The Bowl Champion Series (BCS) is under fire from fans, the media, college coaches, Congress, and even our new President. They worry that the two best teams in the country aren't consistently selected by the polls and the BCS computers to play for the National Championship. At stake is prestige, a place in history, recruiting advantages, and boatloads of cash. The solution proposed most often is a playoff system to give more schools a shot at a title. However, the problem of team selection won't go away with a playoff system, it will be exacerbated. The lack of a credible ranking system is the Achilles' heel of the current BCS system. Cinderella's Slipper reveals why the polls get it wrong, why the BCS computers can't be expected to get it right, why traditional statistics aren't useful for ranking teams, and why won/lost records are misleading. Cinderella's Slipper introduces the performance metrics necessary for team ranking and explains the rating system that can accurately rank teams with similar records. When combined with NCAA sponsorship and an accurate ranking system, a playoff scheme will produce deserving champions and will restore public confidence in the college football National Championship process.

Cinderella's Slipper

A Fan's Plan to Unveil the Fairest Team in all the LandBy Mike Nemeth

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 Mike Nemeth
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4401-7547-3

Contents

Acknowledgements........................................ixIntroduction............................................xiI. Hijacked!.........................................1II. Pied Pipers.......................................23III. Darwin's Dilemma..................................43IV. Circumstantial Evidence...........................52V. Epiphany..........................................65VI. Geek Numbers......................................78VII. Everything is Relative............................96VIII. Bayou Bash........................................120IX. Urban Legend......................................136X. Sun Tzu versus von Clausewitz.....................163XI. Cinderella's Ball.................................176Appendix................................................195

Chapter One

Hijacked!

"A beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly little fact." - Thomas Huxley

Rarely does a college football season end with less controversy and bitter commentary than did the 2005 season. Texas was acclaimed the "National Champion" after completing an undefeated season and winning the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) Championship game at the Rose Bowl in a come-from-behind thriller against USC. All should have been well with the football world except that a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee, chaired by Texas Republican Joe Barton, conducted a hearing to review the BCS (Associated Press, December 2, 2005), because, Barton explained, "College football is ... a billion-dollar business that Congress cannot ignore." More to the point, BCS Bowl games are a financial windfall for the teams invited to play in the games, and for their conferences, but the division of the spoils occurs without any guidance from the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association), any oversight from state governments or any involvement of the federal government. You don't have to be a cynic to worry that government intervention in an amateur sport might be more harmful than helpful, but money wasn't the only issue on the Congressman's mind. "The current system of determining who's No. 1 appears deeply flawed," Barton added. On that point the Congressman found widespread agreement.

The hearings, however, had no impact upon how football champions are decided, so the Congressman continued to probe the BCS like a scientist poking a lab specimen in a Petrie dish. Wind the clock forward three years and we find Congressman Barton proposing legislation that would prohibit use of the label, "National Championship", to describe a game or a game winner unless the game was part of a playoff scheme (Associated Press, December 10, 2008). Violations of the ban, the Congressman said, would be dealt with as "an unfair or deceptive act or practice" under provisions of the Federal Trade Commission Act.

On May 1, 2009, ACC Commissioner John Swofford, the current BCS Coordinator, was called to testify before the House Subcommittee on commerce, trade and consumer protection, the Subcommittee considering Representative Barton's proposed legislation. According to an Associated Press report, Swofford was issued an ultimatum to voluntarily adopt a playoff structure within two months, or else ... Reportedly, Swofford endured the arm-twisting with equanimity but clearly the football fans on the subcommittee are exasperated by their inability to affect change by throwing their weight around. "It's like communism," Barton was quoted as saying. "You can't fix it."

Now the BCS debates have bled across to the upper house of Congress. According to an Associated Press story on March 25, 2009, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, a member of the Senate's Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights, declared that the BCS system "has proven itself to be inadequate" and promised he would introduce legislation "to rectify this situation".

How did an institution so necessary and so potentially beneficial come to be so reviled that the Congress regularly expends its energy to promote change? Prior to the creation of the BCS there was no official body with a mandate to rank football teams according to strength or quality. College football was a journalistic free-fire zone for every writer, blogger, sportscaster, commentator, news service, pollster, pundit, ex-jock, ex-coach and self-anointed expert with an opinion and an Internet connection. There was no standard to apply when evaluating teams, no widely accepted definition of what constituted a "good" team. Then as today, a team with a good record was assumed to be a good team but distinguishing one good record from another was, and is, problematic. A football team was believed to be good if it received a bowl game invitation, but sixty-eight football teams now receive these honorary invitations each year, out of a Division I-A population of 119 teams, so the invitations aren't much more exclusive than the credit card offers that arrive in your mailbox addressed to "Current Resident".

The Associated Press Writers' Poll and the ESPN/USA Today Coaches' Poll were the primary sources of comparative ranking information back "in the day" and they influenced fan opinion to a degree undeserving of simple popularity contests. The traditional poll voting for the college football national champion, following the New Years' Day bowl games, produced results that were by turns inexplicable, shocking, confusing and frustrating, both for fans and for college coaches. By 1997 confidence in the national polls had all but evaporated.

Then an historically momentous event transpired in 1998: the six major football conferences (ACC, SEC, Pac-10, Big Ten, Big 12, and Big East), the four major bowl organizations (Rose, Fiesta, Orange and Sugar), and the University of Notre Dame collaborated to invent the BCS (the Bowl Championship Series) to determine a Division I-A college football national champion on the field of play. The BCS was intended to replace the subjective polling system with a fair and consistent method of determining a singular national champion, thus avoiding the split national championships that had occurred whenever the two polls disagreed on the best team in America. According to the New York Times (Richard Sandomir, June 10, 1998), former Southeastern Conference Commissioner Roy Kramer, the first coordinator of the Bowl Championship Series and the man credited with being the Father of the BCS, called the scheme, "... clear-cut, objective and factual." Eleven years later it is more accurate to characterize the BCS as controversial, misunderstood and in need of reinvention. But, the seminal question is: has the BCS system consistently produced deserving champions through a credible, defensible and understandable process?

The BCS never promised a full-blown playoff system but undertook as its mission two half measures: 1) create a BCS Bowl Championship game from the array of existing bowl games; and, 2) annually identify the two most deserving teams to play in the BCS Bowl Championship game. To be fair, the BCS has done a remarkable job of navigating politically polluted waters to stage a championship game without disrupting the hugely profitable bowl structure that is still revered by many fans. Initially the BCS...