USA TODAY International Edition
Tulane president: Changes in BCS on way
Four- team playoff format possible
College football’s Bowl Championship Series likely is headed for fundamental change, says a member of the committee of the university presidents and chancellors that oversees the system.
Moreover, Tulane’s Scott Cowen lends weight to one of the more dramatic alternatives: staging a four- team playoff apart from the bowls.
Big Ten officials acknowledged two weeks ago that they were discussing such a plan, a notable shift from the conference’s longtime anti- playoff stance. Cowen’s assent might be only slightly less significant, coming from a school and middle-echelon league that could stand to lose some of the access it has gained to the postseason’s biggest stages.
If the top- tier Orange, Sugar, Fiesta and Rose bowls are jettisoned from the BCS, they figure to align individually with the sport’s five or six marquee conferences and would be free to draw nearly all of their participating teams from those leagues. No longer would the likes of the merging Mountain West and Conference USA, to which Tulane belongs, be assured a berth if one of their teams met ranking thresholds.
“That is one of the potential downsides,” Cowen said, speaking to USA TODAY in advance of BCS meetings Tuesday and Wednesday in Dallas. “It’s a tradeoff. . . . Depending on what happens with revenue distribution, it could be a tradeoff worth living with.”
He and others in middle- and lowertier leagues long have railed at what they say are BCS inequities, starting with guaranteed berths for champions of the six richest and biggest- name conferences. Those six leagues and Notre Dame also pocket 85% of all revenue, which a year ago totaled nearly $ 182 million.
Current BCS contracts with conferences, bowls and television carrier ESPN expire after the 2013 season, and officials are weighing a change in a format that now features four top- tier bowls plus the national title game.
A boiled- down, no bowls, champions hiponly BCS appeals to many, including the Big Ten and Pac- 12, which could count on their traditional matchup in the Rose Bowl every year. Another option is building a four- team playoff into the current structure, a “plus- one” plan that would designate two BCS games as semifinals and move the winners to the title game.
“If I were a betting man, which I’m not on these things, I would think it’s better than 50- 50 that there’ll be a significant change in format,” Cowen said. “That’s my sense.”
Conference commissioners and Notre Dame athletics director Jack Swarbrick meet Tuesday and Wednesday at a DallasFort Worth airport hotel, though BCS executive director Bill Hancock said they were unlikely to emerge with any news.
“This is a long, thoughtful and deliberative process,” he said.
A decision on the format is expected by early July.
Regardless of the overall structure, a looming issue is how the BCS continues to rank teams, positioning the top two or four in the national championship mix.
The current mathematical formula — factoring in the USA TODAY Coaches and Harris Interactive polls and computer ratings— would have engulfed a four- team playoff in controversy in 2011.
Alabama, LSU, Oklahoma State and Stanford were the top four, even though fifth- ranked Oregon beat Stanford 53- 30 in November en route to the Pac- 12 championship.
There is sentiment to revise the formula or use a selection committee similar to the 10person panels that fill and seed the NCAA basketball tournament brackets.
“Wehave to take a close look,” Cowen said, “at what role the rankings would play in helping identify those four teams and whether there should be the human judgment of a selection committee on top of them, which I would be in favor of.”