BCS changes in works, but playoff unlikely
NEW ORLEANS — First things first. Officials will roll up their sleeves this week, beginning to work in earnest on the future configuration of college football’s Bowl Championship Series. Almost certainly, they aren’t headed for a playoff.
Not the full-blown, eight- or 16-team version craved by some of the fiercest critics of the sport’s postseason, anyway. It’s one of many options on the table as the conference commissioners who oversee the BCS prepare to meet in New Orleans on Tuesday — a day after LSU and Alabama play for the national championship — but it figures to be discarded then or not much later in the deliberations.
But some kind of adjustment is coming. Key administrators, starting with Southeastern Conference Commissioner Mike Slive, promise it. There have been too many cracks in the current system, and too many controversies, to stand pat.
The question is the degree of change. And based on conversations with multiple officials, one of three outcomes appears most likely:
-Going to a more modest, four-team playoff and incorporating it into the current system as a “plus-one” or greatly simplifying it. Make the mini-tournament the only thing the BCS does, jettisoning its lead-in bowls.
-Staging only a stand-alone, Nos. 1 vs. 2 championship game, again cutting ties with the Orange, Sugar, Fiesta and Rose bowls.
-Leaving the existing framework of the BCS alone and merely tweaking it. There’s sentiment, for example, to eliminate the automatic bids now accorded the champions of marquee conferences, a source of contention in leagues that don’t have them and thus feel they’re branded as second class.
“There’ll be a very open and robust discussion about a variety of options,” Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott predicts. “But I absolutely would not take anything as a foregone conclusion.”
A decision is expected by early July. Whatever the changes, they won’t take effect until the 2014 season.
Tuesday’s meeting is the first in which the 11 major-conference commissioners, along with Notre Dame athletics director Jack Swarbrick, will sort through the various proposals. Speculation centers around the plus-one — a four-team playoff that could designate two BCS bowls as semifinals, with the winners moving on to the championship game — which the SEC and Atlantic Coast Conference pushed for consideration four years ago.
The plan would add a fifth bowl to the BCS lineup, perhaps the Cotton in the Dallas Cowboys new stadium in Arlington, Texas.
Big 12 ADS have endorsed the concept. Britton Banowsky, commissioner of the midlevel Conference USA, has said school presidents in his league probably would support it. And Slive says he expects at least a full airing, telling CBS Sports last week, “I do think we are going to see changes, and I don’t think those changes will be tweaks.”
But signals remain mixed. Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany is a longtime opponent of a plusone, and Swarbrick has voiced reservations.
Concerns remain in more than one league that a four-team playoff inevitably would grow — to eight, to 16 — and render what’s now a healthy and profitable regular season less meaningful.
The BCS could set up a plus-one a couple of different ways. One: playing out all of the bowls, reconfiguring the team standings and slotting Nos. 1 and 2 in the title game. The other: seeding the nation’s top four teams into semifinal bowls.
The site of the title game would be up for bid. Semifinal sites in a seeded plus-one could be, too, and in that case the BCS would create three new postseason games atop the bowls — in reality, a plus-three.
Even more radical is getting out of the bowl business and simply having the BCS stage a twoor four-team playoff.
But there is trepidation down the conference food chain. The Orange, Sugar, Fiesta and Rose bowls could make the team-selection deals they want, unfettered by BCS obligations. How often, if at all, would they look beyond the bigger-name programs in the marquee leagues?
“There’s some real risk in that,” Western Athletic Conference Commissioner Karl Benson says. “Is there a Boise State-oklahoma game (in the 2007 Fiesta), a Utah-alabama game (in the 2009 Sugar), a Tcu-wisconsin in the Rose Bowl (in 2011) if the whole BCS is blown up and we simply go to a one-game championship or even a four-team playoff?”
Beyond eliminating automatic qualification, there are calls to do away with the limit of two teams from a single conference in the BCS lineup in a given year. Playing dates could be adjusted, averting midweek games after New Year’s Day and perhaps moving the title game closer to Jan. 1.