Those were the good old days, before a wave of off-the-field scandal and realignment uncertainty engulfed the sport, the real-time drama distracting everyone from the annual end-of-season headaches.
But with the release of the B.C.S. standings Sunday night, the potential for college football’s season to end with a lot of unhappy undefeated teams became clear. There are nine undefeated teams that could make a case that they should play for the title — sorry, No. 19 Houston, you’re not one of them — and yet another awkward finish appears likely.
But perhaps more important, with so much big-picture change brewing, the biggest question among the sport’s administrators is whether the shifts in conferences’ makeup will result in significant changes to the B.C.S.
As the tumult of conference expansion has defined the past three months, the B.C.S. coordinator, Bill Hancock, has been calling commissioners and administrators to brainstorm about potential changes. The B.C.S. contract expires at the end of the 2013 regular season, and Hancock said a mechanism had been set up for B.C.S. leadership to discuss potential changes. Hancock said changes would be determined in the next calendar year, as they have to be prepared to be presented to ESPN for its exclusive negotiation window by next fall.
“Because it is so early in the process, it wouldn’t be appropriate to even try to describe the general direction right now, except to say that I am hearing little to no sentiment for an F.C.S.-style playoff,” Hancock wrote in an e-mail Sunday. He was referring to the Football Championship Subdivision, which has a playoff format for its national title.
Hancock added that the integrity of the regular season and the bowl experience were priorities to be preserved, which are familiar talking points. The party line from university presidents has always been that a playoff in college football would interfere with academics, spoil the regular season and professionalize a sport that is having difficulty rationalizing its vestiges of amateurism.
But even with conferences seemingly growing as fast as television contracts are increasing in value, the resistance to extreme change in the B.C.S. is severe.
The Big Ten commissioner, Jim Delany, who has long been an advocate of the sport’s vibrant regular season and his league’s relationship with the Rose Bowl, said it was a leap to think that bigger leagues were a gateway to a playoff system.
“That’s not a logical conclusion,” he said in a phone interview Sunday. “The reasons people do or don’t judge a viewpoint on the system is not related to the size of a conference.”
There are a few possible B.C.S. discussions that everyday fans would care about. That would include adding a B.C.S. bowl game — the Cotton Bowl is commonly mentioned — to increase the number of B.C.S. bids and changing the limit of two teams per conference for B.C.S. games.
During the build-up to the current B.C.S. contract, there was a formal discussion of whether leagues would favor the so-called Plus One model, which would essentially have the top four teams play off in the B.C.S.
Just moving to have a discussion about the Plus One model was a big deal, and only the commissioners Mike Slive of the Southeastern Conference and John Swofford of the Atlantic Coast Conference favored it. There was so little interest that a vote wasn’t even taken.
Plus One was ultimately seen as a gateway to a bigger playoff, and college football still appears a long way from trending in that direction. During the expansion boom the past two years, a common refrain was that the march toward 16-team superconferences would inevitably lead to a playoff.
Delany said he did not see that.
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