Then there's Virginia Tech. While the ACC might have been the deepest conference this year, its champion is not BCS worthy. Everyone lost at least three games in the ACC, and Tech added another tally to the "L" column after getting edged out by C-USA champion East Carolina. 8-4 is not a regular season record that belongs in the Orange Bowl. The BCS eligibility rules state:
If there are fewer than 10 automatic qualifiers, then the bowls will select at-large participants to fill the remaining berths. An at-large team is any Football Bowl Subdivision team that is bowl-eligible and meets the following requirements:
A. Has won at least nine regular-season games, and
B. Is among the top 14 teams in the final BCS Standings.
Subtracting the conference title game, VT met neither criterion. If you can't win 10, then have fun at the Cotton Bowl. And if you schedule 13 games, like Cincy did, you better win 11.
(Fun fact: two conferences are without a 10-win team: the ACC and the Sun Belt.)
The Division I Bowl. At the beginning of the season many schools will schedule teams from the "Division I Championship Subdivision" (it used to be named Division I-AA but in reality everyone still calls it that) and wail on them. We never get a true indicator of how the top tier FCS teams stack up with the big boys, because a team in August is usually quite different than a team in December. (See: Bowling Green vs. Pittsburgh.)
So why not have the FCS champion (or the best team in the subdivision who wants it) to play a random mid-tier bowl team in January? on a neutral site? The bowl system should be about intriguing match-ups, and this would certainly be one of them. This idea could also solve where Virginia Tech would play if they can't qualify as a BCS automatic qualifier.
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.
7 - michael z.
Excellent article. I have several suggestions on how to fix the BCS as well. If interested, check out my post.