What Does BCS Scramble Stand For?

"BCS scramble" is a phrase often used to describe the process of ranking college football teams for the purpose of choosing who gets to play in the Bowl Championship Series, including the designated championship game. The "scramble" describes the complex formula used to calculate these rankings.

  1. History

    • The National Collegiate Athletic Association put the BCS system into effect in 1998 and along with that there was no longer the traditional moniker of Division I-A and Division I-AA. It became the Division-I Football Bowl Subdivision and the Football Championship Subdivision, respectively. The two distinctions denote how many athletic scholarships teams in each class can award, according to the NCAA. The FBS teams get 85 and FCS teams get 69. To college football fans, it also denotes the relative strength of the team.

    Eligibility

    • There are only 10 spots for the BCS bowl system. That's for five bowl games: the BCS championship game, the Fiesta Bowl, Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl and the Orange Bowl. The major conferences whose champions are given automatic qualification to the BCS are all FBS schools in the Big Ten, Big East, Southeastern Conference, Atlantic Coast Conference, Pacific-10 and the Big 12. That's six spots already and some of these conferences could possibly have two teams in the BCS.

    Equation Controversy

    • The equation for BCS rankings only has three components: The Harris Interactive College Football Poll, the "USA Today" coaches poll and the average of six computer models created by different programmers. Anyone can see the first two, but the last number is kept private. The best and worst scores from the computer models are thrown out and the other four are averaged. The complaint is that the models put too much emphasis on pre-season statistics and therefore one loss could ruin a team's chances of making the BCS --- more scrambling.

    Playoff System

    • The argument for a playoff system like in professional football and NCAA Division-I basketball says that the best team, not the best numbers, will ultimately win the national championship in college football. Even the U.S. Justice Department's Anti-Trust Division is looking into the current bowl system to possibly dissolve it.