king. The NCAAs seem to hook the country every March, and this year is no different.

It seems not an edition goes by, however, when the discussion doesn’t come to why college football isn’t given the same treatment come postseason time.

This year, the murmurs seem stronger, as everyone from the Big Ten to the Pac-12 is talking changes to FBS college football and the BCS.

But what do the fans, bloggers and viewers really want for college football?

The millions of opinions around the web are difficult to compile. But we’d like to try our best to do just that.

In favor of a playoff? A plus-one? A dissolution of the BCS altogether? Let your voice be heard as we try to collect the largest single sample of college football fans’ opinions on how the system should be changed (or not changed). We’ve put together a five-minute survey here:

BCS Know How Survey [Qualtrics]

The best thing would be for this to make some real impact. So lets get a bunch of people involved. It’s supposed to be all about the fans, right?

How college football should declare its national champ? Take part in our five-minute State of the #BCS survey: bit.ly/GCT6Ug

— BCSKnowHow.com (@BCSKnowHow) March 20, 2012

— BCSKnowHow.com (@BCSKnowHow) March 20, 2012

Thousands of responses would be ideal, especially because nothing this detailed and concrete has really been conducted.

Make sure you’re following BCS Know How and keep checking back here as we collect and compile responses.

An all-SEC BCS title game has got the Big Ten thinking.

The Chicago Tribune today reported that Big Ten commissioner Jim Delaney, who in the past had been viewed as staunchly pro-BCS, and  Big Ten university presidents are discussing a possible playoff proposal that would include a four-team playoff.

The plan, as Teddy Greenstein reports, includes a removal of the top four BCS teams from the traditional bowl system to create a new set of three games — two semifinals and a Super Bowl-esque championship game at a neutral site.

The two semifinal games, which would pit No. 1 vs. No. 4 and No. 2 vs. No. 3, would be played at the higher-seeded team’s home stadium, while the championship game would be bid out around the country, just as the Super Bowl is on a yearly basis.

The rest of the bowl system, including the four longtime BCS bowls — the Rose, Orange, Sugar and Fiesta — would be continued and maintained, but without these top four teams.

It is not clear from the report exactly how the top four teams would be selected or whether an overhaul of the current BCS formula is being called for. No concrete details about selection committees, scheduling or otherwise were made clear in the report, either.

Of course, the conference is interested in protecting certain interests, not least of which includes the preservation of the Rose Bowl and the all-important preservation of the atmosphere of a vitally important regular season in college football.

Delaney has made clear his interest in moving the schedule for the championship rounds of the FBS postseason up in the schedule. This year’s BCS title game was played Jan. 9, with many universities already having started their academic year that day.

“I think sports fans are conditioned to playoffs. I don’t begrudge them that. They’re looking for more games, but we’re trying to do the right thing. It’s a matter of coming up with something that does not kill the baby with the bath water. We have a regular season that is vibrant. We have 12 games plus a (conference) championship game – that’s a lot of games. We have academic calendars, though that doesn’t resonate with many people. But if you’re dealing with university presidents, faculty and coaches, you’re talking about it.” — Jim Delaney, Big Ten Commissioner via The Chicago Tribune

The next renewal for the system as a whole comes in 2014, with many believing a proposal should be solidified by the end of this year.

To see just how the bevy of season’s end rankings played out, we’ve set out to simulate a set of BCS rankings, using the AP poll in place of the Harris poll. What we get is a good aggregate of all of the final rankings, and the equivalent of a year-end, final BCS rankings.

We also used the six BCS computers, not all of which declared Alabama as the top team in the nation. In fact, both Oklahoma State and LSU claimed the top spot in one computer ranking.

Mostly, this is just for fun, a good look at what the BCS standings would look like if they were released after the end of the season. The formula is exactly the same as the BCS utilizes during the regular season, except the AP poll is subbed in for the Harris Interactive Poll, which does not release a post-season edition.

Unsurprisingly, Alabama leads the way, despite its non-unanimous support. LSU and Oklahoma State finish in their expected No. 2 and No. 3 spots, respectively.

Arkansas and Oregon see the completion of strong regular seasons and impressive bowl victories to both finish in the top five.

A little further down, we get a surprising sixth-place finish from South Carolina, who are chased closely by Boise State, where the Broncos finish just .0003 behind the Gamecocks. For fun, we placed USC in the mix, as they are named in all six computers and in the AP. We just replicated the portion the No. 9 Trojans got in the AP for the Coaches’ and used the computers as per usual.

Other surprises include No. 10 Baylor, who completes a fantastic season led by Heisman-winning quarterback Robert Griffin III and the non-AQ No. 16 Houston and No. 17 TCU, both of which had shots at BCS bowl bids but were shut out on the last weekend — a Houston loss and TCU finishing outside of the top-16.

Here’s BCS Know How’s simulated post-season BCS rankings:

Simulated Post-Season BCS Rankings

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