Eliminate Two-BCS-Team-Per-Conference Rule. Texas Tech (#7) and Boise State (#9) are not in BCS bowls, the reason being the BCS is obliged to take only one non-BCS school in the top 12, and that was Utah. Tech has their nose pressed up against the glass because two other Big XII teams are already in. Both are ranked ahead of Ohio State, which became the best de facto at-large team. Ohio State did little to earn that game, scoring a total of nine points against the Rose Bowl contestants (USC and Penn State) and allowing 48 total points.
Make Seven The New Six. 6-6 is good enough for a bowl? That means Northern Illinois, Colorado State, and Florida Atlantic played well enough to be in the postseason, even though none of them were reasonably close to their own mid-major championships. CSU was fifth in the Mountain West, FAU was tied for third in the Sun Belt, and NIU was fourth in their own division of the Mid-American.
Out of 120 teams, 72 teams went at least 6-6. Cutting off the bottom rung merely tightens up the competition and increases popularity of the the games that do matter. This year, 13 teams finished 6-6, and nine of them are in bowls. That leaves 59 teams. It wouldn't be horrible to, say, have just 25 bowl games and — so as not to leave out any cities — scale back some of the lesser bowls to every other year. Then increase the payouts.
AQ Conference Winners Must Win 10 Games ... Maybe. If Cincinnati wasn't the Big East winner, they would be a marginally borderline candidate for a BCS bowl. They were pounded by Oklahoma and lost almost as badly to 7-5 Connecticut. Other than that, they finished 11-2, 6-1 in their conference, and won three straight against then-ranked opponents. But pretend, if they didn't pull a win out of their ass in the fourth quarter, they lost to Hawaii back on December 6. They still would've gone to the Orange Bowl. There's no "holy shit, that was a bad loss" contingency. In the BCS' eyes, every game is supposed to matter, but the Cincy-Hawaii was ultimately meaningless.
Yes, the Cincy-Hawaii game is kind of an outlier. UC was not expecting a BCS game, so they scheduled a thirteenth regular season game to the islands as their "big finale." But the Big East has no conference tournament, so suppose they secured a Big East crown before the final week, then lost at home to lowly Syracuse. You couldn't lose a game like that and be able to show one's face in a BCS bowl if there are more deserving teams.
Article comments
1 - matt
Simple fix. The bowls are part of Football tradition. The solution is easy.
Step 1 nix the recently added fifth game.
Step 2a. Return the 4 traditional bcs games to confernce champion matchups, with 6 major conference champs and two at large. (or)
Step 2b. Give non bcs conferences the chance to displace a conference champ based on strength of schedule.
Step 3. The winners of the Rose, Sugar, Fiesta, and Orange Bowls meet in a semifinal.
Step four. winners of semifinal play a championship game
2 - Dr Dreadful
Well, maybe just some way to avoid the fiasco of schools with a 1-11 record ending up in the glorious Grandma's Old Chipped and Cracked Earthenware Fruit Bowl staged in Gleaming Teeth, Utah.
3 - El Bicho
Another way to fix it without the P-Word: No more Big Ten schools.
4 - Matthew T. Sussman
Ouch, but probably true. (Although, can anyone really say Ohio State didn't deserve to be in that game? Hell of a win by Texas.)
5 - Jet
If you consider by how much Texas was predicted to win by Suss, I'd have to disagree, but then I live in Columbus, so I'm one of "them".
6 - Matthew T. Sussman
I said on page two that OSU had no business there, but they stepped it up and were 40 seconds away from beating a team "percentage points" away from facing Florida on Thursday.