Hello! If you’re looking for BCS rankings in such a year as this one, you will not find them. The BCS is no longer a thing.
BCS rankings no longer exist. Here’s what you’re probably looking for instead
The College Football Playoff has replaced the BCS. In the latter half of the season, its new rankings release every Tuesday over here, followed by Selection Sunday in December.
Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images
What you can find, however, are College Football Playoff committee rankings, provided the committee’s started to release those each Tuesday night. They’ve been a late-October/November thing, culminating in December’s Selection Sunday. We’ll have new Playoff rankings right here the second they’re available.
What happened to the BCS?
It morphed into the Playoff. The 1998-2013 method of matching up college football’s FBS national championship and biggest bowl games was always doomed by the fact that it wasn’t a playoff.
The BCS was little more than a group of computer formulas slapped together and combined with a couple human polls. Those numbers were then released as a ranking, which determined an entire sport’s major postseason. Everyone hated it! It got tweaked annually! It became a big joke!
So the BCS doesn’t run the Playoff?
Never did, though the Playoff still works within the bowl system and retains some of the same people, such as double-speaking spokesperson Bill Hancock.
Who runs the Playoff now?
No one? Everyone? There is no good answer.
- ESPN owns all the broadcast rights, including to the rankings release shows.
- The FBS conferences all have stakes and split the money, depending on participation.
- The selection committee is mostly made up of athletic director types, one from each power conference, with a little bit of mid-major representation.
- The NCAA, allegedly the sport’s governing body, has roughly nothing to do with the Playoff. It does run the FCS, Division II, and Division III football playoffs and oversee FBS bowl eligibility.
Is the Playoff still confusing and angering, like the BCS was?
Often! The committee made a big show out of not using complex stats, while kind of missing the point about why people didn’t like the BCS’ opaque, half-assed formulas. During the weekly reveal show, the Playoff committee presents only micro-soundbite explanations for why one team ranked above another, and those can often feel wildly contradictory from week to week, even if you can squint hard and see the reasoning.
Usually, it’s fine, though.
Do people like it more than the BCS?
It involves more football games and involves SCREWING OVER the No. 5 team instead of the No. 3 team, so yes.
Since people always like more football, will the Playoff expand?
Am I the only one who didn’t know the BCS was no longer a thing?
No, a lot of people still refer to “the BCS” as if it’s a current thing. I’ve heard multiple full-time sports media professionals use the term since 2016 in that way, and plenty of people were still Googling it in 2017. The, uh, latter part is why this service post exists.
See More:
